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Digital Inclusion, Local Government

By James Smith | 12 August 2008

R S Sharma, Principal Secretary in the Information Technology Department of the State Government of Jharkhand, India, is responsible for formulation of State policies in the IT and e-governance area. He shares his views on the technologies likely to be most useful to his State in future.

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The pervasive use of technology in all spheres puts the security and privacy of electronic data as a central and critical issue amongst people. Despite the Information Technology Act, 2000, India still lacks a real legal framework for data protection and privacy. Recently, certain amendments have been proposed in the Act to protect the citizens’ information from unauthorised access, damage, modification or disclosure, the issue of data privacy still remains a concern.

However, to ensure that citizens’ data is not exploited following steps have been taken. The government ensures that the databases of citizens are not shared with any commercial organisations the state understands that undertaking projects on PPP basis exposes people’s data to the respective private partners. Therefore, the contracts are covered by strict agreements and ownership and control of data remains with the government with only the operational control with the private partner.

A state of the art State Data Centre is being built by the Government of Jharkhand to ensure the security, integrity and availability of data with all government departments through a secured centralised data hosting facility

Managing the new The Government of Jharkhand would like to use the latest technological advancements for improving the lives of its citizens. However, new technology is expensive and at times not robust enough, due to which there could be loss of data, inability to provide services, non-availability of trained people etc. Given the paucity of resources and the fact that government services can’t be held hostage to vagaries of new technology, our effort has been to use the latest technologies which have been tried and tested.

Jharkhand was amongst the first Indian states to embark on the State-Wide Area Network which is fully operational. Some of the technologies which we are examining and might be useful for the general populace in near future could be:

Services through the mobile: We have already started delivering some of the services through the mobile. Given the rate at which the mobile penetration is increasing in India, we feel that mobile may turn out to be the most popular and least expensive way of delivering and availing services

WiMAX: This could turn out to be the fastest and the most cost effective way to provide fast and reliable connectivity in rural areas.

Space Technology based applications: A pool of multi-disciplinary applications in the fields of Remote Sensing, GIS and GPs could provide accurate and geo-referenced databases to resource managers, planners and decision makers for natural resource management, environmental monitoring and infrastructure development. The value-added services can be thus provided in various sectors like agriculture, environmental conservation, forestry, geology, soil and urban planning etc.

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