“To simplify government processes through the use of eGovernance, eGovernance literature should be prepared in a simple format,” Rajesh Aggarwal, Principal Secretary, IT, Government of Maharashtra.
You have started a new website on eGovernance – www.egovernance.guru. Please tell us about your motivation for starting this website.
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Though there is vast material on eGovernance in public domain, much of it suffers from jargon which can be difficult to decipher, if you are not fully conversant with all the nitty-gritty’s of the subject. To simplify government processes through the use of eGovernance, eGovernance literature should be prepared in a simple format. That is the main reason behind creating this website – www.egovernance.guru.
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When you were with NIXI you played a role in liberating and promoting the .IN domain. What is your view of the “Dot bharat” initiative in which the domain can be booked in Devanagari script?
Unfortunately .IN domains still are priced quite high, and educational domains like .ac.in and .edu.in are still tightly controlled by ERNET. I hope that when vernacular domain names “Dot bharat” are opened up to public, they will be reasonably priced (not more than 100 Rupees per annum). Also sufficient care must be taken to ensure that early domain names are not cornered by the Chinese and German domain name squatters as it has happened in case of the earlier Indian domains. If Indian citizens are able to get these new domain names in a transparent fashion, hopefully, it will lead to development of some good vernacular websites.
You have expressed the view that UIDAI and NPR should be merged. Please give us your opinion on the benefits that can come from the merging of UIDAI and NPR.
UIDAI and NPR should not work at cross purposes. NPR must utilise back-end of UIDAI to ensure uniqueness of record. One thing which both programmes today lack is guarantying the address correctness of a citizen at any given point of time. In Taiwan, there is one single National Address Registry . Whenever any citizen wants to change his address, he communicates to one single database. Election Commission issues a print request to this single database, which prints lists of all the citizens who are more than 18 years old, sorted polling booth wise, as per this address database. Thus, coupled with unique ID which will be permanent, and unique address database, which will get modified whenever the citizen changes address, these two things together can revolutionise hundreds of other processes.
In his independence day speech, the Prime Minister of India has spoken about creating a “Digital India.” What steps is can the Department of Information Technology in Maharashtra take to enhance the scope of eGovernance within the state?
Maharashtra has consistently been at the top of the eGovernance pyramid in the country. After getting to the point of having more than 9 crore UIDAI enrolments in the state, we are effectively utilising the eKYC Aadhaar service to simplify the lives of citizens. The IGR Maharashtra has launched eRegistration for rental agreements. Under this initiative, the landlord and the tenant can sit at home or go to cyber café to authenticate themselves on the IGR portal using eKYC. They can make payment through net banking and print the agreement. Many more initiatives are in the pipeline.
You have earlier spoken about eGovernance suffering in the country as the databases in different departments do not speak to each other. What steps can the government take to resolve this problem?
Our doctors have to first enter data into NIC National Portal and then enter again into State portal. Different state units of NIC write separate code for similar applications. But now things are changing. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has now stated that everything should be on the cloud, and this rigmarole of writing the source code again and again in different ministries and states has to stop. NIC and the state Governments have also been advised to be more liberal in sharing databases with other departments. In Maharashtra, we have been successful to quite an extent in this respect.
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