Dr. K Rosaiah, Governor of Tamil Nadu inaugurated the 15th Express Technology Sabha on January 16 at Hotel Leela Palace, Chennai. The annual event is an established platform that sees around 100 senior Government IT leaders from across India sharing ideas, best practices and innovations on e-Governance.
Setting the platform open, Rosaiah said, “Both the central and governments should work together to usher in e-inclusion by leveraging ICT. The governments will have to assume participatory role to do that.
He stressed that effective utilization of IT is imperative to offer better services, business interactions, greater revenue generation opportunities. “Modalities should be developed to deliver citizen-centric services online,” he said.
Pointing that the first step towards e-Governance has been taken in the country in the form of enabling payment of e-bills, taxes, procurement of documents like birth certificates, he said, “This is a welcome move, yet we have a long way to go.”
He said the state governments should work on tighter inter-department integration that will be critical for reducing response time for services. “It is not just about reducing time, what is ,more important is that fact a time limit should be fixed for the PSUs to response to citizens,” he added.
In his welcome note Shubhomoy Bhattacharjee, National business Editor, Indian Express said, “The recent political events have shown us that the governments cannot escape from responding basic needs of the citizen in time.”
Dr. Ashwini Kumar Sharma, Managing Director, National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology, also delivered a keynote address. He noted, “Inclusion is considered as a set of individual entitlements like human freedoms, autonomy, dignity and equitable participation in society. Everyone has a right to achieve this. E-inclusion is effective participation of individuals and communities through their access to ICT and digital literacy is the most important component of it.”
The event opened to an engaging panel discussion around e-Inclusion to E-Services: Serving citizens with better services delivery, highlighting issues that have been stalling smooth implementation of e-Governance in the country.
BN Satpathy, senior advisor, Planning Commission pointed that as a country India is capable of deal with larger crises with the help of IT, the real challenge is to enable basic e-Services to the rural masses.”