KV Satyanarayana, additional chief secretary, government of Tripura, inaugurated the day-long state consultation workshop on e-governance in Agartala on July 10. Congratulating the state for taking giant leaps in the development of e-governance, Satyanarayana said Tripura has come a long way from the days when people of the state did not know much about information technology and infrastructure such as the state wide area network (SWAN) and national optical fibre network (NOFN).

“Tripura has been named as one of the leading states in e-governance by the central government,” he said.

He said electronic delivery of services through NOFN was expected to reach all the 1,038 panchayats by 2015. “NOFN is already running successfully in Panisagar block of North Tripura district and people are using various services through it,” Satyanarayana said.

According to Satyanarayana, Tripura has developed successful applications of e-governance and other states are replicating them. “The hospital management software developed in Tripura is soon going to be adopted by Karnataka.” In addition, 108 telemedicine centres would be operationalised in the state, he added. Gaurav Dwivedi, director, department of electronics and information technology (DeitY), government of India, spoke about the status of national e-governance plan (NeGP) in Tripura. He requested the state to expedite the request for proposal (RFP) for the e-District project, adding that Tripura had almost fully utilised the bandwidth for SWAN. “The number of points of presence (PoPs) has increased from 60 to 350, which is a welcome sign,” he said.

He said 35 institutions in Panisagar, one of the pilot districts for the electronic delivery of services through NOFN, had been connected and were already delivering services. “Panisagar alone accounts for 30,000 transactions out of the total of 52,000 transactions by all pilot districts across the country,” he said.

He said the Jalabasa common services centre (CSC) in Panisagar was upgraded to a ‘digital knowledge centre’ according to the Centre’s plan for CSC 2.0 as per the pilot being undertaken under NoFN.

LK Gupta, principal secretary, IT, Tripura, shared the e-governance roadmap for the state. He said the data centre in Agartala had fully utilised its 15-16 terabyte capacity and would be expanded soon. “The (central) government might have thought that Tripura is a small state but we have exceeded the data centre capacity provided to us and we are planning to expand,” he said.

Gupta also said that SWAN in Tripura has also reached its capacity and talks are on with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to increase it. “SWAN will be extended to the panchayat level with the NOFN,” he said.

Gupta also said that the Tripura government is planning to have one CSC for every panchayat, which would augment the electronic delivery of services in the state to a large extent.

He informed the workshop participants about the various IT applications developed with the help of National Informatics Centre – in this context he took the example of tele-ophthalmology centres, where 2 lakh people had consulted doctors till March 2012, and which are running successfully in the state.

Gaurav Dwivedi argued for re-engineering of the e-governance processes instead of merely automating them. “We need to find the redundant steps in a process and pass amendments to remove them,” he said.

Dwivedi made a presentation, explaining the flow of service delivery process through various infrastructures and applications.

Kiran Gitte, district magistrate of West Tripura, spoke about e-governance initiatives, especially the mother and child tracking system, which he said was working well to reduce infant and maternal mortality in the district. “The system tracks mothers and their children from conception to the age of two years, when the child is more vulnerable to malnutrition, stunting and low growth,” he said.

Milind Ramtheke, chief executive officer of the Agartala municipal corporation, spoke about the various initiatives taken by the civic body for better governance. Focussing on the proposed ‘building plan approval system’, he said, “It takes anywhere between two days and two years for a building plan approval. The new system will make it a standard 14 days.”

According to Ramtheke, once the system is in place, officers responsible for delay in approval would be penalised.

Pravin Kumar Agarwal, director, IT, government of Tripura, said that a memorandum of understanding was signed between the CSC special purpose vehicle (SPV) and 26 scheduled banks for providing financial services through these service centres. “All banks in Tripura are procuring software from TCS for providing business correspondent services to the people,” he said.

Pranjal Hazarika from SAP spoke about the changing phase of public services delivery and how the company can help provide better service delivery in the domains of public enterprise, homeland security, healthcare, urban management and social services.

D Chakrabarti, general manager, BSNL, Tripura, spoke about the role of the public sector firm in providing connectivity in Tripura. He noted that the number of BSNL internet users had grown by 200 percent in recent years. He said, “With the coming of NOFN and other technologies, e-governance is no longer an option,” he said.

The workshop in Agartala was the 25th in an ongoing series, which started with one hosted in the national capital territory of Delhi in July 2011.

With many states at 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, identify state-specific issues and understand emerging technologies from industry. Thus, the idea of a state level consultation workshop was born.