By Our Reporter
Shillong: Raising concerns over connectivity problems in the North Eastern Region, Union Minister of DoNER Paban Singh Ghatowar informed that the central government has recently formed a committee to look into this problem.
“Connectivity problem in the north east is a very serious matter and the prime minister himself has expressed concern over the issue”, Ghatowar said adding that the DoNER ministry is giving all priority to this sector.
The union minister was addressing the inauguration of the two-day North East e-Gov Summit 2012 at IIM Shillong here on Wednesday. Pointing out that states in the north east lack communication with mainland India, Ghatowar said mobile coverage, state highway, mobile communication is very poor with only 65% coverage. He rued the quality of mobile connectivity stating that mobile services have gone down, call drops are frequent and connection error has increased.
Terming e-Gov as the ‘Engine for Transition’, Ghatowar said that e-Development could bring a huge transition in the north east and turn it into a developed and urbanized region, bringing the eight states at par with the top states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala etc.
Further, Ghatowar also mentioned that the Government of India approved the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in pursuance of its policy of introducing e-Governance on a massive scale.
The NeGP vision is to “Make all Government Services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man”. The Minister also informed that NeGP comprises of 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) encompassing 10 Central MMPs, 10 State MMPs and 7 Integrated MMPs spanning multiple Ministries/ Departments.
He further added that an integral part of the NeGP plan is Common Service Centres (CSCs) which are the IT kiosks at the rural level and which can provide G2C (Government to Citizen) services like various certificates, revenue records etc, G2B (Government to Business) and B2C (Business to citizen) transactions.
The DoNER Minister urged all the north eastern states to complete the SWAN, State data centre, common service centres, e-Districts and Mission mode projects, stating that his ministry and North Eastern Council would provide all the necessary assistance.
Mr AL Hek, Minister for Information Technology said Meghalaya is one of the few states in the country to have all the 4 important pillars of e-governance—Data Centre, State Wide Area Network (SWAN), common service centres (CSCs) and the State Service Delivery Gateway (SSDG) or the electronic bandwidth. Meghalaya is also the first state out of 16 states to set up the set up a Data Centre and one of 30 states to introduce SWAN.
It is learnt that 225 CSCs will be set up in the state based on the Public Private Partnerships (PPP) model which is mandated to be set up in the rural areas and at present, 212 have already been set up in the last three years with the brand name ‘Rainbow’. Mr Hek however, pointed out that in the state where there are 6500 villages out of which 50 percent have a population of about 200 and above hence setting up CSCs is a challenging task since many villages are situated beyond the block and district headquarters coupled with connectivity problem (internet). Editor of Business and Specials-CNN-IBN, Karma Paljor moderated the sessions.