Kalam for early implementation of e-governance programme

New Delhi, Oct 13: President A P J Abdul Kalam today urged the Government speed up the implementation of the Rs 23000 crore National e-Governance Programme (NeGP) aimed at upgrading the quality of governance by vastly improved delivery of government services.

''The Internet revolution has proved to be a powerful tool for good governance initiatives and the world is moving towards Internet governance. Particularly in a democratic nation of a billion people like India, e-Governance should enable seamless access to information and seamless flow of information across the state and central government in the federal setup,'' Dr Kalam said inaugurating the three-day national conference on the Right to Information Act organised by the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) at the Vigyan Bhavan here.

Hailing the RTI Act, that came into being last year, as an important milestone, Dr Kalam said it has thrown open the system of governance to total transparency and therefore ''inescapable accountability''.

''Adequate safeguards have been built in, in the Act to ensure that the right is exercisable consistent with the dictates of national security which by no means can ever be compromised,'' the President added.

Dr Kalam suggested that the Commission should make the people aware of ''who deals with what'' in order to ensure a more direct flow of information from the applicants and to make it more meaningful for them.

He added that the Commission website should provide a search engine so that the applicants could easily consult a case decision.

Elaborating on the ambitious NeGP, recently launched by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Dr Kalam said it entails establishing State Wide Area Network (SWAN) with State Data Centres with 2 mbps connectivity up to Block level with 100,000 Common Services Centres as front end.

''It is essential to establish the G2G e-Governance GRID by connecting District Level Data Centres to State Data Centre there by linking National Data Centre through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) based secured network.

''G2G E-Governance GRID should enable the secured dynamic workflow system across the government units thus ensuring the seamless file flow with digital signature authentication mechanism under the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) framework,'' he added.

He said the implementation of e-Governance cannot be delayed any further in the name of security as the present manual system was more vulnerable.

''With that kind of secured IT environment in place, if anybody wants to escape or try to erase their foot prints, it is thus making further foot prints; hence it is traceable at all levels through system oriented and application oriented audit trails,'' he said.

Sharing his experiences, the President said 99 per cent of the applications received by the Rashtrapati Bhawan are on unrelated matters.

''This lack of awareness amongst the public leads to delays for them and also places a heavy burden on the working of government departments and the concerned persons and sections,'' the President said stressing on the need to create awareness among the people as well as making the Commission website more interactive.

''In Rashtrapati Bhawan we have implemented an e-governance system to study all the management needs and determine the action requirements to be taken by Rashtrapati Bhavan and other agencies of Government and the relevant institutions both public and private.'' Dr Kalam also stressed on the need for the officials to continuosly assess the information needs of the people so to ascertain what kind of information was generally requested.

''All such information which has been requested for by more than one citizen or a number of times should be uploaded in the website and updated from time to time. This will also save the time and resources and will also diminish the chances of any divergent interpretation by the person seeking information,'' he suggested.

Dr Kalam called for active participation by all the stakeholders including, political leaders, civil services, media and the citizens to derive maximum benefit from the Act.

UNI