The Government of Meghalaya received the best project award for Meghalaya Enterprise Architecture (MeghEA) at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (UN WSIS) Forum 2022. The state conferred the award in the category of “the role of governments in the promotion of ICTs for development”.
Houlin Zhao, Secretary General, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) presented the award to the Chief Minister of Meghalaya Conrad K Sangma at the UN WSIS Forum held at Geneva, Switzerland, today. A total of 360 projects nominated from different countries passed the test of the UN jury. Post this, a poll was run to select the best 90 projects from those nominated. These 90 projects were invited to Geneva for the award ceremony. Meghalaya competed with projects from Australia, China, Argentina, and Tanzania. Today at the forum, the north-eastern state claimed the title of the best project in the category. MeghEA is the only project from India to win the Winner Award this year.
The Planning department, Government of Meghalaya is implementing the MeghEA project. The project has several components such as Government to Citizen (G2C) or Business services, Government to Employee services, and Government to Government services. e-Proposal system, part of the Government-to-Government component, enables faster processing and tracking of schemes. The system transforms the entire administrative approvals and sanctions of citizen schemes. Through modern technology, the system integrates multiple departments, directorates, and other Government agencies. In two months, close to 1600 proposals have been submitted through this e-Proposal system and an amount of Rs 790 crore has been sanctioned. The transformation has led to processing in days which used to take months in the previous process.
Meghalaya is progressing towards enabling Government to Citizen and Government to Employee services. With these, citizens would be able to view their benefits and apply from anywhere, anytime and through multiple channels. MeghEA is a change from department-centric service delivery to citizen-centric service delivery.
While addressing the award ceremony, CM Sangma congratulated the people of Meghalaya for winning the prestigious award and making India proud. He also expressed his gratitude to the Prime Minister for believing in Meghalaya to implement India’s 1st Enterprise Architecture initiative.
The CM further said that MeghEA is about delivering citizen-centric services and transforming internal processing of schemes with maximum efficiency. The Government’s efforts aim to provide services digitally to even the citizens of the remotest villages, he added.
In addition to the MeghEA Project, the state government is also implementing digital solutions for supporting pregnant women, supplying medicines using drones, and digitizing agriculture. Through Information & Communication Technology (ICT), the government wants to bridge the geographic disadvantage of difficult terrain and dispersed habitations.
MeghEA started under the guidance of the National e-Governance Division (NeGD). Collaborative efforts of several government departments and external agencies have led to the success of the project. The Government of Meghalaya has recently submitted a proposal to the World Bank for upscaling the project.