CHENNAI: With its focus on making citizen services easily accessible and its efforts to reach out to the population in the rural areas and also provision of business services, Tamil Nadu has emerged as the pioneer in the e-governance initiative.

According to a recent survey by IDC Dataquest, Tamil Nadu has been ranked No. 1 in e-governance with satisfaction levels among citizens and businesses quite high.

Falling from the top position in the list was Delhi, which stood at No. 1 last year, and has dropped down to No. 3 in the all India ranking.

Among the top citizen services were water utility, police, security, education and other civic amenities, while the business index saw best satisfaction levels in issuance of licenses and permits, government tenders, and financial assistance.

Even as Tamil Nadu made available many services online, including land records, road transport services, property registration, civil supplies records, the newly appointed IT secretary of the state, P W C Dawidar, said the state cannot rest on its laurels and has a long way to go.

“While it is quite nice to know that we have been ranked as the top performing state in e-governance, our focus is to move ahead. We are in the process of setting up common service centres (CSC’s) across the state. Within the next month, 550 CSCs will be set up and in another three months, all the proposed 5,440 CSCs will be rolled out in all the districts, which will make citizen services easily accessible,” Dawidar told The Times of India.

Dawidar said the e-governance initiative will have a more dramatic impact when the services are made available to the citizens across the state.

Meanwhile, former IT secretary of the state, Dr C Chandramouli, currently working as secretary - planning and development with the state government, said the credit should go to all the departments who had taken the initiative to make their services available online.  Source: The Times of India