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Rabi Banerjee
Rabi Banerjee

technology

West Bengal gears up to embrace total e-governance

PTI9_7_2016_000300B (File) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee might be putting a roadblock in front of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to build a cashless society through the use of mobile phones, but in her state, she has taken up a series of measures to expedite mobile connectivity and e-governance.

The IT department of the government has rolled out a grand plan of interactive voice response system (IVRS) through which government could connect with citizens.

Through this system, any citizen could lodge complaints from his/her mobile phone and receive feedback from the government, including the time and delivery of the particular service requested.

“In this way, we could give services to poorest of the poor in the society,” said an officer of IT department.

The government would collect information from people over voice messages or the complaints through telephones. To get response, people would not have to make any more calls as the same voice message would be transferred to other departments if necessary to avail the service that has been requested. The voice message may be stored to make it readily available to various departments concerned to ensure speedy delivery of services.

This can also be used to ensure safety of citizens in certain situations like by calling the passenger of a pre-paid taxi to know whether he or she has reached the destination or not after a certain period of time.

The mobile numbers of the citizens would be selected in a pre-defined manner. Any person who make his/her number available with the departments concerned during any complaint or inquiry would be contacted by the government through IVRS.

“The total cost of this project is nil. Only people who want to get the service need to have the telephone number, preferably a mobile phone number (as wire phone does not have much presence in rural belt these days),” said an officer of IT department.

The target is to enable mobile financial transaction.

The West Bengal government has also decided to spend more than Rs 55 crore to upgrade the state's data centre in order to expedite e-governance in government offices across the state so that it could deal with the cashless regime.

“Out of that amount, around Rs 30 crore would be needed in two years which our finance department has assured to give us,” said an officer of the IT department.

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Topics : #West Bengal

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