Coronavirus pandemic has not only forced the people to remain indoors but also created the necessity of adopting modern technology tools to connect with the world digitally.
Video conferencing has become the new normal under the lockdown, imposed due to coronavirus pandemic, that has wreaked havoc in the world and made people do ‘work from home’.
In its bid to ensure that the government functions smoothly, the Centre’s, National Informatics Centre (NIC), has facilitated over 54,000 video conferencing sessions of over 1,40,000 hours, involving 2,20,000 sites/users across the country held at all levels of governance during the lockdown.
NIC’s video conferencing (VC) services are helping the government officials to connect effectively with each other, thereby ensuring minimum physical contact and exposure during stay-at-home duration.
The most noticeable among all is the video conferencing of Prime Minister Narendra Modi where he interacts with various heads of the governments, Union Territories and heads of international organisations, to get the latest updates on Covid-19. NIC has created a permanent video conferencing setup at the PM’s residence and at the PMO at South Block. The VC facility is also available from over 2000 studios across the country including state and districts, district/UT and ministry/department at the Centre over NICNET.
NIC says that its staff did extensive groundwork to facilitate a series of video conferencing sessions for the PM from his residence during the lockdown period, to line up participants from diverse fields like healthcare, defence, home affairs, and disaster management among a plethora of others.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) technical arm has got VC coordinators in every state, who facilitate VC services in these unprecedented times and ensure flawless, secure communication with password protection, unique conference ID to access VC services.
NIC through its technology driven digital solutions assists the government to carry out essential tasks during the lockdown and combat these challenging times.
NIC’s wide range of services include video conferencing, e-office, networking, messaging, ServicePlus, web hosting (data centre, cloud) to the centre, state governments and district administrations.
The web based video conferencing setup is capable to facilitate virtual meeting among officers, either point to point or with multiple officials together.
The President and Vice President are also using this service to interact with Governors, Lt Governors and administrators of all states and Union Territories to discuss Covid-19 issues.
The healthcare sector is one of the key sectors where VC service has played a phenomenal role in the lockdown. The service is being used by the medical experts to provide necessary training to the doctors, nurse, volunteers, and Asha workers to make them competent into helping in the nation’s fight against the corona pandemic.
A number of dedicated Covid-19 web rooms have been created to facilitate VCs. These are being effectively used by senior government officials for monitoring and reviewing Covid-19 preparedness and planning in their respective regions. These web rooms help the government officials to connect effectively with each other using any electronic gadget from anywhere, anytime and ensure minimum physical contact and exposure.
NIC VC services are also used to launch and implement the new ICT initiatives under the Centre’s flagship program — ‘Digital India’. Cabinet ministers, state ministers and Chief Ministers used this service for the launch of applications like ePass, Dashboards to tackle Covid-19 situation. Recently, the Union Minister for Law & Justice, Communication and Electronics& IT along with Tamil Nadu CM, used this service to launch ‘Covid-19 Self Registration and Early Response System’.
The service was also used by Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to unveil the special Covid-19 SUM hospital at Bhubaneswar in Odisha.
The Centre had launched web-based high definition VC services in 2011 for conference over desktops even in low bandwidth environments, including Wi-Fi and 4G public network. The Web (desktop) VC can be used from home using the laptop, desktop and mobile phones.
The video conferencing services are also being used extensively by the Supreme Court, High Courts /District Courts. Countrywide desktop video conferencing infrastructure was created under e-court project to facilitate HC/District Courts/Jails for hearing using VC technology. This project helps to make faster delivery of case, saves enormous amount of time and expenditure on unnecessary movement of jailer/police personnel, avoids unpleasant incident that can happen during the transit.
The Supreme Court passed guidelines for the functioning of the courts via video conference, to follow the social distancing guidelines while maintaining constitutional role and these sessions shall be supported by NIC VC service.
However, it must be noted that the service NIC’s VC services are already in use by the High Courts of Odisha and Rajasthan, and some of the other states at various levels.
Lately, the VC service was made available in all courts, jails in Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh. The VC facilities also equipped the courts in the twin UTs with the capacity to receive evidence and submissions from witnesses or persons involved in court proceedings in circumstances where it would be expensive, inconvenient or otherwise not desirable for a person to attend a court in person.