The government has decided to set up a national institute of smart governance for providing seamless administration.
Inaugurating a conference of secretaries of information technology of state governments, Union minister for state for personnel, public grievances and pensions Vasundhara Raje said it was necessary to build capacities within the government to provide basic government services to the people.
"The institute will be the focal point of this capacity building exercise," Raje said. She said creation of web-based content was not enough and it had to be useful, easy to access and updated regularly.
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She said special care needs to be taken to ensure that use of information technology does not create a new class of haves and have nots. "We must ensure that IT is accessible and functional in the rural or remoter areas," she said.
Raje said the government had issued guidelines that 2 per cent to 3 per cent of every ministry's and department's budget should be utilised for promoting information technology.
Agreeing with Raje, Karnataka Chief Minister S M Krishna said information should be accessible to the people as a fundamental right. "The need of the hour is to look beyond funding of hardware and software and confront the fact that the basic psyche of governance inherited from a feudal past still views right to information with great suspicion."
Krishna said it was necessary to develop a "no-nonsense" strategy that initiates computerisation of government departments not only in a fixed time frame but as an irreversible process.
Secretary for information technology P V Jayakrishnan said the IT task force had set a target of $50 billion for software exports and hence had recommended that each state should have a five-year information technology plan. He said the Information Technology Bill was ready and would be placed before Parliament soon.
Jayakrishnan said states should share their software for computerisation of their government departments with others to make the computerisation process speedier.
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"The need of the hour is to confront the fact that the basic psyche of governance inherited from a feudal past still views right to information with great suspicison" - S M Krishna, Chief Minister, Karnataka