Deepak Khandekar, commissioner, Jabalpur Division of Madhya Pradesh, inaugurated a consultative workshop on the topic, “Citizen Centric e-Government”, in Jabalpur, on Thursday, October 4, 2012.

Delivering the keynote address, Khandekar said, “We are the first state where divisional level consultations have begun.” He said these workshops should be held in all the seven districts which are under his jurisdiction where he would provide all support needed.

“The whole administration of the state is in Hindi but unfortunately we have not been able to provide IT services in Hindi,” he said, urging the IT department to provide applications in that language. “There are a number of missing links because of language,” he said. 

Commenting on the top-down approach in implementing e-governance initiatives, he said, “We cannot imagine, while sitting in Bhopal and Delhi, the needs of the tehsil and blocks in the state.”

He urged district-level officers to start consultation workshops in their districts to include the last person in this project. The people in the Common Services Centres (CSCs), the citizens and the private sector all have to be included in the workshop.

Khandekar also asked the departments to share resources as IT infrastructure had a short lifecycle. “We need to efficiently share IT resources,” he stressed. “We need to address the lack of communication amongst us to improve the e-governance programme,” he added.

Hariranjan Rao, secretary, information technology department, government of Madhya Pradesh, said that he aimed to showcase the e-governance initiatives in the state through the conference and also take suggestions to improve them in the future.

Talking about the successful conduct of online Patwari recruitment exam, he said online exams can achieve transparency in the government recruitment process.

He said that the challenge was to introduce ‘redundancy’ where alternative equipment and networks would be available if there was a failure in the existing system. “The redundancy in the network will also improve bandwidth,” he said. He added that the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) is an ambitious project of the Government of India which will connect even the village panchayats with an optical fibre network.

He said, “NOFN will be revolutionary because extra bandwidth will be provided to telecom providers which will increase mobile and internet connectivity at the village panchayat level.”

He also informed the conference participants that a State Data Centre (SDC) for Madhya Pradesh was set up and it is scheduled for inauguration in November. “It will provide data capacity for 10 to 15 years and will be insulated against all kinds of physical and other problems,” he said

“All districts can do any IT experiments without any problems now,” he said. The future of the e-governance initiatives lay in mobile governance initiatives and in replicating successful e-governance initiatives in the state, Shri Rao said.

He said that the state was planning an IT competency test which would be held on the pattern of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) every six months where the candidate would get a score card which would facilitate recruitment of data entry operators in the state.

“The volcano is going to erupt and we have reached a stage in the e-governance sector that we have to deliver everything without any glitch,” he said.

Kantarao, Director, National e-Governance Division (NeGD), Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, said, “It is a great initiative to bring the (state consultation) workshop from the state capital to the divisional headquarters.

“Recently we announced the national IT policy. The output of IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) is $100 billion today. We want to take this to $300 billion by 2020,” he said.

He added that this would mean that this sector should grow by 13 percent every year which is more than the average growth of the economy of the country. “We want to make India the global hub of IT and ITeS in the future,” he said.

Elaborating on the vision of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), he said, “NeGP aims to ensure that IT is used in the government to deliver public services to the common man in a reliable manner at an affordable cost.” Currently, there is one CSC for every six villages on an average, he added.

Vivek Porwal, Collector, Balaghat; Madan Kumar, Collector, Dindori; and NCS Rajput, Commissioner, Municipal Corporation, Jabalpur, made presentations on their e-governance initiatives.

During the daylong workshop, the Madhya Pradesh Government showcased e-Government solutions implemented under the NeGP.

The workshop was organised by DeitY along with NASSCOM. The consultative meet is part of the 50 workshops being organised in all states and union territories (UTs) to amplify the mission and message of the NeGP – "Public Services Closer Home".

With many states in various stages of rolling out public services on the e-Government platform, the NeGP Apex Committee decided to create awareness about NeGP initiatives among stakeholders, discuss challenges in delivery of e-Services, identify state-specific issues and understand emerging technologies from industry.

The first workshop was hosted in the National Capital Territory of Delhi in July 2011 and the workshop in Jabalpur was 20th in the series.