E-governance And M-governance For Smart Cities

What role does e-governance and m-governance play in providing integrating services to the citizens, in the smart cities today?

Experts sat to discuss the same at BW Envision 2018.

Panellists Navin Mittal, Commissioner of Collegiate Education, Government of Telangana who moderated the panel including Arun Sharma, Director, DBT, Government of India, Lalit Jain, Deputy Commissioner, Sirmaur, Sagar Setia Assistant Commissioner, Ludhiana Municipal Corporation, Alka Singh, Deputy Director, RCUES, Dr. Pritha Bishwas, MBBS, Health Expert, “Talking about Smart healthcare and e-clinical governance, Aditya Shukla discussed the strategies of fine e-governance in smart cities.
Sharma talked about his experience how IT systems have supported DBT by Saying “Direct benefit transfer DBT ensures targeted good services. We need to have various systems that need to be inter-operational.”

Highlighting on the IT infrastructures in smart cities, Jain said, “We need more connectivity and IT infrastructure in states like Himachal Pradesh. IT has played a big role and we still need handholding from Government of India to understand our requirements. We look forward to having e- classrooms and have many such requirements.”

Setia highlighting on the e-governance initiatives in Ludhiana said, “Ludhiana was taken under the smart city project in the first phase by the municipal corporation of Ludhiana. We are planning a lot of reforms for e-governance, and other reforms to give a better life to citizens.”

“We have a website and newsletters, which provide all the government and services information to the citizens such as online transfer of salaries, online employee grievance system and citizen grievance systems. We have come up with a mobile app too, that’s being used by the citizens” added Setia.

Singh talked about importance of sharing data for better governance.

“It’s important to share the data for urban local governance because, without it, it cannot work. Efficiency in the collection of user charges and property taxes will definitely increase with the integrated digital systems. We need to focus on infrastructure and digital literacy as people don’t know how to integrate data.”

Bishwas talking about Smart healthcare and e-clinical governance said, “I believe that health should be a critical part of any smart city initiative. We need to have efficient use of the resources like internet and mobile phones to tap for smart health. To increase productivity and give a better quality of care to patients and optimize drug supply etc. We work with the QTA tool to do clinical quality audits that acts as a benchmark of services providing.”

Highlighted on the need for functional cites Shukla said, “India stands 97th in world’s e-governance ranking. We need skills and smart people to use the smart infrastructure. More than smart cities, we need functional cities since they come to a halt since the basic infrastructure is collapsing. We basically need the smarter governance so that we provide the best services to citizens.”