CHANDIGARH: Punjab has become the first state in the country to roll out e-Office facility for seamless electronic movement of government files and to make decision making efficacious and transparent.
Launching the hi-tech inter and intradepartmental service facility along with his cabinet colleagues, Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh on Friday asked the officers to continuously innovate to leverage the latest advancements in the field of information technology for the larger public good.
Amarinder also asked the Chief Secretary to further speed up completion of online transmission of revenue records, the progress of which he had been personally reviewing regularly. He also set a deadline for all directorates and other field level offices to upgrade to the e-Office system latest by January 1, 2020.
The new e-Office programme, set to replace IWDMS system, is a National Software Product and is an initiative of Punjab Government and National Informatics Centre (NIC).
The Chief Minister, while noting with satisfaction the rapid strides made by Punjab in digitising its office records, hoped the new initiative would further transform work culture and ethics in government offices, besides eventually reducing the burden of employees by shifting from manual handling of files to online dealing.
With the spurt in technological advancements, he said the outreach to ensure public services had increased exponentially, adding that the state government's endeavour was to fully leverage the advancements in the service of the masses in a hassle-free, efficient and transparent manner.
Earlier, making a detailed presentation, Additional Chief Secretary Vini Mahajan informed the Chief Minister that department of Governance Reforms had already conducted comprehensive training of Administrative Secretaries and of IAS and PCS officers posted in Chandigarh. The two-day training course was conducted during October at MGSIPA.
Following the training schedule, as a trial, the department had implemented e-Office in their branches from October 15 this year, under which 1,21,669 E-Files beaded 6,61,550 e-Receipts had been already generated. Joint Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries, Under Secretaries, besides Superintendents, Clerks,
Assistants and personal staff deployed with officers have also been trained to handle the software efficaciously. The training was held at training labs made at PCS-1 and PCS-2, she added.