UT Administrator approves IT,Electronics Policy for city

The IT and Electronics Policy aims at making two individuals in every household e-literate. Of these at least one would be female. A Venture Capital Fund,with a corpus of Rs 20 crore shall be created to provide funds to MSE and young entrepreneurs in the IT and ITES industry.

IT Incubation Centers would be set-up in some identified colleges,where students would be allowed to set-up start-ups. Use of upcoming technologies like Near Field Communications,Cloud Computing and Social Media would be promoted for delivery of public services ‘Anywhere,Anytime and through Any device.’

A knowledge resource or digital library would be setup to maintain a repository of documents for use by general public and government authorities. Use of e-mails would be stepped up for responding to e-mail-based correspondence of citizens and for intra-and inter-departmental communication within the UT Administration.

Chandigarh Administration would mandate for all the departments to earmark necessary plan funds annually for e-Governance. Facility would be set up for user-friendly e-Vault and e-mail IDs for life-long archiving for each citizen,company and departments to enable them to secure their digital dialog,correspondence and important documents.

Smart city infrastructure such as city wifi and fibre ready homes etc would be developed. Creation and upgradation of the IT infrastructure for interactive education at schools and promoting advanced virtual class room courses would be facilitated. The Department of IT will facilitate participation of Micro and Small Enterprises IT units in tender issued for procurement of IT goods and services.

Electronic Technology Transfer will be incentivised through friendly tax regime for industries who adopt technologies developed by Indian institutes,organisations or laboratories. The department of IT would work towards notifying Chandigarh as Brownfield Electronic Manufacturing Cluster.

The policy has many unique and national firsts in it. The policy envisions creation of an electronic/digital resource by the department of Information Technology,which would enable the officials as well as citizens to have an easy access to important information such as rules,regulations,notifications etc. The policy would promote excellence,innovation and research and development in the domains of IT and Electronics. Besides making provisions to create a venture capital fund,the policy also includes incentives and provisions for IT and Electronics entrepreneurs at various levels.

While drafting the policy,special emphasis had been laid on mapping technology trends,IT-adoption patterns in Chandigarh and feasibility of using upcoming cutting-edge applications of IT for eGovernance.

In order to implement the new policy Department of Information Technology is planning to prepare a detailed Action Plan which would be followed by an implementation plan aimed at making the city attain a smart-city status.