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The AP assembly will soon become the country’s first paperless legislative body. The voluminous reports, bundles of paper with questions and answers and other texts, a universal feature of government offices, including legislatures, will soon be a thing of past. What is interesting is that the state is ahead of even Parliament of India in this matter. The project has been sanctioned by the Centre and funded by World Bank project.
Union information technology and communication minister Kapil Sibal has approved a concept note presented by speaker Nadendla Manohar and the project is to be implemented under the mission mode.
The entire project cost of Rs 16.5 crore is to be funded by the World Bank. Sharing the information with the media, Manohar said Union IT minister Kapil Sibal greatly appreciated the concept note submitted by him and sanctioned the project to the state on a priority basis. He said it took nearly two years for him to prepare the concept note and getting the clearances.
The speaker said the paperless technology will increase the efficiency in functioning of the legislature as well as the members and will improve transparency. The project will be executed with the help of a dedicated team of 30 IT experts with technical support from the Centre for Good Governance (CGG), a world-class institute of state government. Under this project a file monitoring system will be integrated with all government departments to ensure paperless administration.
“All information related to government schemes and public assets in each assembly constituency will be made available to the legislators on their mobile phones through Geographic Information System. All communication to members will henceforth be electronic only”, Manohar said.
Special training, the speaker said, would be provided to MLAs and legislature staff in the use of computer applications. The existing website of the legislature would soon be made bilingual (English and Telugu), Manohar added. He said that only 52% of the MLAs had so far furnished details of their assets and liabilities. As the disclosure was voluntary, he said, all that he could do was to request the members to furnish the information but there is no way to force them to submit the details. Hoping that the members would honour the assembly’s commitment to the transparency the details would be made available on the assembly website once the assembly secretariat receives them, he added.
