Karnataka To Be The Flagship For Modi's Digital India Drive

BANGALORE: Congress-governed Karnataka now aims at becoming the flagship for the Digital India initiative. Led by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and the state's e-governance department is all set to release 376 government services for the e-district program in the next three months. This is four times larger than BJP-governed Maharashtra's 85 services and is the highest in the country at present, reports ET.  

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

The e-district platform is expected to cover services regarding motor vehicles department, the revenue department, backward classes department, education, police, forest, registration of vehicles and land, and industries among other things. Citizen from any state can easily visit a citizen service centre that includes Atal Janasnehi Kendra, Karnataka One or Bangalore One with the needed documents while the franchisee at the center will handle all the necessary documentation, e-sent to the respective department.

Kelkar added “We will have about 5,000 such centres 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 be sent to the citizen after a few days stating your document is ready and you can go to the centre. It will be digitally signed and handed over."

Moreover, the state is eager to clear 1,200 services in the next step 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," Kelkar said.

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