e-governance key to making India corruption free: Kalam
Thursday, 16 November 2006, 20:30 IST
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New Delhi: President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam emphasized the need for a sound e-governance system to ensure transparent administration and a corruption-free society. "All government programs must consider citizens as privileged customers and become accountable for providing all services without interruption and hassles. One of the means to ensure this is by incorporation of a sound e-governance system," Kalam told a gathering of intelligence agencies and officials here. Good governance is an important goal recognized by many countries and several nations have taken up specific initiatives for open government, Kalam told the '16th Biennial Conference of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and State Anti-corruption Bureaux/Vigilance Bureaux-2006'. "There should be a conscious effort to put the citizens in the center of focus of governance. Citizens should be perceived as customers and clients. e-governance has to be citizen friendly," he told the gathering of over 500 officers of CBI, intelligence agencies, paramilitary forces and representatives of state police forces. "e-governance should enable seamless access to information and seamless flow of information across the state and central government," he said. Emphasizing the need for better training of personnel, Kalam said that services like police, land administration, special services, municipal services and income tax were found to be the key problem areas. "Personnel working in these services should be specially trained to be citizen friendly and provided with reasonable housing and transportation, including empowerment in their work," said Kalam. "Personnel should be accountable for the services being provided to the citizens and also penalized for wrong decisions," Kalam added. He stressed on corruption detection, fast police action and court proceedings with minimal adjournments leading to fast judgments and provisions to bring accountability into the system to make for a transparent society. "All these process should be completed within a prescribed time frame and all the pending cases of corruption, special crimes and economic offenses should be cleared in a time bound manner by setting up special courts throughout the country," Kalam said.
Source: IANS
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