Tamil Nadu portal on cards for e-service

CHENNAI: The time is not far off when individuals can access a common government portal, a one-stop service for citizens to avail themselves of government services from all platforms. There will be an unified gateway to enable online payments and bi-lingual (Tamil and English) mobile applications to ensure the state portal and websites of government departments are mobile compliant. A standardised digital address number (SDAN) system will give digital identity to every property with appropriate technology.

In what could be seen as a major leap in

e-governance

initiatives, the government on Tuesday unveiled its first ever e-governance policy, in line with the vision 2023 document of former chief minister J Jayalalithaa. The state hopes that in the next five years government services would be accessible online from anywhere or nearby common service delivery outlets, mobile platforms. "In the process, the departments would earmark 0.5% of their annual budget for e-governance and will be encouraged to increase it to 3% in a phased manner," IT minister

M Manikandan

said. The allocation for IT department fell to 116 crore this year compared to 185 crore last year.

The policy creates a common framework for e-governance to be implemented across all departments and agencies of government. The common framework or ecosystem includes infrastructure (like state wide area network, data centre), policies relating to data, security and email. "All government services are mandated to go online within a prescribed timeframe as per the e-service delivery rules that had been formulated and notified last year," IT secretary

T K Ramachandran

told TOI.

Given the mobile phone penetration among citizens, the state will also promote m-governance to use mobile technology for providing services to citizens. The state will put in place cloud infrastructure, including virtualisation of existing computing resources to enable speedy, efficient, cost-effective deployment, scaling up and sharing of IT resources. To enable proper identification and authentication of electronic transactions, use of digital signatures for online processing will be encouraged. Ramachandran said each department will arrange for procurement of digital signature certifications and timely instructions and training will be provided to officers. All government officials will be provided with unique email address based on their designation, and a separate email policy will be drawn up for the purpose.