Punjab Goes Digital: Govt asks entities to upgrade to E-offices from January

In an effort to go digital, the Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Friday, December 13 announced that all Punjab government entities will start dealing in new file work only on e-office from next month.

He also announced that all the documents issued by Sewa Kendras will be digitally pushed to the Digilocker of the citizens, to enable anytime-anywhere access to them.

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The Chief Minister was chairing a meeting of the Board of Governors (BoG) of Punjab State e-Governance Society (PSeGS) to review the status of various innovative projects being undertaken by the society. 

Currently, PSeGS is managing 520 Sewa Kendras in the state for delivering more than 200 services to around 30000 citizens daily. All the important services, including various kinds of certificates and licenses, are delivered through Sewa Kendra. The government is also bringing services to the Department of Revenue and Transport on the Sewa Kendra platform. 

Captain Amarinder congratulated the PSeGS team on their contribution to the creation of state-level applications on E-Sewa, Debt Relief, PM-KISAN, and monitoring of SDGs. He appreciated them for bringing down pendency from a whopping 23% to only 1.5%. He directed PSeGS to continue the endeavor towards efficient and accountable administration in the state.

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Additional Chief Secretary cum PSeGS Vice-Chairman Vini Mahajan told the Chief Minister that PSeGS had a separate team of dedicated professionals, which was providing IT consultation to other departments of the State and had helped create State Level applications like Punjab State Development Tax, Smart Village. The team has also supported the Revenue Department in bringing all the land records to the Cloud platform. 

Vini further elaborated on the initiatives being undertaken by State Advisory Council to carry out transformative reforms. 

A team of Governance Fellows had been hired to support various departments for best practices for this purpose, she said. Supporting CM’s decision she appreciated the PSeGS hiring of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), along with 15 Technology Experts, to take the state to the next level of digitalization.

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Chief Secretary Punjab cum senior Vice Chairman  PSeGS, Karan Avtar Singh apprised the Chief Minister that PSeGS was working on implementing Enterprise Architecture in the State, and policy in this regard had been drafted.

“ All departments will be integrated via Micro Services and will maintain a single source of truth of their databases.  More than 1,35,000 e-files had already been created in eOffice by more than 8500 users,” he said.

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