In a bid to make the delivery of services efficient and transparent, the Centre is planning to enable online availing of certain services, beginning with permits, across states.
By Ruhi Tewari
The efforts are a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Digital India” campaign, which is aimed at ensuring that government services are available to citizens online.
The process of applying and issuing permits online will be modelled on a similar experiment started in Jharkhand recently. The website — permitonline.jharkhand.gov.in — allows one to apply and receive permits related to commercial tax, excise and mining.
According to senior officials in the Ministry of Information and Technology, efforts are now on to replicate this at the national level by enabling each state to start such websites.
“A meeting of state IT secretaries will be called soon where this idea would be shared and we will offer all help to initiate it in their respective states. The Centre will fund the replication,” a senior official said.
The dashboard on the Jharkhand government’s website enables real-time tracking of the status of the permit and shows statistics of the number of permits issued on a certain day, week, month and so on, along with a break down of the category of permits. It also gives a graphical representation of department-wise and permit-wise activity on daily basis. It further gives a breakdown of the district-wise pending excise permit list. Officials say this has helped reduce fraud and misuse that seeps in with permits issued manually.
The Centre is also proposing to replicate another online initiative of the Jharkhand government — checkpost.jharkhandgov.in — across states. This enables real-time tracking of the movement of commercial vehicles that enter the state, giving information on which vehicle crossed a particular check-post and the vehicles that were detained for defaulting on any count.
“We are essentially collecting the best practices in online/electronic initiatives started by states and trying to replicate them nationwide under the Digital India initiative,” a senior official said.
As reported by The Indian Express last month, the NDA government has already launched an “attendance website” to serve as a centralised database for all central government employees. The website — attendance.gov.in — is modelled on the lines of attendance websites of the Jharkhand government and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology.