Jammu: Union Minister Jitendra Singh Saturday said that the ultimate objective of good governance was to bring ease of living in the life of a common man.
An official spokesman in a statement issued here said that inaugurating the 25th National Conference on e-Governance (NCeG), the silver jubilee edition of the NCeG in Katra, Singh said, “Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi giant strides were being taken in the field of IT and new age technologies for better delivery of governance to the citizens.”
He said that the ultimate objective of good governance was to bring ease of living in the life of a common man.
“The Centre has preempted the need of Information Technology and inculcated it in every aspect of governance and has committed to augment inclusive growth across all sectors,” Singh said.
Dwelling on the theme of the conference ‘Bringing citizens, industry, and government closer’ he said, “This has become absolute necessity in the present times as the days of working in silos were over.”
Singh said that closer synergy among the research, academia, industry and start-ups was the way forward for India to become self-reliant (Atmanirbhar) in true sense of the term.
He said that in an era of increasing digitisation with Web 3.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and regular tech disruptions, his vision of India’s Techade could be realised through vigorous and all pervasive digital push.
Singh said that the digital innovation would play an important part in the next decade for governance to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
Singh said that Vision India@2047 would be e-Vision India @2047.
He said what was worth noting was that all such large public digital solutions were built with an open architecture, and were modular with plug and play that essentially seek to democratise and decentralise technology usage.
Singh said: “India has been building ‘open digital platforms’, which were tremendous force multipliers and underlined that this was critical and unique in being affordable, interoperable, API-driven (and hence scalable), mobile-first in vernacular languages, and allows India’s entrepreneurs to build on the rails of these platforms to innovate and solve problems at scale and for trust.”
He said that these were not only digital transformations but also innovations in the design philosophy of citizen-centric solutions with huge socio-economic implications.
Singh urged all the participants and stalwarts taking part in the two-day intense deliberations to focus on questions that would propel India to the next decade of agile growth.
Singh said, “The whole of government, the whole of nation, and the whole of society approach has become the new norm to achieve the desired results in shortest span of time.”
He gave examples of success stories of 75-day ‘Swacch Sagar, Surakshit Sagar’ campaign from July 5 to September 17, 2022, and the ongoing countrywide campaign of Department of Pension of the Ministry of Personnel, PG, and Pensions for creation of digital life certificates.
Singh said that due to this whole and integrated approach, 25 lakh Digital Life Certificates (DLCs) for central government pensioners were created in just 20 days from November 1 to 19, 2022.
He said that apart from officials of DoPPW, SBI and Punjab National Bank, registered Central Government Pensioner Associations, representatives of Indian Post and Payment Bank (IPPB), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Informatics Centre (NIC) as well as Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA) in every city took part in the campaign.
Singh said that increased efficiency, increased transparency, robust focus on citizen-centricity and reaching out to the last man in the last queue for service delivery in the true spirit of Antyodaya was the ultimate objective of all governance reforms.
“In the next 25 years of ‘Amrit Kaal’, the officers in their 20s and 30s have to play a stellar role to steer India to become the unique and best model of governance in 2047 when India celebrates 100 years of its independence,” he said.
Expressing happiness that NCeG was coinciding with the Constitution Day celebrations, Singh administered reading of the Preamble to the Constitution with all participants in the inaugural session as November 26 is celebrated as the Constitution Day to commemorate the adoption of the Constitution of India in 1949.
He presented the National Awards for e-Governance (NAeG) under five categories of the NAeG Scheme 2022 to 18 e-Governance initiatives at central, state, and district levels, academic and research institutions and Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs). This includes nine gold and nine silver awards in which e-Panchayat Mission Mode Project (eGramSwaraj and AyditOnline) of Ministry of Panchayati Raj was awarded the gold award under ‘Excellence in Government Process Reengineering for Digital Transformation’ category of the National Awards for e-Governance.
Singh handed over the national award to Joint Secretary, MoPR Alok Prem Nagar.
The two-day 25th National Conference on e-Governance (NCeG) is being organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, in association with the J&K government in Katra.
Secretary, DARPG V Srinivas in his address said that a digitally empowered nation, a digitally empowered citizen, and a digitally transformed institution represented the policy maxim ‘Maximum Governance, Minimum Government’.
“In the period from 2014 to 2022, government has brought about digital transformation which has been accepted by India’s rural population through Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, UPI and Beam application, and Arogya Setu App,” he said.
Chief Secretary Arun Kumar Mehta said that it was a proud moment for J&K to host the 25th National Conference on e-Governance that shows signs of changes happening in J&K.
“J&K has achieved milestones in e-Governance with distinctions in implementation of Amrit Sarovar, AKAM, PMGSY, Agriculture Income, ease of doing business, digitisation of land records, and providing land passbooks that has been possible through transparency, teamwork, and technology,” Mehta said.
Secretary MeitY Alkesh Kumar said that it was an occasion to recognise and showcase exemplary digital transformations brought out by the Centre, state governments, startup community, research and academic institutions.
Additional Secretary DARPG Amar Nath, Joint Secretary DARPG N B S Rajput, and VC SMVDU Prof R K Sinha attended the inaugural session.