CHENNAI : Tamil Nadu government has standardised the websites of 32 districts. It has planned to standardise 300 departmental websites, according to a top Information Technology department official.
This comes as the Union government has come out with standard guidelines for all government websites as they are the first point of contact for many citizens to find information about various initiatives and schemes.
The standardisation would give the State websites a similar look and feel and they will comply with all norms regarding security audit, firewall and copyrights. Government websites are often the first resort to find information about various government initiatives. So, there has been a lot of emphasis to ensure that all the websites comply with certain uniform guidelines.
Such guidelines for government websites were first issued in 2009. These guidelines prepared by the National Informatics Center (NIC) were made an integral part of the ‘Central Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure’ and were called the ‘Guidelines of Indian Government Websites (GIGW)’.
According to an audit by the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification Directorate in 2016, a mere 31 of the 957 websites audited were found to be fully compliant. All State governments have begun the exercise of standardisation of State government portals.
Sources said the initiative would help in standardisation of data as many departments in the State are extensively working on Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing Technology and huge volumes of data sets.Sources said the standardisation of websites is a five-year project and within a year almost all State government departments will be covered.