Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee will take time off tomorrow to spend an hour on deciding a National Action Plan on E-Governance for building a high-tech tomorrow for the nation in the near future. The Prime Minister will be presented the concept of starting ‘‘computer thelas’’ (pushcarts) that would visit village clusters to bring IT to the doorstep of the common villager where computer dhabas or e-seva centres have not yet been opened. The idea is to provide services like registration of property, vehicle, births and deaths, passport applications, immigration services and access to land records at the push of a button. STEP-BY-STEP • First phase: Online filing of I-T returns, land records, vehicle registration, property registration, excise and customs • Second phase: Online municipality and gram panchayat services, like birth and death registration, filing of police complaints • Third phase: Registration of medical records of people in a given area, personal profiles of sales and purchases This is the first time that an integrated National Plan will be put up to the PM to seek a direction on what should be the broad framework on e-governance. Once decided, ministries would be entrusted with implementing specific projects at the Centre and state-level and set up empowered committees for each of these projects. For instance, government health services visiting a village would have Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs with information on families in the village and their medical histories. This would enable them to provide immediate services to villagers. Other such services making the government-citizen interface convenient will be a part of the Action Plan to be presented tomorrow. The aim would be to replicate experiments in Karnataka (land records available online), Maharashtra (online property registration), Andhra Pradesh (online police complaints and treasury management) at the national level. Sources in the Ministry of Communications and IT said that estimates are that over the next five years, an annual expenditure of Rs 3,000 crore would be undertaken to put e-governance on the fast track — Rs 2,000 crore at the Central and state government-level and Rs 1,000 crore from the private sector. In the first phase, projects like land records, vehicle registration and online filing of Income Tax returns would be implemented by 2005 with an initial corpus of about Rs 700 crore at the Central level. Approvals from the Finance Ministry and the Planning Commission will be taken after the PM clears the Action Plan. The e-governance plan will also have a commercial angle in delivering the results of computerised operations, like delivering a railway ticket booked online through private parties. ‘‘This will give a fillip to economic activity in villages and rural areas,’’ said a top IT ministry official.
