Srinagar, Aug 29: J&K today added 16 more online services offered by the Transport Department to its list after Chief Secretary, Dr Arun Kumar Mehta launched them under the e-Transport project of the Department.
With this, Jammu and Kashmir moved to first place in the country amongst States/UTs in offering the number of online services to its citizens. The UT had earlier taken its tally to 1016 online services overtaking Kerala and other top performing States as per the recent edition of NeSDA rankings.
Speaking during the launch of these services, the Chief Secretary maintained that the motive of the online services is to reduce the burden on our citizens by providing them opportunities to access services from the comforts of their homes. He observed that the provisions of facial recognition, e-KYC authentication and jivan pramanpatra are few reliable means to ascertain the genuineness of claims. He asked for adopting measures under which the services are offered to the citizens seamlessly without having to make physical visits to government offices.
Dr Mehta further impressed that since volume of services has increased exponentially, it is time to assess digital maturity of these services. He made out that the quantity underpinned by quality would lead to desired results and satisfaction of citizens. He enjoined upon them that the integration with APIs should also be carried out to make single sign-on a prominent feature for all these services.
The Chief Secretary called it is an important milestone in tune with the resolve of the J&K administration to provide corruption free, convenient and accessible services to the common man. He made out that the ‘Digital J&K Programme’ that was launched in mission mode last year has been successful in making J&K to upgrade from ‘line to online’ and ‘physical to digital’ thereby ushering an era of transparency and efficiency in working of government offices across the UT.
The Chief Secretary took the occasion to commend the efforts of the IT Department and NIC for the progress made in enhancing the number of online services of different departments. He gave credit to the team work and commitment of all those officers and officials who contributed immensely to take UT at the top of the rankings today from bottom a couple of years back.
While providing details the Secretary Transport, G. Prasanna Ramaswamy revealed that by introducing these services in an online mode would make the Department faceless to a large extent. He gave out that these services would go a long way in resolving many of the issues faced by the Department in serving the citizens better.
He also disclosed that the redundant options like Hold, Inward in file disbursement have been done away with in this improved set-up to bring efficiency in the working of the department. He said that the most downloaded government application named ‘NextGen m-Parivahan’ having more than 10 Crore subscriptions would soon be adopted here in J&K to provide holistic information about the transport related services to its users. He added that the Department is soon going to add the feature of auto-appeal in order to curb the chances of delay in providing services to its applicants.