negp
e-District
Made for local governance Pilots are in the last leg for e-District, a G2C project that aims to make e-Governance up to village level a reality By Prachi Shirur
E
-District, one of the important mission mode project (MMP) under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of India, is the application of technology in governance from district level downwards. Since a majority of government-to-citizens (G2C) services are delivered at the district level, it is envisaged under this project to build front-ends in the form of citizen facilitation centres at district, tehsil, subdivision and block levels. Village-level front-ends will be established through common services centres (CSCs) for delivery of services. The G2C services that are planned to be delivered through e-District include, among others, issuance of caste, marriage, income and employment certificates, pensions, ration cards and filing of cases in revenue courts. The project has tremendous impact for the citizens since it is a G2C project that impacts the common rural people, who otherwise have to run to different officials for getting their work done. The project will also help in facilitating district administration to efficiently monitor the functioning of various departments and help in generating efficient MIS for better decision making to district administration officials According to Abhishek Singh, Director, e-Governance, Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India, who is also heading this MMP, “e-District is an application system that will leverage and utilise the infrastructure pillars under NeGP like SWAN (the secure network) and CSC (the front-end delivery channel) to deliver services to citizens at their doorsteps.� The project focuses on IT enablement of internal processes of service delivery through business process re-engineering, automation of workflow and internal processes of district administration, providing easy access and quality services to common man through CSCs. It bring about seamless integration of various departments for providing services to citizens by integrating various district databases and creation of ICT infrastructure for rolling out of e-Governance plans right up to the subdivision and block and circle levels.
Implementation strategy The e-District project envisages centralised architecture at the state level with common application software for all the districts of the state, residing at the state data centre (SDC). Citizens will access Web-enabled services at CSCs. Applications developed during the pilot phase will be re-used in other
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states. The project seeks to redesign government processes to ensure significant process simplification and value addition for citizens. The project gives emphasis to identification and prioritisation of services to be enabled on the basis of volume of transactions. Further, service levels for each service have to be determined by the state as part of the detailed project report (DPR) and only those services where the service levels determined meet the criteria of improvement in the quality of service delivery are to be included. Program management units are planned at national, state and district levels to enable implementation of the project in a time bound manner. For ensuring delivery of services in the long term as also addition of new services when the demand for e-services increases, an effective