New Delhi: In an age where paper-less offices are becoming the norm everywhere, the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly still uses tons of papers starting from questions and answers to routine office work.
However, Assembly Speaker, A.T. Mondal has attempted to bring some change by introducing online system in the whole process which he said was much faster besides saving paper.
Under this system the MLAs get SMSes followed by e-mails about all the meeting, Assembly schedule, questions, answer and all other alerts, he said.
Mondal visited Jaipur to study similar processes being adopted by the Rajasthan Assembly and held several meetings with the Rajasthan Assembly Speaker and other officials.
Mondal informed that this was innovative use of information technology in the process of Assembly questions and their replies by the Government. It is a sort of online solution which replaces most manual procedures used at any stage of the process, he said.
SMS messaging has been integrated at every step of the workflow for the stalk holders, Mondal said. Looking at the critical nature of legislative functioning digital signature based transaction authentication is used, he added.
The IT process is a green solution which saves large number of paper sheets every day mainly during the sessions, the Speaker said. This also helps in instant communications between the Government, Assembly members and other stakeholders including even the media and general public, he said.
When questioned how many of the legislators in the Hill State were computer savvy, Mondal said a majority of them know how to use a computer.
All of them have been provided with laptops from the Assembly, he added.