Congress-ruled Karnataka to lead Modi’s ‘Digital India’ initiative

After leading the baton of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India mission, now, Karnataka’s Department of E-Governance is showing promptness in rolling out services under the e-District program.

As reported by The Economic Times, the state is all set to introduce 376 government services under the banner. Surprisingly, the count of services is four times more than BJP-ruled Maharashtra, where the number is limited to 85. This is the highest count in the country as of now.

Rathan U Kelkar, CEO of Karnataka’s Centre for E-Governance, told ET, "Other states have started earlier, but we feel we are in line with the requirements of Digital India as many of our departments are already ready with a lot of these services. We are integrating all of them on the e-district platform and with this; we will be number one in e-services in the country."

The services in the e-District program will take account of services related to revenue department, motor vehicles department, education, police, forest, industries, Backward Classes department, registration of vehicles and land, among others.

To avail the services, all that a native of Karnataka would have to do is visit a citizen service centre like the one in Banglore or Atal Janasnehi Kendra and provide a few relevant documents. The franchisee running the centre will do the rest of the required documentation and will sent it across to the concerned department via Internet.

Kelkar informed, "We will have about 5,000 such centers in the state, almost one for each gram panchayat. The citizen will ask for his requirement, the franchise will upload all documents and send it. The concerned department will process it and an SMS will go to the citizen after a few days saying your document is ready and you can go to the centre. It will be digitally signed and handed over to him."

In addition to this, the state is looking to cover 1,200 services in the next stage of this project. "For this, we have to sit with the departments, understand their back-end processes and figure out how best we can onboard all of these 1,200 services that we have listed," he added.