Giving a push to the Digital India mission and digitalisation of services in India, the Central government will implement a slew of e-governance projects. It will also streamline and legalise several existing services for greater transparency and efficient functioning of the government.
The new initiatives being taken by the government include “e-Vidhan” which will digitise and make the functioning of all Vidhan Sabhas paperless, while e-Courts will help in universal computerisation of all district and subordinate courts to provide an online platform for information related to judicial proceedings and decisions and, in turn, create a data base called the “Judicial Grid”.
Apart from these, the government will also be opening many e-offices for several ministries for faster disposal of matters concerning the ministries. The government has also started electronic bids under the Central Public Procurement Portal which already has around 3.5 lakh contractors and vendors registered. Similarly, the third version of the Government E-Marketplace was also launched in the last week of January this year and already has 7,800 buyers, 5600 sellers, 3,75,000 products and 12 services so far.
The government is also working towards streamlining the “Digital locker facility” that was launched in 2015, envisioned as the “document highway” to store certain official documents on the Cloud platform. The service is aimed at reducing the need to carry physical documents.
Over 95 lakh people have already registered for the DigiLocker facility and over 2 billion documents have already been uploaded in the locker in the last three years.
However, there have been concerns raised about several government and private organisations being unaware of the digital documents and even the police, who still refuse to accept digitised documents.
Debabrata Nayak, Additional Director, Digital Locker and e-governance, told The Sunday Guardian, “Digital Locker is one of the finest initiatives of the government; however, the lack of awareness among the people as well as organisations is something that we are considering. We will be holding awareness campaigns to ensure that citizens and organisations are made aware of the legality and validity of digitised documents.”
On e-Governance, Nayak said, “Several initiatives are being taken by the government to facilitate good governance and through e-governance measures, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for good, transparent and effective governance would be realised.”
Experts have also raised concerns about the privacy and leak of data from the humungous data base available with the government.
A senior manager at one of the biggest software giants, who did not wished to be named, told this newspaper, “Digital India is one of the best initiatives taken by this government, but with digitisation comes a great responsibility with the government, where the cyber security apparatus of the government needs to be constantly upgraded and strict checks made so that no leakages happen or else people would start to lose trust in the government and its initiatives.”