CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday rolled out an ambitious e-Governance Policy 2017, which enables public, government and commercial establishments to get all their services through digital mode.
The policy aims at achieving this through a multi-pronged approach - promotion of proactive delivery of online services to citizens, increase in the level of penetration of broadband connectivity, to ensure the use of Tamil language and Tamil unicode standard, encouraging m-Governance to use mobile technology for providing services to citizens and making e-governance applications suitable to differently-abled citizens.
Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami released the policy at a simple function at the Secretariat and Information Technology Minister M Manikandan received the first copy.
Establishing an integrated environment for delivering seamless Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to Employee (G2E), Government to Government (G2G) and Government to Business (G2B) services in a cost-effective manner, besides increasing productivity levels within government are some of the key objectives of the policy.
A State-level apex committee for e-Governance headed by the Chief Secretary would be formed for periodic review of the implementation of the policy and would provide necessary guidelines for its implementation. The departments would earmark 0.5 per cent of their annual budget for e-Governance and would be encouraged to increase the same to three per cent in a phased manner over a period of five years.
“Considering the mobile phone penetration among the people, all departments would ensure that their applications are compatible to mobile access and utilise the common mobile infrastructure provided by Government of India and the State government like Mobile Service Delivery Gateway (MSDG) etc. Mobile applications will be developed in English and Tamil Language using open standards, to the extent possible. The State Portal and Government Departmental Portals will be made ‘mobile compliant’ in due course,” the policy said.
The policy made it clear that the departments would ensure use of Open Source and Open Standard technologies for software development, unless the use of proprietary technology is unavoidable. This would enable respective departments to prevent vendor lock-in, unnecessary cost on user licences and long-term cost liabilities.
The policy also envisaged setting up of Knowledge Management Facility that would maintain Project Management Information System (PMIS) related to e-Governance projects in the State. Public Private Partnership would be encouraged in e-Governance projects in the State to the extent possible. Social media will be leveraged to increase the awareness on delivery of services to citizens.
To promote paperless office and to increase the efficiency of office work, e-Office Application will be implemented in all government offices throughout the State. Steps will be taken to ensure that government files/documents/records are made available in a digitized form and are easily accessible to those authorised for access. To enable proper identification and authentication of electronic transactions, use of digital signatures / e-Sign facility for online processing would be encouraged.
State Resident Data Hub (SRDH), an integrated framework which provides a unique centralised database of citizens with Aadhaar linkage would be integrated with all e-Governance applications wherever possible. The State would also come up with a framework for using Aadhaar for the State government schemes, the policy said.