Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 10

In a bid to bring more efficiency, transparency and accountability in the functioning of the state administration, Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Thursday asked the Additional Chief Secretary, Governance Reforms, to ensure complete digitisation by shifting all users in the government on e-Office.

The Chief Minister said the entire system of physical files should be replaced with e-Office to ensure prompt delivery of citizen-centric services in line with the governance reforms. He hoped that switching over to the e-Office system would go a long way in curtailing inordinate delay in disposing official work thus making the government accountable, which would ultimately lead to checking inefficiencies and corruption to a considerable extent.

The Chief Minister reiterated his government’s commitment to bring in greater transparency and efficacy in governance by providing nearly 350 citizen-centric services to the people through a network of 516 unified service delivery centres — the Sewa Kendras.

Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal said Punjab had missed the industrial revolution earlier and now, it was high time to grab the opportunity to usher in an IT revolution and e-Office was an effective mechanism to achieve this goal. He underlined the need to transform the state into a digitally empowered society. Additional Chief Secretary (Governance Reforms) Anirudh Tewari apprised the Chief Minister about the functioning of the department.

Helpline launched

In a unique step towards ensuring ‘Digital Punjab’, a unified state helpline 1100 has been launched for non-emergency services. For vaccination, bed and patient management apart from contact tracing and test reports, COVA app has also been rolled out with more than 63 lakh downloads so far.