Himachal Pradesh Focuses On Bharatnet, Citizen Services And Computerisation Of Departments

HIMACHAL PRADESH IS moving with decent speed in rolling out the BharatNet project, despite of its hilly terrain. Express Computer speaks to Rohan Chand Thakur, Director - IT, Himachal Pradesh

- Abhishek Raval

Abhishek Raval abhishek.raval@expressindia

For Himachal Pradesh, there are three areas of focus to empower citizens to access government services. Firstly, the IT department is in the process of making the Government to Citizen (G2C) services available online to citizens. An e-district platform has been rolled out for the purpose, under which, the Chief Minister will soon launch the Five-Certificate scheme for government school students in 10 and 12 grades. The objective is to ease the process of job applications and other purposes where the certificates are required. They will be provided a class, agricultural, bonafide, domicile and BPL certificates (for students that fall in the below poverty line status). These will be made available online; the certificates can be applied, approved and sent online to the student’s e-district account, which will be maintained as a locker.

The next step is to push these certificates into the DigiLocker, a digital locker service established and run by the central government. It facilitates citizens to store certain official documents on the cloud. “Currently the government is running pilots in some schools in Himachal Pradesh,” informs Rohan Chand Thakur, Director - IT, Himachal Pradesh. Currently, there are about 70 different G2C services available on the e-district platform.