Bihar RTI-on-phone project earns it top e-governance prize

Bihar's unique attempt to accept Right to Information (RTI) applications through phone calls - Jaankari - has been selected by the Centre for the first prize (gold) for "outstanding performance in citizen centric service delivery" under its e-Governance project for the year 2008-09.

Incidentally, 11 of the total 18 National Awards for e-Governance under different categories this year have gone to NDA-ruled states with Gujarat taking the lead with five prizes, including one gold, one silver and three bronze.

Announcing the annual awards, minister of state for personnel Prithviraj Chavan said: "These awards are given to recognize and promote excellence in implementation of e-governance initiatives."

Under the category of citizen-centric service delivery in which Bihar won the gold for Jaankari, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh were selected got the bronze for their e-krishi-kisan (Agricultural University, Anand) and HIMPOL (state police website), respectively.

Praising the Bihar government's citizen-centric service delivery project "Jaankari — RTI facilitation on phone", Chavan said: "In this, you can make a phone call and the call centre person will keep all the details. The cost of the RTI application will be deducted by adding it to the phone call charges." He said the Delhi government had also shown an interest in implementing the project.

The awards to these states will be given away during the 12th National Conference on e-Governance in Goa on February 12-13.

On excellence in government process re-engineering, Chhattisgarh's department of food and civil supplies bagged the first prize while in the exemplary horizontal transfer of best practice the first prize went to Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.

Nagpur Municipal Corporation, the national panchayat portal of the ministry of panchayati raj and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad, won awards in the category of best government websites. Tripura, Karnataka and Haryana were the other states which won awards in different categories for their efforts towards promoting e-governmence for the benefit of citizens.

Chavan said as part of Centre's initiative to streamline the official websites, the government has issued guidelines for all official portals which will help people to get required information easily.

As part of the government's e-governance plan, 27 mission mode projects would be rolled out across the country with an outlay of Rs 20,175 crore. Out of this, 16 projects have already been cleared by the Union Cabinet with an outlay of Rs 10,626 crore.link