State Governments announce many schemes however over the years, it has been found that the eligible citizens arent able to benefit from them. The funds remained unused. Thus, UP has prepared a common beneficiary data base of the citizens who, based on the family profile, are eligible for many schemes. “This Artificial Intelligence based database will help the Government to target citizens with all the schemes they are suited for and avoid duplication of efforts in the way of approaching separately for different schemes,” explains Alok Kumar, Additional Chief Secretary, IT, Uttar Pradesh.
Kumar also informed about the use of AI by the department of Prisons. Jarvis, an AI enabled video surveillance platform has been deployed in seventy prisons, which will keep a watch on prison activities, movements, frisking, etc to report any violations or aberrations.
The state has also partnered with IIT Kanpur to setup a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for AI startups. This collaboration is under the new startup policy of the state.
Use of technology during the lockdown
Portal and DBT platform for migrants
The migrant crisis was one of the highlights of the lockdown. The Government of Uttar Pradesh took swift action as most of the migrants were natives. “Over 35 lakh migrants came back to the state and a portal was designed to compile information about them. The portal was not only used for providing Direct Benefit transfer (DBT) and food grains but also for providing jobs. The data was kept open for the industries and thus many companies hired these migrants based on the openings and skills,” informed Kumar.
Use of CSCs
Following the lockdown guidelines, Uttar Pradesh aggressively activated over sixty five thousand CSCs in the rural areas for delivering daily services to the citizens. “The CSCs in Uttar Pradesh conducted over 1.65 crore transactions related to home delivery of food grains, e-pass, etc,” says Kumar.
Chief Minister’s helpline
The Chief Minister’s helpline, operational since the last couple of years, doubled up as COVID-19 control room. “It’s a 500 seater control centre handling COVID related calls and also other health related grievances. We were also able to use the same service to follow up, twice in a day, with the people in home isolation. Calls related to the industries were also handled in the call centre,” says Kumar.
During the pandemic, twenty two new services were added on nivestmitra.up.nic.in, a single window clearance portal for industries. “During the pandemic, a total of sixty thousand NoCs were issued without any manual intervention,” informs Kumar.
The state has also setup a centre for Geo-informatics. A GIS based Decision Support System (DSS) is operational for planning, mapping and monitoring assets like land, state Government works, etc.
Dedicated policies for startups and electronics manufacturing
UP already had an IT and Startup Policy 2017. The state has relaunched the Startup Policy in 2020 and has also launched UP Electronics Manufacturing Policy 2020 with special provisions to woo manufacturers to shift base in UP. The aim is to bring investments worth fourty thousand crore and generate four lakh jobs in the next five years.
A dedicated data centre policy to be announced soon
Given the huge demand for data centres, Uttar Pradesh will soon announce a dedicated policy on data centres. As a part of rolling out a red carpet for data centre developers, there are plans to provide sops in land allocation, power supply, electricity, etc. Yotta, a major data centre developer from the Hiranandani group, has already begun the construction of one of their data centres without waiting for the policy to come out. The draft policy for data centres is ready. According to estimates, the data centre industry will attract investments worth twenty thousand crore, generating over 1.5 lakh jobs. The policy envisages three data centre parks and ten data centre units.
Vishwas Dass, Special Correspondent at Express Computer also contributed for this story
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