Applying for local government services and accessing official data may soon be- come easier, with the informa- tion technology department looking to roll out an e-district project in four-five months.
All of India's 626 districts will have to automate 6-10 services, such as pensions, ra- tion cards, filing of cases in revenue courts, issuance of caste, marriage, income and employment certificates, etc. under the scheme.
Past records and certificates will be fed into a common data repository that can be ac- cessed online. District admin- istrations will have an 18-month deadline to com- plete the digitization. The depart- ment will spend 75% of the project cost, expected to be at least Rs2,500 crore, while states will shell out the rest.
It has ap- plied for fund- ing with the expenditure finance commit- tee, an official said. Any planned expenditure has to be approved by the panel. “The national roll-out of the project should begin within the next four-five months as soon as the cabinet approves the funding.“
“A pilot programme is being conducted currently in 40 dis- tricts across 14 states,“ said another bureaucrat. Neither official wanted to be named. Each state will be given Rs4 crore to carry out the digitiza- tion, the second official said.
The department expects to spend around Rs100 crore on the pilot programme, of which Rs50 crore has been released. E-district is one of the 27 mission mode projects being executed as part of India's push towards e-governance.
“While all the other digitiza- tion projects currently under- way in the country reach out to only a certain section of the citizens, e-district is the only project after the unique identi- fication (UID) project that will touch the lives of almost all In- dians in some way or the oth- er,“ said Navin Agrawal, exec- utive director of audit and consulting firm KPMG.
The UID project aims to as- sign a number to all Indians, expected to particularly bene- fit those who cannot access a slew of services due to lack of identification papers.
The grant for the e-district project will be higher than the Rs1,900 crore issued for UID.
The project will also offer a significant opportunity for In- dia's software companies, he said. Each state will appoint a vendor, who will build the ap- plication for digitization and automation of data, as well as implement it in each district.
States such as Tamil Nadu, which have started digitizing some records, will have to up- grade and link to the new mod- ule to ensure compatibility.
Wipro Ltd and ICICI Bank Ltd-backed 3i Infotech Ltd have been consultants to the edistrict project at the pilot stage, while India's largest IT firm, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, was the imple- mentation agency in West Bengal and Maharashtra.
Various e-governance projects in India are an opportunity worth $9 bil- lion (Rs41,760 crore) over the next few years for the Indian software services industry, ac- cording to a February projec- tion of industry lobby group National Association of Soft- ware and Services Companies.
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