National award to Himachal in e-governance.

Shimla, Oct 26 (UNI) Himachal Pradesh has been declared the second best state in the country in e-governance, Secretary, Information and Technology B K Aggarwal said here today.

An assessment in this regard has been done by India Tech Foundation, Mumbai on application of Information Technology and its use in government institutions.

Speaker of Lok Sabha, Som Nath Chatterjee will give away the award during the 10th International Summit and Expo Power 2008 to be held on November 8 next in Mumbai.

Mr Aggarwal said this premier award in the area of e-governance will be given to the state for providing the best IT related initiatives and providing efficient, transparent, cost effective and speedy government to government, government to citizen and government to business services.

He added the award was judged on the criticality of the IT usage, improvement in service, impact on quality and productivity, impact on society and innovation in terms of reach and replicability, tangible impact on efficiency, operational costs and decision making and demonstrating functionality of providing various information relating to e-governance.

The Secretary told that Himachal Pradesh is the first state to launch State wide Area Network and added that a Network Operation Centre has been set up to provide unified placement of data for the entire state at one place.

He added that about 3000 offices at tehsil and block level would be connected through HIMSWAN project in near future for which a State Data Centre will also be separately set up.

He informed 1186 Gram Panchayats have already been provided with computer hardware to computerise all services at the Panchayat level. The state has taken a lead in the country in undertaking computerisation of 40 police stations under CIPA programme, he claimed.

Mr Aggarwal said that touch screen kiosks have been set up at various places in the state to provide common interface for various activities and added that all the 68000 employees working in the state would be trained in computerisation and IT related services.

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