ODISHA: AT THE CUSP OF AN E-GOV REVOLUTION

The Government of Odisha is taking ICT to the next level in its concerted efforts to enhance citizen services in the state. In an exclusive interaction with Vishwas Dass of Express Computer, Tusharkanti Behera, Electronics & IT Minister, Govt of Odisha, speaks about the new ICT Policy and how it will benefit crores of citizens

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Could you brief us about how Odisha Government is determined to use ICT to the next level to benefit crores of its citizens? What is the government's vision of embracing modern technologies to create jobs, train youth, improve services in various sectors like education, healthcare, urban development among others?

The ICT Policy of Odisha needs to be revamped and we would be coming up with a new policy by March 2020 to attract more companies. We aim to make the policy industry-friendly which also ensures ease of doing business. We have created one Centre of Excellence in collaboration with Tech Mahindra and will also collaborate with other IT companies for setting up more such centres with other concerned stakeholdres in Bhubaneswar to train fresh IT graduates in AI, cloud computing, blockchain and machine learning and they will be at par with graduates from other states.

We are determined to use ICT in various sectors of governance for betterment of the citizen. We have mandated that each department would spend one per cent of their budget towards ICT. While implementing various IT initiatives in Odisha, we follow the Open Standard solutions. Important applications like e-District, HRMS and OSWAS are all developed in open standards and also with open source tools. The applications are based on an end to end open source platform which provides room for constant up-gradation and advancement. These are stable, reusable and scalable platforms which have been seamlessly scaled to the entire state.