NeGP to make remote villages accessible through internet

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

Kolkata, May 25 (UNI) The Centre has accorded high priority to improving the quality of basic governance and decided to promote e-governance on a massive scale in areas of concern to the common man, according to Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

On June 14 last the Department of Information Technology unveiled various components of the ambitious National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), covering 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) and eight support components, to be implemented at central, state and local government levels, at an estimated cost of Rs 23,000 crores over the next five years, the annual report of the department stated.

The government approved a scheme, as part of the NeGP, to establish 1,00,000 broadband-enabled Internet Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural areas of the country to connect the villagers to the World Wide Web. The scheme was approved with a total outlay of Rs 5,742 crores and implemented in Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and was expected to create one lakh direct jobs and 2-3 lakh additional indirect jobs.

State Data Centres (SDCs) were created for the states to consolidate services, applications and infrastructure to provide efficient electronic delivery of G2G, G2C and G2B services. These services could be rendered by the states through common delivery platform seamlessly supported by core connectivity infrastructure such as State Wide Area Network (SWAN) and CSC connectivity extended up to village level.

The government approved a scheme for establishment of SWANs at a total outlay of Rs 3,334 crores over a period of five years. These SWANs would extend data connectivity of two mega bits per second up to the block level in all States and Union Territories (UTs) in the country.

The block level nodes in turn would have a provision to extend connectivity further to the village level using contemporary wireless technology. Under the scheme, proposals from 24 States and UTs were sanctioned.

The IT Department approved two pilot e-district projects covering six districts in UP and two districts in Asom. The objective was to computerise the backend workflows at the district level with appropriate Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), to reduce the work load at the district level, ensure fast processing of grievances, enable better monitoring of various government schemes.

As a step in this direction, software tools and fonts for ten Indian languages namely Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu languages were released in public domain for free use by the masses. Similar software tools and fonts for other languages were likely to be released during 2007, the report stated.

The Department of Expenditure released Rs 17 crores and Rs 21 crores grants during 2004-05 and 2005-06 respectivrly as Additional Central Assistance (ACA) to all the States for taking capacity building initiative.

UNI

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