Central portals on cards to improve citizen services

NEW DELHI: Keen to bring better services for citizens online, the government is looking to reduce the time, cost and complexity of information technology (IT) projects at state and district levels by consolidating IT assets within a year, and creating central portals for common tasks that could free resources at the state-level for more effective governance.

"Converging infrastructure, having a single software, a single instance database, will free up all the resources…This is a major reform that is going to be introduced," Department of Electronics & Information Technology ( DeiTY), secretary Ram Sewak Sharma said. If resources are centralised, the cost of ownership of assets could become 20% of what it is today, said Sharma.

"These will provide a single application where each province can become a customer," he added.

These central platforms will be developed in consultation with state representatives, and states will be free to choose whether they want to use the central facility or not.

Some projects proposed to be centralised are a national portal for scholarships, and another one for the national social assistance programme . The department is creating an inventory of existing projects, including websites and software, to identify projects that may be performing similar tasks but are maintained at the district and state levels.

Each of these project requires hardware, infrastructure and software locally that use up resources for maintenance and increase costs.The new exercise follows the department’s endeavour to centralise software and make internal processes simpler.