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As the National Informatics Centre (NIC) plays a key role in the Digital India campaign, a high level committee headed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan on Monday called for permitting NIC to partner with private sector players and academia.
The committee, which was formed in December last year for transformation of NIC, said the organisation plays a key role in e-governance plans that form a part of Digital India and there should be business continuity processes that enable private participation in government projects.
The five-member panel, which also had Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) Secretary Aruna Sharma, presented its report to Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, suggesting the setting up of an advisory committee under the chairmanship of the DeitY secretary, which is to guide NIC to align with the new vision and objectives.
It has proposed to extend NIC’s presence to the block level and strengthen the information and communications technology infrastructure.
“NIC is a very important part of connectivity platform, which has a footprint across all villages in India. They do good work. However, with changing times and challenges, they need to play a bigger role. NIC will play a huge role in India's transformation,” Prasad told reporters here.
The report said there was a critical shortage of manpower at NIC as its human resources department's strength remained stagnant in spite of increasing workload.
Besides, upgrading the knowledge of NIC professionals with the help of latest technology tools was stated as another challenge for the organisation.
Some of the major e-governance initiatives supported by NIC include eCourts, eHospital, eDistrict, Land Records, ePanchayat and India Portal, among others.
