With cloud computing picking up and hi-speed connectivity now easily available, software applications can be placed in the cloud with minimal customisation for countrywide replication of ‘Mee Seva’.
The Union IT department has already modelled the e-district project on the lines of Mee Seva, which would help it reach out to the entire country, IT minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah said at the inaugural session of the regional conference on reforms for citizen-centric governance, held at the MCRHRD Institute.
As part of that, GoAP initiated the eSeva project in 2001 and, more recently, a centralised system called Mee Seva, he said. The number of services covered under Mee Seva is likely to go up from the present 40 to 100 by year-end, he added.
Claiming that the state government has always been in the forefront of leveraging IT for development, Mr Lakshmaiah said: “The impact of Mee Seva can be gauged from the amount it is helping people save.
Statistics collected in the state say approximately 50,000 certificates or documents are issued daily from the Revenue, Registration and Municipal departments. If we include all the departments, this figure may go up to one lakh transactions daily, or three crore annually.
“Assuming that a person saves Rs 1,000 per transaction, the annual savings for the public is a whopping Rs 3,000 crore. It also prevents generation of unaccounted money.”
Mee Seva has adopted the concept of central pooling of all records, digitally signing them with the digital signature certificates of the authorised officer, storing them in the database and rendering them using a web-service. All documents are digitally signed.
Mee Seva optimises the use of the State Data Centre (SDC), State Wide Area Network (SWAN) and Common Service Centres (CSCs), created under the Centre’s National e-Governance Plan initiative.
Union Additional Secretary (Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances) Arun Jha stressed on the need for bridging the digital divide and the gap between rich and poor through effective public service delivery.