The first Himalayan info highway - Uttarakhand State Wide Area Network (U-SWAN)- will be launched shortly making it possible for a government functionary to keep a tab on the progress of important projects by holding video conferencing with other officials.

"Our U-SWAN project is now ready. Through this project, we will have connectivity through lease lines between tehsil-block-district and state headquarters," Additional Secretary, IT, Nitesh Jha said.

It would be the first major achievement of the state IT department which had gone through a rough patch during the past five years, he said.

The info highway will not only provide connectivity at all 85 tehsils and 95 blocks of the hill state through two-four MBPS lines but also help save the important time of government officials covering long arduous distances.

Another hallmark of the project is that records related to key departments like revenue, police, agriculture and finance would be available on-line, simplifying procedures and ushering in more transparency and openness.

Similarly, several important central and state government departments would also be connected with each other.

Apart from this, the art of e-learning would become more easy and accessible to the government officials especially in the far-flung areas. All land records would also be available on-line which means that middlemen would have no role to play in the future land deals.

The U-SWAN project has been completed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) with the help of BSNL's lease lines network. Initially, the project cost was Rs 95 crore when it was being given on the PPP mode.

But later the government cancelled the bidding process and roped in NIC which in turn completed the project not only in less than one year time but also at a much lesser cost of Rs 76 crore.

The government is also setting up a state data centre at the Secretariat with the total project cost of Rs 43 crore.

The bidding process for the project is expected to begin next week.

Most of the records related to the state government can be preserved in this data centre.