Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan on Wednesday inaugurated the ePost facility set up in his office in collaboration with India Post.
The system facilitates sending of responses to memorandums and petitions received by the Chief Minister’s office by ePost, by linking the servers of government and the India Post. The project was implemented in association with the State Information Technology Department and the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
The NIC had earlier developed a file tracking system for the Secretariat named ‘IDEAS’. The system has modules for petition monitoring, tapal monitoring, file monitoring, telephone management and the like. Staff at the Chief Minister’s office enters details of the petition received by the office into the IDEAS application. The data gets stored with backups at the State Data Centre.
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Communication on action taken on the petitions, created as files in the system, are then uploaded into the ePost site. The uploaded material gets registered in the ePost server in Delhi, and the ePost application routes them as ePost messages to the relevant post offices on the basis of pincode. The post master concerned then prints the messages and the postman delivers it to the addressees.
The initial communication will have office reference numbers which can be subsequently used for follow ups, if the Chief Minister’s office forwards the petitions to the departments concerned. The IDEAS application is capable of responding to SMS queries on the status of applications and send alerts.
Speaking on the occasion, Post Master General of Kerala Shobha Koshy said the Kerala government was becoming the first ‘corporate customer’ of ePost. The facility could be extended to other corporate users.
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Principal Secretary (Information Technology) Ajaya Kumar and State Informatics Officer K.S. Raman attended.