Naidu to unveil e-Pragati project in July

Hyderabad, June 23 (INN): With a vision to make Andhra Pradesh a technologically-advanced state and a model state in Digital India initiative, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu will unveil e-Pragati in Amaravati in July first week. This project set to change the way services will be delivered to citizens.

e-Pragati, designed in collaboration with Wipro, is part of Andhra Pradesh State Enterprise Architecture which offers a bouquet of 600 services to people across the state. Some of the key services of e-Pragati include Certificate-Less Government System (CLGS), Dail.AP, Mana Rashtram, tele-health, e-education, HARITA, e-Mandi, Citizen Inbox, Digital Literacy, e-SHG, Smart City, Smart Grid, etc.

The Phase 1 of e-Pragati project will be completed in October 2016 with 72 sub-projects while the whole project will be completed by October 2017.

e-Pragati will be an impact-assessment project which will also use analytics to predict the performance of sectors, health profiles of people, drop-out rate in schools, et al.

Unveiling a draft of the new enterprise architecture, IT Advisor J. Satyanarayana said that this will give the government and its citizens a 360 degree view of every sector. E-Pragati has been designed to make the government citizen-centric. 'Not only does it offer common applications like Mee Seva, CM Dashboard, Mee-Bhoomi ,etc, it also offers department-centric as well as cross-cutting applications which will benefit people. The best part about it is digitization of data for citizens spanning across various age groups and categories,' Satyanarayana added.

Stating an example, Satyanarayana explained how services will be delivered under Primary Sector Mission. 'Under Primary Sector, we have categorized it into departments such as agriculture, horticulture, fisheries, livestock, etc. Under these, services will be divided into three categories A, B & C. If it's a farmer, from crop/ land details to seeds, insurance, marketing and e-Mandi details will be made available to him,' he said.

e-Pragati also will be one-stop shop for information of any citizen in the state. This information will be available on 'People's Hub'. Another model on similar lines, called the 'Land hub' is being designed. 'Such models will be integrated into the government database and with government programs to avoid duplication of data,' Satyanarayana informed.

The core data is being collected through Smart Pulse Survey in August 2015. Through 50,000 field workers, the data of each citizen in the state will be collected. This will not only include validation/verification of existing data of the citizens, but also fill in new data. The data will be collected through field workers whose location will be tracked through GPS. For individuals giving their details, a bio-metric (fingerprint or iris detection) attestation will be done so as to verify that the information is given by the respective person.

The Chief Minister lauded the IT department and Wipro's novel initiative and asked to test the utility of the entire project. 'People in the state should be trained and be taught that they have to adopt technology to work efficiently by saving time,' he said, suggesting AP State Skill Development Corporation to take up training of trainers.

'Students from colleges and universities who are early adapters of technology can be used to train those who are late adapters,' he added.

The entire project can have a 24-hour control room which will constantly be monitoring services in the state, the Chief Minister said. He said that the project should be a game-changer in IT and a model for other states in India.

State Planning Board vice-chairman Ch. Kutumba Rao, Principal Secretary to CM Satish Chandra, Heads of Department of IT&C, Revenue, Primary Education, Civil Supplies, Finance, officials from Planning Department and others were present at the meeting.