Living in a remote village in Bihar and you are in need of a passport! You don’t have to come to Patna; you may soon be able to apply for the important document in your village through the Common Service Centre. The Ministry of External Affairs is now finalising a plan under which the Passport Department will be able to reach out to the rural residents so that they can apply for their passports online. This initiative will make life easier for millions of Indians who are living in the remote regions of the country.This is one more example of how e-Governance is enabling government departments to reach out to the citizens everywhere in the country. The growth of e-Governance in the last two decades has been spectacular and historic in the world. e-Governance has changed the entire set-up of governance and altered the thought process of the bureaucracy. Today the instances of e-Governance have become the shining beacons of good governance in the country, but a lot of work still needs to be done.
The stakeholders of e-Governance need to build up their strengths and effectively leverage their new technologies and trained man power to create even better systems for good governance. They need to create an atmosphere of efficiency, transparency and accountability. The idea of e-Governance has already taken root, what we now need to work on is providing further push for creation of infrastructure and training of the manpower so that people from all sections of society can enjoy the convenience of having services
at their doorstep.
We are organising eBihar event in Hotel Maurya, at Patna, on 19-20 February, 2014. The purpose behind the event is to showcase Bihar as an emerging destination for world’s big and small IT companies. We will also be highlighting the work on e-Governance that is being done by various government departments of Bihar. There is no doubt that Bihar is now on cusp of a turnaround in the field of IT, we can expect a significant increase in the investments by the private sector in the IT landscape of Bihar. The economic survey report, tabled recently in the Bihar Assembly, shows that Bihar’s average annual growth rate has been 12 percent in the last seven fiscal years,
one of the highest among all Indian states.
Then on 22nd February 2014 we are organising eJharkhand event in Ranchi. Jharkhand, as all of us already know, is another emerging state in the country. We look forward to having you in both the events, eBihar and eJharkhand, where we will be having invigorating round of discussions on the development of IT sector in these states.
