The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is granting &21.2 million for the development of ICT in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal by improving the availability of affordable broadband Internet connections.
The Department of Telecom may not increase the spectrum fee beyond the prescribed INR 1,651 crore for an all-India licence as it feels mobile tariffs could go up if operators have to pay higher charges. The Government had kept the fee for an all-India license at INR 1,651 crore, which comes bundled with start-up spectrum, so that operators could roll out services faster and at affordable prices. This objective has not been accomplished as most of the rural areas are yet to get connected.
India’s Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs, E Ahamed,recently said at the lower house of the India Parliament- Rajya Sabha,that e-Passports would initially be introduced for diplomats and officials as a pilot project by the middle of 2008. Based on the experience of the pilot project, the government would then issue e-Passports in the ordinary category, which could take another year.
The Government of India is looking at Service Oriented Architechture (SOA) to bring greater efficiencies to administrative processes and to enable e-Governance. The National Informatics Center (NIC) has been entrusted to introduce e-Governance standards, which will be based on SOA.
India is lacking behind in the index of the world Wi-Fi rankings. India has only 454 public Wi-Fi hotspots. While US leads the Wi-Fi hotspot index with 64,670 public hotspots followed by UK (30,613), Germany (21,236) and France (22,799) hotspots.
[This article was published in the December 2007 issue of the eGov Magazine (http://www.egovonline.net) ]
Cisco, together with the National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG), hosted the 3rd Annual India Public Sector Summit on e-Governance between 29th and 30th October 2007, in New Delhi.
[This article was published in the December 2007 issue of the eGov Magazine (http://www.egovonline.net) ]
When you hear the term telecentre ethos 2.0, what comes to your
mind? In general, like in the version of software development as
a product, the term telecentre 2.0 refl ects a level of robustness
and maturity. It really is going beyond the IT infrastructure and
pilots to encompass access to knowledge, social transformation,
opportunities and partnership building for collaboration which
provides value plus to the communities as they prepare to become
part of the knowledge economy
