Guwahati, Jan 17: The Assam Secretariat will migrate to the electronic-office or e-office mode from May 2023 with all departments functioning as e-offices even as the process towards the migration will be initiated from May this year.
“The state government will initiate the process of migration to the e-office at the state Secretariat here from May 11, 2022 onwards after clearing all pending files under Project Sadbhavana which will be launched from February 1, 2022. By May next year, all departments will adhere to the e-office model,” chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said, while interacting with 650 Assam Secretariat employees during a programme here on Monday.
Sarma underlined the need to redefine the way of work at Janata Bhawan, urging all, from the highest to the lowest levels to work collectively and serve the people.
“States such as Telangana and Maharashtra follow the e-office model where offices have minimum paper, which also helps keep diseases at bay. E-office is a very good system and I will request the NIC (National Informatics Centre) for hand-holding and grooming our employees,” he said.
The chief minister also said that the state was also contemplating setting up a decentralisation model after issuing standard operating protocols and putting in place an effective monitoring mechanism.
“All pending files and applications can be disposed of through the Sadbhavana portal. In the first phase, a window of two months will be given to all the citizens for registration and quoting the file number or reference of government communication regarding the old cases,” Sarma later told mediapersons.
In the second phase, the departments will be given time till April 2022 to clear all the old cases and subsequently close the files.
“Clearing of the cases will not mean that decisions will always be affirmative. It will involve due diligence which will be done by the department and a final decision will be taken. Subsequently, the old files will be closed and archived. The exercise will be completed by May 10, 2022,” he said.
Urging the employees to become an agent of change, connect and strike a chord with people who come to the Secretariat, the chief minister said that the priority would be to take the Secretariat closer to the people.
A study carried out by a firm had revealed that top five departments attracting visitors are education (27 percent), PWD (19 percent), pension and public grievances (8 percent), irrigation (5 percent) and social welfare department (4 percent).
“Out of the visitors, 29 percent are government employees, 24 percent are contractors, 12 percent are teaching staff, 7 percent are general public, 6.5 percent are corporate people and 6 percent are retired government servants,” he said.
The study showed that most of the cases related to the visitors are old cases where no decisions have been taken for years together.
The chief minister will have similar interactions with the remaining employees, who could not attend the function on Monday owing to COVID-19 protocols, on January 28.
Prior to that, he would meet the IAS and ACS officers of the Secretariat on January 25.