MP: 2-day 26th National Conference on e-Governance concludes in Indore; Digital University Kerala receives national e-Governance award

Indore (Madhya Pradesh) [India]: A two-day 26th National Conference on e-Governnance on the theme ‘Viksit Bharat, Empowering Citizens’ held in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore concluded on Friday.

Union Minister Jitendra Singh attended the valedictory Session of the Conference and addressed the program on the occasion.

Singh said, “Now the time has come when India not only stands even with other countries, but has proven that it can lead the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has broken the shackles of the past and set India free on the path to development.”

“PM Modi opened the Space sector, and today there are more than 150 private Startups,” he said.

Dwelling on Administrative Reforms, the union minister said many reforms were initiated by PM Modi in the last nine years.

“During the Covid-19 period, life came to a standstill, but there was no delay in the Government of India’s administrative machinery, because we had already gone digital while others were just preparing for it,” he said, referring to transfer of benefits to the common man through DBT.

Singh said the Prime Minister gave us the mantra of ‘Minimum Government – Maximum Governance’. The DARPG (Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances) took initiatives such as the practice of Attestation by Gazetted officers was done away with, Interviews were scrapped abolishing malpractices.

Most of the functioning was converted online and in order to bring in transparency, accountability and citizen participation, the human interface was reduced to the bare minimum.

Speaking about the transparency and accountability in the governance, the union minister said, “The benchmark for clean and effective government is the robust grievance redressal mechanism. The CPGRAMS receives about 20 lakh grievances every year in comparison to just 2 lakhs annually earlier because this government followed a policy of time bound redressal and gained the confidence of the people.”

Singh listed DigiLocker and SVAMITVA scheme bringing transparency in land registry, among technology driven reforms towards Ease of Living.

“Our goal is to gear up and work towards making India a developed nation by 2047, and we will accomplish this with speed and scale, leveraging the potential of digital transformations in e-governance,” he said.

Meanwhile, the union minister also honored those who are doing commendable work in this field with the National e-Governance Award.

During this, Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation and Technology (Digital University Kerala) received the award in silver category.

Speaking to media, Vice Chancellor of the University, Dr Saji Gopinath said, “We are happy that we received the e-governance award in the silver category in the area of research for the citizen service. We have developed a product for the state GST department to ensure the transparency of the GST process.”

It is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solution where citizen can upload their bills and based on that the department will be able to track whether the GST has been rightly paid or not, he said.

“We are very happy that this product is now being launched on national level as well as ‘Mera Bill Mera App’ model,” Gopinath added.