Odisha to use digital infra for swift service delivery: CM

Announcing Odisha government's vision to digitally connect every nook and corner of the state, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today said digital competence will be used to improve education, health, agriculture and poverty alleviation programmes.
"We have a vision to digitally connect every nook and corner of the state and use our digital infrastructure for a swift service delivery mechanism," Patnaik said while inaugurating 'Advantage Odisha 2016' a Business-Technology and Leadership conference here.
Maintaining that Odisha was rapidly moving to the forefront of IT revolution with appropriate thrust on the sector, the Chief Minister said, "We will also exercise our digital competence to improve education, health, agriculture and poverty alleviation programmes."

Noting that the growth rate of IT exports from the state was more than the national growth rate for the last many years, Patnaik said every department of the state government has been directed to spend two per cent of their plan budget for electronic enabled service delivery.
Stating that Bhubaneswar has made good progress in IT
SEZ sector, Patnaik said in order to promote such industries, IT Special Economic Zones were established at Infocity and Infovalley in the state capital.

The state government, he said, was also setting up a Green Field Electronics Manufacturing Cluster at Info-valley.
Odisha was also one of the leading states in the country in the field of e-governance and a number of initiatives have been taken in this regard during the last decade by various departments, Patnaik said.

The focus was on providing end-to-end dedicated government network from state to Gram Panchayat level offering high speed Broadband Internet services in next three years for seamless transactions of government services, he said.
To provide employment opportunity to youths closer to their home towns, the government was also bringing out a BPO scheme in all the STPI locations of the state, Patnaik said.
The inaugural ceremony was attended among others by state minister of state for Electronics and IT, Pranab Prakash Das, Omkar Rai, Director General of Software Technology Parks of India, Tapan Kumar Chand, Chairman and MD of NALCO and Anil Kumar Jha, CMD of Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd (MCL).

The two-day conference has been organised jointly by Electronics and IT department of Odisha Government, INFOCOM and The Telegraph.