Odisha aspires to become a true Digital State

The Cloud for Digital Governance: The Tour in Bhubaneswar, organised by Express Computer and Microsoft India on December 20, saw Ashok Chandra Panda, Minister of State, Science and Technology, Government of Odisha, stress on the need of proactively using information technology tools for simplifying services for people. He said that the Odisha Government is extensively using IT to ensure citizen services are improved and strengthened for every citizen.

Panda said that the Naveen Patnaik-led government is strongly committed to bring happiness on the faces of citizens by making government services easy and accessible. The government wants people should not face difficulties in availing services.

The minister said that the IT Policy of Odisha attempts to put in place a favourable environment for investment through strategic initiatives, concessions and facilitation so that Odisha could capitalise on the growth opportunities in the IT/ITES sector and eventually become one of the leading states in the country. The policy also aims at encouraging the young talent pool to acquire higher degree of employability skills in the knowledge economy.

He that said the ICT Policy 2014 has a vision to develop IT/ITES/ESDM (Electronics System Design and Manufacturing) industries for inclusive growth and employment in Odisha, and leverage IT & ITES in governance to transform the state to a knowledge driven welfare society for improving the daily life of citizens.

Panda said that he was elated to learn that the conference aims to deliver critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and intelligent cloud computing skills to the government officials in charge of IT and the initiative comprises of a series of physical and virtual workshops, and aims to train 5,000 personnel over a period of 12 months.

Manish Prakash, Executive Director, Public Sector, Microsoft India said that in 2017, digital technologies impacted a mere eight per cent of GDP in India. Fast forward it to 2021, it would be 60 per cent and AI will play an important role in the area of digital technologies.

AI, IoT, genetic engineering and nano technology will be the characteristics of the next industrial revolution and AI is empowering these technologies, he stated.

According to Prakash, more than AI enabling driverless cars, drones, gizmos, etc, it will enable nations to meet their sustainable development goals (SDGs). It will address problems of economic inclusion, climate change, poverty alleviation, improving food production, agriculture and create better healthcare and wellness facilities for the masses.

He mentioned that AI will change the way people interact, and use government services. The various schemes announced by the Central Government – Digital India, Startup India, JAM, Smart Cities, creating a US$ 5 trillion economy, inherently has an AI led policy intervention.

The states will have to prepare themselves adopting a three way approach to harness the benefits of AI. “The policies and institutional framework will have to be setup, followed by inviting a friendly atmosphere for startups, VCs and finally empowering the human resource with skill development programs to unleash the true potential of AI in any state,” said Prakash.

Trust and ethics is an important component in the systems and policy frameworks adopted by states. There are three elements to it. Firstly, it means the data generated from different technologies should be secured and cannot be tampered with. “Microsoft invests over a $1 USD billion annually. Trust also qualifies as the data of the person/organisation/government is under their control. It remains private to the truest sense. Thirdly, the data is managed as per the laws of the land,” informed Prakash. Given the experience of Microsoft for operating in many countries globally, the company understands the importance of law abidance,” he said.

Manoj Kumar Mishra, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of Odisha said that the state government has 45 departments with 400 odd processes and the government is trying to cut down the processes to one tenth or one twentieth by using ICT. He spoke about how many states, including Odisha, was grappling with the Motor Vehicle Act Amendment this year. He said that the only way the government can achieve transformational changes in processes is by using technology.

According to him, the department has facilitated renewal of licences from anywhere in the state and the applicant need not to visit the RTO where the licence was originally issued. He cited examples of how earlier people in rural parts had to struggle a lot to deposit their holding tax/land tax at government offices which is a miniscule amount. He said that one must be surprised to know that the holding tax is such a small amount that a poor person, who used to visit government offices to pay this, might have had to spend INR 500 just to commute. Mishra said this was completely unnecessary to run from pillar to post to deposit the tax and because of this reason, the government had introduced an online system and made sure people do not visit government offices in person for such a small work. Unless mandated by some act or provision, people should never come to the government offices, he said. The 5T project is launched for this purpose only, which has enhanced the appetite for technology for the government. The Odisha Government is trying to approach citizens to resolve their grievances. Now the government is looking at the people to have their feedback on the Mo Sarkar initiative of Hon’ble CM Naveen Patnaik. He said Odisha really aspires to become a role model for others in terms of usage of IT for service delivery.

Dr Nitin Jawale, MD, IPICOL, Government of Odisha said IPICOL is using technology in a major way for GO SWIFT application to render services to the investors investing in Odisha. One of the major requirements of the Business Reform Action Plan of the Government of India is about ranking of different states on different parameters and Odisha is aspiring to be the in the list of top 10 states this year. The Centre has mandated to make efforts to avoid human interface in citizen services. As an instance, online building plan approval is being implemented across India, which envisages issuance of such plans digitally to avoid people making multiple visits of government offices to get this work done. Odisha Government wants to achieve this level of proficiency in service delivery and this is possible only through infusion of technology. When it comes to governance, ICT plays an important role and Odisha is among a few states which has taken technology to the new level. The single window created for the investors in Odisha has garnered a lot of positive response from the stakeholders. Jawale said that various departments of the state government are trying to strengthen coordination among themselves to simplify services for the citizens via ICT.

Pratibha Singh, DDG and SIO, NIC Odisha said the Union Government through Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) is implementing Government of India Cloud whose strategic paper was issued in 2013, which defined the vision, policy and objectives for adopting the cloud for accelerating service delivery while optimising government spending for new projects and migrating existing projects. It also helped in easy replication, development and deployment of eGovernance applications and follow standards in interoperable best practices. Integrated infrastructure of the Centre and state governments would provide the backbone for the cloud following common standards, guidelines and protocols. The government cloud would have a single window for service delivery even though having discreet cloud computing environment spread across the country. This would also be governed by standards and ever improving set of security guidelines for privacy and security of applications and data.

It was therefore provided in the paper that the Central and state government combined infrastructure would augment the government’s capability of providing cloud services based on the state wide area network, national knowledge network, state data centre, NOFN etc. NIC is a front runner is facilitating eGovernance initiatives and has set up state of the art cloud on National Date Centres in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and now in Bhubaneswar. She informed that the MeiTY secretary has launched NIC’s Open Cloud Public Platform under Meghraj banner.