BENGALURU: The umbrella portal for updated information from various departments -- Mahiti Kanaja -- got a revamp and was launched on Tuesday. This will have no login system and will provide to all visitors information on 157 services by the government.
The portal earlier had just 30 schemes and 10 departments onboarded but now has 50 departments including new additions such as education, Escoms, Metro, and Health.
It has been developed internally by programmers at the e-governance department and not by third-party developers.
The platform is in line with section 4(2) of the RTI Act, which makes it a constant endeavour of every public authority to provide as much information suo moto to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication, including the internet so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information.
The portal also gets inputs from civil society organisations to update information needed for citizens.
Three digital dialogues have been held by the E-governance departments with the participation of 40 Civil society organisation representatives, and 10 state departments in which the CSOs demand certain information to be updated on the portal and the department explain if they're viable.
This bottom-up approach, Additional Chief Secretary in the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (e-Governance) Rajeev Chawla who launched the updated portal said, was to ensure that the portal has information that the public needs.
With transparency in government schemes, the tradeoff is privacy. Chawla agreed that one will find themselves at a juncture of privacy-related issues and information on the money government has spent which everyone has the right to know from who is an ailing scholarship to what offences a number plate carries. "There is no privacy in this, but we have hidden some information of individuals from the portal."
For instance, in the BPL Ration card beneficiary details, one will know the name of the head of the family and just a plus three (+3) in case there are three more members in the family in the card, said Chawla. One can monitor The money being spent on the MGNREGA scheme and the percentage of completion of work since public money has gone into these schemes.
Privacy of the information seeker is also assured, he added --"For instance, the portal does not track the IP address or names of those who seek information so that information seeker are not discriminated against."
About the complementing RTI Act, Chawla believed it will widen the range of information of the information seekers who may not be aware of all the information pertaining to a department and hence limited in their questions.
Karnataka's system being second in the country is based on a first of its kind system in the country by Rajasthan -- Jan Soochana.
Challenge to reach persons lacking digital literacy
While the portal has information from ration card details to know the status of Nadakacheri certificate or the list of beneficiaries of Swacch Bharat and MGNREGA, the great challenge is to take these services to the last person in the state especially those lacking digital literacy.
The site already has a 206067 visitor count since a year which is still considered very little in number and the department is faced with a conundrum of how to include more persons to access the portal, especially those with very little or no digital literacy as per top officials.
This concern of reach was also posed by the chief minister Bommai.
The Chief Minister said that we're increasing our systems but how do we increase public awareness over this. He wanted the department to improve on letting people access the portal, Chawla said.
This comes even as the department is contemplating launching its services on a mobile application (app) in two months. While also planning to increase the information on the number of government services from its existing 167 to 500 by February- March 2022. They're aiming to touch a visitor count of one lakh a day.
Several key pieces of information from BBMP, mining department, food, and civil supplies and education department continue to be missing from the portal -- for instance the number of persons availing the BPL Ration cards, or roads repaired in the past six months by BBMP, or persons who have gotten mining license in Karnataka, as per department source.