The State government has decided to implement e-governance in all government departments in a time-bound manner, Minister for Law and Public Works M.Vijayakumar has said.
Presenting the awards instituted by the Information Technology Mission for excellence in e-governance here on Thursday, Mr.Vijayakumar said that the State has many pioneering initiatives in the IT sector to its credit, but still has to go a long way in reaping its benefits in full. Even the Law Department’s efforts to switch over to e-governance did not attain fruition owing to the delay in implementing it in other departments, he said.
Chief Secretary P.Prabhakaran in his address noted that the State’s IT sector has put up a commendable performance braving the economic slowdown and was poised to grow further like the tourism sector. He also noted the achievements in e-governance. The winners were selected by a jury comprising journalist Anand Parthasarathy and former diplomat T.P.Sreenivasan. Mr.Parthasarathy said that the second edition of the awards saw a surge in the number of entries and the jury had to invite 13 out of the 43 applicants for detailed presentations to select the winners. Kerala was one State which practised e-governance in its true sense and there were many path-breaking in-house creations in the IT sector, he said.
The first prize for M-governance went to Kozhikode Collectorate for harnessing the mobile phone to reach citizens through its innovative service and the second prize in the local language content category to the General Education Department for IT@School project. The following are the award winners in different categories: e-learning- first prize Mahatma Gandhi University for its initiative in creating a digital database of its thesis holdings, e-payment services- Commercial Taxes Department won the first prize for innovations in enabling the online payment of VAT and KGST, citizen’ services – Information Kerala Mission and Kerala Public Service Commission shared the first prize for innovations in online registration of births, marriages and death through Sevana and web-enabling all key operations connected with recruitment respectively, the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations and the Directorate of Higher Secondary Education shared the second prize for e-enabling the selection for 120 engineering and 50 medical colleges and the commissionerate for creating a single-window admission system for over 1,400 higher secondary schools respectively.
KSRTC won the third prize for its online reservation system. The website of Kerala Tourism Development Corporation (www.KTDC.com) designed and maintained by Invis Multimedia won the first prize in the website category and the Alappuzha District Collectorate’s website (www.nehrutrophy.nic.in) the second prize. The site was designed and maintained by the National Informatics Centre, Alappuzha. The third prize was shared Suchitwa Mission’s www.sanitation.kerala.gov.in, designed and maintained by C-DIT and Institute of Human Resources Development’s www.ihrd.ac.in, designed and maintained by IT Department of IHRD. The special jury award went to the Electrical Inspectorate Department for its cost-effective touch screen information kiosks.
