state focus
Rajasthan
Health of e-Gov in Rajasthan Save departments akin Commercial Tax and Excise, it’s quite rare to notice a theory underlying various e-Governance projects across all the departments By Pratap Vikram Singh, eGov Bureau
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rowing with six percent plus growth rate over the past two decades, Rajasthan has emerged as one of the foremost players in the national economy. Increased industrial growth, agriculture, tourism and young demographics –almost 40 percent of the population- are engines for the high-paced economy. In information technology, the state has emerged as one of the favourite destinations for many domain business houses as is it ranked the eighth biggest IT hub in the country. It is also one of the first few states to have an IT Policy in the year 2000. While making Jaipur as a preferable destination for attracting IT investments, the Vasundhara Raje regime had built the much required ecology for e-Enabling the state. The subsequent, also the present government has remained vigilant, given the regular stock taking of several e-Governance projects done by the current top state leadership. Rajasthan deserves appreciation for being the first state to have issued an executive order mandating the departments to allocate three percent of the Plan Budget for rolling out critical online government to citizen (G2C) services. It’s also the only state to have mandated the ownership of the common services centre (CSC) [under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP)] to women. Besides, it’s a pioneer state to use mobile platform for bringing in transparency and convenience to citizens in service delivery. [Read projects: e-Sanchar, iFACTS] With the thrust provided by the state top leadership, the revenue earning departments – the commercial tax and excise – started automation in year 2002-03. Today, Department of Excise has become a virtual paper-less office, where more than 80 percent of the work is being done through IT. Commercial Tax department get its 45 percent of the revenue through electronic mode. Department of Mines of Geology, too, is way ahead of its counter parts in other states in leveraging GIS in its business processes. However, in spite of all forward moves taken by the state authorities on e-Government, the e-Enablement of state as was envisaged by the government in the IT policies of the year 2000 and
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2007 is still a distant dream. Save the revenue earning departments-Commerical Tax and Excise- in the state, the re-engineering and automation of business processes and electronic delivery of services are yet to be made a priority in most of the departments. Use of three percent of plan budget expenditure on providing electronic services was first mentioned in year 2000 policy and was repeated in IT and ITES Policy 2007. However, it was only in the year 2009 when Chief Minister Ashok Gahlot mentioned in his address to the state assembly that all of the departments will be using three percent of their Plan Budget for rolling out online critical G2C services, on the obvious request from the state Department of IT. Following the budget announcement, the state government issued a circular (dated January 18, 2010) mandating the departments to roll out a minimum of two G2C services within a period of six months. Quite expectedly, departments were again indifferent to this ambitious deadline. As of now, the IT dept has appointed consultants for preparing reports for almost eleven departments for rolling online services.