National eGovernance Award 2003

LokMitra

Exemplary EGovernance Initiative of the Himachal Pradesh Government  
(Bronze Award Year 2003)

The LokMitra Pilot Project in Hamirpur district has been conferred with the Exemplary EGovernance Initiative-Bronze Award at the 7th National EGovernance Conference 13^th to 15^th November, 2003 at Chennai jointly organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Government of India and Government of Tamil Nadu ( http://www.elcot.com ).
 
The detailed criteria for nomination and selection can be seen at http://darpg.nic.in and list of award winning Exemplary EGovernance Initiatives is available at http://www.elcot.com/7egovconf/index.html

The basic objectives of LokMitra are

 

·         Visible enhancement of citizen services

·         Efficient delivery of government services to citizens and business

·         Submission of various forms, requests, complaints to the Administration (including availability of such forms at these Kendras)

·         Improving efficiency in government administration by fixing responsibility

·         To improve the lot of poor and down-trodden people and stop their exploitation by acting as a mediator between the Government and public

·         Better dissemination of government information

·         Facilitating the growth of IT industry by encouraging the setting up of additional such Booths in the private sector resulting in self employment

·         To connect the rural masses through IT Awareness with the main stream

·         To bridge the existing digital divide: People living in urban areas are already using IT for interacting with Government. Various types of services readily available in big cities are online bill payment without standing in queues, downloading forms, online filing of income tax returns, online banking, railway ticket booking, online hotels reservations etc. But the rural and poor people cannot imagine such a scenario. More and more banks are going online providing Internet Banking. But what about the poor rural citizen who doesn’t even have running tap water. For such citizens, especially those below the poverty line, online water bill payment is a big joke and majority of the State’s Population is rural. Therefore, LokMitra has targeted at improving the quality of life of such people by providing them an interactive interface, which they can use with the help of trained people managing the LokMitra Soochna Kendras at their doorstep without much overheads.

 
The LokMitra Pilot Project has been formulated, designed and developed by the by the National Informatics Centre, Himachal Pradesh State Unit (sio@hp.nic.in, rajesh@hp.nic.in) for Deputy Commissioner, Hamirpur. The NIC HP State Centre is the E-governance Wing of the Himachal Pradesh State Government’s Information Technology Department (sanjeevg@hp.nic.in)

 

In the 6^th National EGovernance Conference held at Chandigarh in October 2002, the Official website of Himachal Pradesh (http://himachal.nic.in) was conferred with the Best Website Award (Silver Icon status). The website of Himachal Pradesh Government has been given this award on the basis of its being oriented towards meeting information requirement of the students, citizens, senior citizens, businesses, Government departments etc.