AP ministers to study e-governance in other states

HYDERABAD: With the Telangana government deciding to join all panchayats across the new state with 'broadband connectivity' soon, the Andhra Pradesh government has set for itself a target to make one person from each family across the reorganised state a computer literate in the next five years.

The objective of this ambitious programme is to ensure that each family in the state is benefited from the revolution of Information Technology (IT).

At the same time, the AP government also wants to implement e-governance model of administration from the village to state level in all departments in the next five years. The government has taken this decision to compete with its Telangana counterpart, which has begun taking steps to transform as many as 2,400 panchayats in the new state into e-panchayats in the first phase.

These two objectives _ making one person from each family an e-literate and adopting e-governance model of administration at all levels in the government, constitute the core of the AP government's IT policy-2014-2020, which was approved by the state cabinet two days ago.

In order to achieve these twin targets, the tech-savvy chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu is understood to be planning to send a team of officials of IT and HRD departments, led by IT minister Palle Raghunadha Reddy to various states across the country, where IT revolution is effectively being used in the day-to-day administration of governments as well as efforts are being made to make the people computer literates.

While visiting various states such as Kerala and Gujarat, the first priority of the high-level delegation would be to closely study the measures being taken in Kerala to make the state, a 100 per cent literate state in computers.

The Kerala government has been on a mission of achieving 100 per cent e-literacy by 2016. The project is spearheaded by PN Panciker Vigyan Vikas Kendra, an institution promoted by the department of general education of Kerala.

The Kerala government is implementing the programme by appointing 10 resource persons in each village to initiate the e-literacy training and awareness drives in their locality.

After studying the Kerala model, the AP government will formulate an action plan to achieve its target of making one person from each amily a computer literate.

According to IT minister Palle Raghunadha Reddy, the state government is also planning to update the syllabus in all technical institutes including engineering colleges and polytechnics to meet the industry standards so as to improve e-literacy with industry participation. The syllabus of the industry-accredited online courses would also be appropriately modified, he added.