Fadnavis pitches for Maharashtra's digital transformation

MUMBAI: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said that his administration is trying to bring all government services to the smartphone to effect the massive digital transformation which the state is "slated to achieve" in the next few years.

The administration is trying to bring all government services on to the smartphone to deliver it at the right time and right cost for the benefit of the common man, he said on Twitter. "We are going through a massive digital transformation. We are connecting all the villages digitally by December 2018," he tweeted quoting the keynote address he delivered at the Oracle Open World Conclave in San Francisco.

Fadnavis said his government wants to transform education and the healthcare sector and also transform cities as equal number of population lives in both urban and rural areas.

"We need to convert our population into human resource. Speed and scale is the key. Demographic advantage is not permanent. I'm here to find solutions. By 2020 we have to put government processes on auto pilot mode for max efficiency & transparency.

" Technology is the only solution. It is gender neutral, person neutral and neutral by all means," he tweeted.

According to Fadnavis, for any transformation, political leadership creates an idea and technocrats convert this idea into reality. Meanwhile, the state government and Oracle have signed an MoU to accelerate digital transformation in Maharashtra.

Oracle and the Maharashtra government will develop the state's smart city programme, to make the state's urban landscape "more livable and inclusive". The state and Oracle will set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to accelerate smart city program and modernise the government's technology solutions.

The CoE in Mumbai, will serve as a research platform to design, develop and test new capabilities to deliver better Government to Citizen (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services, Fadnavis said. Both the government and Oracle will invest in IT infrastructure, training and skill-set resources as well as management of the CoE in Mumbai, he informed.