8225 - State logs in to digital India - Telegraph India

State logs in to digital India - PM fetes Giridih achiever, CM launches appointment app

Our Correspondent

Chief minister Raghubar Das is all ears in Ranchi as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches the Digital India Week in Delhi on Wednesday and (below) employees of the General Post Office, which has lined up a string of programmes, watch the proceedings in Jamshedpur. Pictures by Prashant Mitra and Bhola Prasad Ranchi, July 1: Digital India Week, launched with great fanfare by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium today to transform India into a digitally empowered mega knowledge economy, had a proud Jharkhand moment. Kiran Kumari, a Pragya Kendra worker from Giridih, received a laptop and a citation from Modi to acknowledge the fact that she opened 5,000 digital lockers in 10 days, trained 200 anganwadi workers to become tech-savvy and was instrumental in her kendra enrolling highest number of Aadhaar card-owners in Jharkhand. "It's a proud moment for us all as Kiran Kumari is from Dhanwar, Giridih," Giridih DC Uma Shankar Singh told The Telegraph this evening. "Her achievements are notable in the run-up to Digital India Week." In Ranchi, chief minister Raghubar Das kicked off the digital week at a newly built conference hall in Project Building in the presence of state urban development minister C.P. Singh, development commissioner R.S. Poddar, information technology secretary Sunil Kumar Burnwal. "Our country is ready for its biggest digital empowerment measure under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership, which will change the face of the country. Jharkhand has moved towards e-governance and it is our priority to make people digitally literate. The unique combination of Make in India and Digital India campaigns will completely transform India," chief minister Das said. Jharkhand has campaigned aggressively for e-lockers and at present stands fourth among Indian states and Union Territories with 45,000 e-lockers opened in the past one-and-a-half weeks. Today, Das also launched Online Appointment, an app through which a citizen can seek appointments from the chief minister, his cabinet ministers and top bureaucrats. Sounding upbeat about both initiatives, Burnwal said the state aimed at contributing 10 per cent of the Centre's goal of opening 10 lakh digital lockers, also called DigiLockers and e-lockers, across the country in the coming week and added that the appointment app would empower the common man. The e-locker is a personal online folder with up to 1GB space for every citizen owning an Aadhaar number linked to an email ID or cellphone number. Citizens can digitally store e-documents free of cost by opening an account at digitallocker.gov.in. Though Online Appointment is not a mobile app, it is easy to operate from a laptop or PC, said representatives of National Informatics Centre (Jharkhand state centre), who have designed and developed it. "Anybody seeking an appointment can visit jharkhandmulakat.nic.in and apply. A request will be sent to the department concerned, which will fix the time and date and inform the same to the supplicant through an SMS," said Shahid Ahmad, state informatics officer of the NIC. Twenty-five Pragya Kendras from across the state also received tablet PCs and citations. Till July 7, the IT department will arrange programmes across the state, especially in schools and colleges, spreading awareness on e-governance, e-education and e-health, launching contests on best mobile apps for public utility, essay writing on digital challenges and opportunities in rural India, IT quiz and talent hunts.