Deepak Khandekar, commissioner, Jabalpur Division of Madhya Pradesh, inaugurated a consultative workshop on the topic, “Citizen Centric e-Government”, in Jabalpur, on October 4, 2012.
Delivering the keynote address, Khandekar said, “We are the first state where divisional level consultations have begun.” He said these workshops should be held in all the seven districts which are under his jurisdiction where he would provide all support needed.
“The whole administration of the state is in Hindi but unfortunately we have not been able to provide IT services in Hindi,” he said, urging the IT department to provide applications in that language. “There are a number of missing links because of language,” he said.
Commenting on the top-down approach in implementing e-governance initiatives, he said, “We cannot imagine, while sitting in Bhopal and Delhi, the needs of the tehsil and blocks in the state.” He urged district-level officers to start consultation workshops in their districts to include the last person in this project. The people in the Common Services Centres (CSCs), the citizens and the private sector all have to be included in the workshop.
Khandekar also asked the departments to share resources as IT infrastructure had a short lifecycle. “We need to efficiently share IT resources,” he stressed. “We need to address the lack of communication amongst us to improve the e-governance programme,” he added.
Hariranjan Rao, secretary, information technology department, government of Madhya Pradesh, said that he aimed to showcase the e-Governance initiatives in the state through the conference and also take suggestions to improve them in the future.
