As governments shift to digital, the need to enhance the capacities of the government infrastructure and resources becomes imperative. The role of the State eGov Mission Team (SeMT) is to make government services accessible to the common man and ensure efficiency, transparency & reliability of such services. Elaborating on SeMT’s role in Haryana’s context, Munish Chandan, Head- SeMT, Government of Haryana addressed the Elets Digital Governance Summit, Haryana Edition.
The State e-Gov Mission Team (SeMT) is an integral part of the state and the team is from the Government of India. It is working to achieve the vision of cashless, paperless, faceless and secure governance.
Sharing how the perception of the Government of Haryana has changed for its in-house teams, Chandan said, “During the last two years, the state government’s confidence towards in-house teams has grown tremendously. We were able to generate work, build capacities to strengthen the teams for in-house application development and then roll out. So, it was end-to-end delivery from conceptualisation to roll out.”
With regard to confidence, the government is already working on strengthening teams. The SeMT is working as the advisor, consultant and putting efforts to support development parts. With support from other organisations including the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the in-house capacities are so big that Haryana is far ahead of many other states in the country. The most important part is that the Chief Minister of Haryana is also handling the IT portfolio and he is deeply interested in technology implementation. Therefore, he is concerned about the minutest details.
Speaking of challenges faced with technology adoption, Chandan pointed out that with more usage of IT tools, more data is being generated. Therefore, the government faces a big challenge in data mining, data extraction with the right type of metadata and data storage. “We are taking steps to improve these aspects. As the data storage requirements are ever-increasing and with the limited capacity at the data centres storage challenges surfaced. However, we have implemented measures to address the issue and increase capacity,” he added. Technology is not difficult to manage but how to handle the huge loads of data collected while using the technology is a big challenge.
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Addressing how smart city solutions have helped in improving governance and security in the cities, Chandan said, “Smart city solutions have helped in improving surveillance and detection of crime.” He gave Chandigarh’s example and said there is a lot of discipline on the city roads irrespective of the presence of a traffic police officer.
Smart cameras, installed as a part of smart city initiatives, are capable to detect overcrowding, fire incidents and more such scenarios. The data through these cameras are routed to Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) and analysed for fetching actionable inputs, he added.
Sharing a brief on the state’s preparedness for cybersecurity, he said, the state government has also set up an information and security management office and this office is assisting all the state departments, boards, etc. for security assessment requirements and audit-related requirements.