Chief Secretary, Dr. Arun Kumar Mehta today held an interaction with Union Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), Alkesh Kumar Sharma who visited the J&K State Data Centre Jammu.

On this occasion the Commissioner Secretary Information Technology (IT), Prerna Puri and senior officers from ITD J&K, NIC J&K, CDAC and JaKeGA were present.

The Secretary MeiTY reviewed the progress of e-Governance Projects and recent IT initiatives by the Government of J&K.

Commissioner Secretary IT apprised the Secretary MeiTY that the Government of Jammu and Kashmir has embarked on an ambitious journey for ushering in the era of smart, efficient, responsive, transparent, citizen friendly and corruption free governance.

A number of major IT initiatives have been taken in recent times by the UT Government. These have brought about a paradigm shift in the structure of governance and the common people are really beginning to feel this transformation to forward looking, modern, people-friendly, empathetic and corruption free governance. The main emphasis is on G2C (Government to Citizen) Online Services, 213 of which have so far been launched and many of which have now been made available under a Unified Service Delivery Portal called e-UNNAT. These have been integrated with MeriPehchaan, RAS feedback mechanism, e-Payment gateway, SMS gateway, DigiLocker, Aadhar eKYC and UMANG.

A presentation was made by the State Informatics Officer, NIC J&K, Mr. Mohammad Saleem Khan, highlighting recent projects like e-UNNAT Unified Services Delivery Portal, SASB Portal, BEAMS, Jan-Bhagidari, e-Kitabkosh and EPM (Employee Performance Monitoring).

Another presentation was made by Abhishek Sharma, CEO JaKeGA in which he highlighted major IT initiatives like JK MyGov, UT Dashboard, e-Office etc.

The Chief Secretary said that the Government of Jammu & Kashmir is firmly committed to reach out to the common public and make available to them the G2C services in an easily accessible, uncomplicated and transparent manner.The Government’s resolve is to provide an enriching experience to the citizen / user and save them from physically visiting offices and having to deal with public officials in crowded offices and to go through complicated processes. At the same time, the objective is also to save the citizen from visiting too many online portals and having to remember all those website addresses and login credentials. There was a long felt need of the citizens to have easy access to all those services.

The Rapid Assessment System (RAS) has been integrated with all the services for eliciting the response and feedback of the citizens regarding the ease of availing, usage and quality of the service. About 30 of these services have been brought on-board the UMANG platform thus moving towards the Goal of “AapKa Mobile, HumaraDaftar”. A few services like Birth certificate, Death Certificate etc. have been integrated with Digi-Locker and more are in the process of being integrated thus paving the way for a citizen to obtain their digital documents while sitting in the comfort of their homes or offices.

The aim is to bring about a transformation by means of a single National Single Sign-On (NSSO) called “MeriPehchan”. In coming days and weeks, all the remaining G2C services would be digitally enabled and brought on-board a single platform.

The Secretary MeiTY was requested to extend support from the Ministry in the establishment of Centres of Excellence in J&K in areas like AI & ML, IoT, Big Data Analytics, Bharatnet I and II, Agristacks and Gati Shakti etc. as well as to achieve stabilization of SDC with the involvement of all stakeholders particularly NIC in areas like e-Office migration to version 7.0 and Service Plus integration with UMANG and RAS in a dedicated and time bound manner.