Govt considers bringing dept-wise budgets for apex body on IT needs
The move will help ministries’ implement better projects to ensure that the benefits can percolate across sectors, said an official familiar with the matter.
New Delhi
The Union government is discussing having individual, department-wise budgets for the National Informatics Centre, the government’s apex body for information technology needs, in order to improve the pace of digitisation of services across government departments, officials familiar with the matter said.
“There are many times that schemes do not get requisite attention since there are budget constraints,” one of the officials, asking not to be named. “This will help ministries’ implement better projects to ensure that the benefits can percolate across sectors.”
The department, the government’s IT provider, appears to have hit a ceiling in terms of the money it can spent and is being allocated.
In the last three fiscals, the ministry of electronics and information technology proposed NIC’s proposed budget to be between ₹1,700 crore and ₹1,500 crore. For the current fiscal year, the proposed budget allocated to NIC is set at ₹1,600 cr. Revised estimates showed that in each of the fast three fiscals, NIC used roughly ₹1,300 crore.
“There is a need to reevaluate what all functions NIC must performs,” the official quoted above said. “Whether the maintenance of infrastructure should also be handled by the organisation is one of the areas of focus.”
The government is now considering rationalising NIC’s resources to ensure maximum efficiency.
Established 1976, National Informatics Centre had emerged as a promoter of digital opportunities for sustainable development. NIC maintains 1,000 LANs (local area networks) and offices, and more than 500,000 nodes across over 8,000 locations, 8,000 websites of the government, and is presently hosting several critical applications on over 24,300 virtual servers supporting over 1,600 e-governance users/applications under Digital India.
Among these projects are the e-courts, the Soil Health Card programme for farmers, the critical eHospital utility that public sector health agencies use and the Immigration Visa Foreigners Registration & Tracking (IVFRT) service.
“Mainly the fund requirement under the Capital Budget has been reduced. Due to which the upgradation of ICT infrastructure in the districts will be taken up in a phased manner depending upon availability of funds,” NIC told the parliamentary committee on IT.
The committee has noted that NIC offers a number of popular user applications such as NIC email, e-Office and Sandes instant messaging App, whose user base has increased significantly over the years. “The committee feels that there is a need to pay particular attention to obtaining user feedback with option to provide the same through the Software product/Application itself in a user-friendly manner. This needs to be incorporate in successive iterations/versions of these popular NIC products/Applications to give further impetus to their widespread adoption.”
