SHILLONG: The Finance Department on Monday signed two MoUs with the State Bank of India to use its ePay and CMP (Cash Management Programmes) facilities as part of the State Government’s initiative to migrate government transactions to digital mode.
The State Government has already established a Cyber Treasury, which dedicatedly handles all the online transactions of government receipts across State centrally for a few selected departments as of now.
The Government now plans to escalate all its transactions for collection of tax and non-tax revenue through the online system known as Government Receipt Accounting System (GRAS) covering all the Departments in a phased manner. GRAS is being implemented in coordination with NIC, Shillong, and the facility would be available 24×7 through the gateway provided by SBI ePay under the MoU. Any citizen can make his government payments using credit card, debit card, online banking or mobile banking.
SBI CMP will help the Government of Meghalaya to make its payments online. It will reduce the paper work and manual reconciliation of government transactions.
With implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the anvil, these MoUs are expected to give the dealers and other citizens the desired platform for conducting financial transactions with the State Government on a digital platform.
The agreement was signed by Sanjay Goyal, Secretary Finance Department, and Rajeev Arora, DGM (B&O) SBI, Zonal Office, Shillong in the presence of Y. Tshering, Chief Secretary.