The Meghalaya State Wide Area Network (MSWAN) built at a cost of Rs 25 crore and designed to establish a reliable horizontal and vertical communication corridor was inaugurated by Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma on Wednesday.

The SWAN will provide an integrated backbone to the state government for the implementation of various mission mode IT projects defined by Government of India and e-governance initiatives of the state government, an official release said.

The network will act as a single point services delivery system across Meghalaya for voice, data, email messaging and video conferencing services across various departments of the state.

A total of 55 state, district/sub district and block level headquarters along with their departmental offices have been interconnected using high speed leased lines from BSNL.

With this, all offices will also have internet and would be able to share information among themselves as well as deliver services to citizens, it said. The Meghalaya State Data Centre (MSDC) was built at a cost of Rs 14 crore.

The centre will consolidate services, applications and infrastructure of all state government departments to provide efficient electronic delivery of government-to-government (G2G), government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) services.

The SDC is intended to provide a central data repository, secure data storage, online delivery of services, citizen information/services portal and service integration for all departments of the state.

Meghalaya is the 14th State in the country to have a State Data Centre of its own. Speaking on the occasion, Sangma congratulated the IT Department for having implemented the 2 projects successfully which he felt would transform the way of life altogether especially in terms of service delivery.

He said that the infrastructures should be used in the right perspective by the people and the technology should be adopted efficiently for effective governance. "We should sensitise the people to use the facility and we should prepare them to adopt the G2C concept," he added.