Workshop on e-Governance

Mr. Tarun Toshniwal, Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Jaipur, enlightened the MCA & MBA students of IIIM on “ICT in e – Governance”, in a one day workshop held on 31 October, 2006, in the Institute’s auditorium. Mr. Toshniwal has an industry experience of more than 20 years and has played key roles in various e – governance projects of both central and state government.

Mr. Toshniwal started on the note of one click access to government by a common man. He defined "Governance" and elucidated “e – governance”, meaning and definition, from both technical as well as managerial perspective.

As per Mr. Toshniwal, due to complex procedures, mechanisms in the government offices and lack of required information, common man has to undergo a lot of suffering in terms of time, money and sometimes irreparable losses which otherwise could have been avoided. The speaker envisaged e – Governance as the solution to all such problems of the common man. e – Governance is equally beneficial for the government departments when it comes to working in tandem with each other towards a common goal. Implementation of e – Governance is the need of the hour and is the only way of improving throughput in the government departments. The major hindrances towards the implementation of e – Governance are changing the mindset of government officials, business process re-engineering to improve upon existing procedures and induction of information technology.

Mr Toshniwal discussed various infrastructural requirements in terms of hardware, software and induction of skilled manpower that would be required for realizing e-governance in any government. He expressed the need for a mechanism that provides efficient information storage, quick and precise retrieval and is independent of individuals i.e., conceptualization of an interface that can cater to the immediate requirements of the common man without the involvement of concerning individuals.

Mr. Toshniwal envisaged “paper less office”, to be a reality in near future and called upon the young professionals from both management and IT fields to make it happen. At the end of the workshop Mr. Toshniwal answered queries of the students related to e-governance.