Meeting for the second time in seven years, the prime minister-led committee on national e-governance plan (NeGP) reviewed the central plan on Monday. The committee directed the department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) to formulate the next version of the plan to "tap the potential of significant technological advancements and emergence of new implementation models and delivery mechanisms".

The committee stressed on integrating recent technological interventions, including Aadhaar, cloud computing, mobile seva (service delivery through mobile phones) and social media for implementing e-governance projects in the future.

Elaborating on the background of NeGP 2.0, Rajendra Kumar, joint secretary (e-governance), DeitY, said that as of now DeitY's focus is completely on outcomes – in reference to number of services delivered and number of people benefited from the e-delivery of services. "NeGP 2.0 takes this renewed agenda to its logical conclusion," he said.

NeGP 2.0 will leverage cloud computing to provide services anytime, anywhere to the citizens. This will eliminate the technological limitations of line departments. The departments will be able to cut down on the time and cost which goes in egov project implementation.

A national data centre, which will work as the cloud infrastructure, has already been inaugurated. Similar initiatives will also be taken in states, where the state data centres will be cloud-enabled. DeitY has already shared the model requests for proposal (RFPs) in this regard to all the states and union territories, Kumar said.

The next version of the plan will also make social media an integral part of e-governance projects. According to the social media framework formulated by DeitY, departments could use social media at two stages – one at the time of conceptualisation of e-governance project and second at the time of impact assessment.

"Once NeGP 2.0 is approved, all the line departments across states will be expected to follow a common framework and join the social media bandwagon," Kumar said. The DeitY will be coming up with a consultation paper on NeGP 2.0 in the next few months.

In order to make public procurement more transparent and efficient, the committee directed that e-procurement shall be adopted both for publication and processing of tenders by all government ministries and departments.

The committee also reviewed ‘e-TAAL’(e-Transactions Aggregation and Analysis Layer) – a portal which aggregates and analyses the transaction statistics of central and state level e-governance projects, including MMPs, on a real-time basis.

The committee also took note of Mobile Seva initiative –under which 444 departments across the country have been integrated, offering over 200 services to the citizens.

Using this platform, over 15 crore transactional messages for various government services have been sent to the citizens, a release on press information bureau noted.

Taking note of the human resource crunch in the domain, the committee also wished to set up a national e-governance academy.

During the review, the committee also assessed the implementation of the recommendations of a committee on human resource led by UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani and an expert group on NeGP headed by Sam Pitroda, who is advisor to PM on national information infrastructure and innovations.

Interestingly, while the government has made public Nilekani's report, Pitroda's report has not been put in the public domain. Both the committees were formed during the first meeting of the apex committee in November 2011.

The Pitroda committee was formed to assess whether NeGP has realised its aim, suggest a roadmap for better implementation, business process reengineering, provide institutional, legal and operational framework for e-governance projects and re-evaluate plan's portfolio and suggest additional mission mode projects. 

In its recommendations, the committee had suggested addition of new MMPs and analysed the existing 31 MMPs and suggested improvements.

“The expert group's observation that out of the 31 MMPs, only 14 were delivering the full range of services while nine had recently started delivering some services was also taken note of by the apex committee," Kumar said.

The NeGP was approved by the government of India in May 2006 with the vision to “make all government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency & reliability of such services at affordable costs”, the release said.