january 2011 issue 01 n volume 07
INbox President Dr M P Narayanan
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Editor-in-Chief: Dr Ravi Gupta Managing Editor: Shubhendu Parth
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VP - Strategy: Pravin Prashant Editorial Team Dr Prachi Shirur, Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar Divya Chawla, Sheena Joseph, Yukti Pahwa, Pratap Vikram Singh Sales & Marketing Team Debabrata Ray, Arpan Dasgupta, Bharat Kumar Jaiswal, Anuj Agarwal (+91-9911302086), Fahimul Haque, Rakesh Ranjan (sales@elets.in ) Subscription & Circulation Priya Saxena, Gunjan Singh (Mobile: 9718289123) (subscription@elets.in)
Broadband for rural connectivity This in reference to the interview of R Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Department of Telecom and Chairman, Telecom Commission. The idea of connecting the Gram Panchayats for e-Governance, telemedicine, tele-education, financial inclusion, gaming and entertainment by broadband connectivity is really commendable. Also the fact that with an increase of 10 percent broadband connection there will be a per capita GDP growth of 1.4percent is incredible. A country’s development lies in its overall development. 70 percent of India being rural needs greater attention as compared to the urban areas. The idea of using area connectivity in place of point-to-point and enabling its use by all the Government institutions is surely going to work. Ajay Kumar Prasad, Bihar
Moldova leads
Events
This is in reference to the interview of Stela Mocan published in the December issue of egov. The Moldova’s experience of progress in the the United Nations e-Government Survey 2010 from its earlier position. The Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011 by the World Economic Forum ranks Moldova 89th globally (out of 139 countries) in terms of technological readiness, and 123rd in terms of innovation and sophistication. Its a good case study for India, since the progress made by the country in this area has been slow.
Vicky Kalra
S Shauryal, Noida
Editorial & Marketing
egov is a pioneer
Correspondence
Please refer to report titled ‘face2face is the way to open government’ published in December 2010 issue of egov. It was heartening to know that the social media is being leveraged for various developmental and governance related tasks. Though social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Linked In have been very well proven their worth with individuals and businesses, but it was equally fascinating to know that various government agencies like Ministry of External Affairs and Delhi Traffic Police are also using social media as Government 2.0 tools thereby inculcating more transparency and openness in the opaque government system.
Graphic Design Team Bishwajeet Kumar Singh, Om Prakash Thakur Shyam Kishore Web Development Team Zia Salahuddin, Amit Pal, Sandhya Giri, Anil Kumar IT Team Mukesh Sharma
egov – G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA–201 301, India Phone: +91-120-2502181-85, Fax: +91-120-2500060 Email: info@egovonline.net egov is published by Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd in technical collaboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS). Owner, Publisher, Printer: Ravi Gupta, Printed at H T Media Ltd, B-2, Sector-63, Noida 201307 , U.P. and published from 710 Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30, Sector - 50 Noida, UP Editor: Ravi Gupta © All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic and mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage or retrieval system, without publisher’s permission.
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egov / www.egovonline.net / January 2011
Sachin Bharadwaj, New Delhi
Smart city – A dream! The cover story on smart city presents a very positive picture of changing scenario of urban
development and planning. In a ideal smart city, the article says, the businesses run quite efficiently and at a lesser cost, which overall leads to greater productivity. It also points out towards the application of ICT in city administration, which lowers costs and enhances the government-tocitizen service delivery. However, India still has a long way to go, given the fact that the state of public infrastructure- the transport, health, education, economy and trade facilities- still remains to be poor. Policies like JNNURM have not been able to address the much complicated issues of the sprawling urbanisation and concretaisation. Increased technology usage and focus on urban planning could be the way out. Kuntal Chatterji, Kolkata
CWG portrayed our technological brilliance This is in reference to the article named “The network’s spectacular show” in your December edition. I would like to say that the way this article has been written and the way the beautiful facet of CWG 2010 was portrayed in it thoroughly matches with my thought as I had covered the entire event while interning with The Doordarshan. Not only CWG 2010 saw the first worldwide deployment of inline video monitoring for uncompressed high-definition video but also witnessed a fine interplay of data, voice, video and mobility, with professional broadcast and enterprise conferencing that thrilled audiences across the globe in ways like never before. Debapriya Mondal, IIMC, New Delhi