Monday, December 09, 2013: Chandigarh UT administrator, Shivraj Patil has approved the new IT and electronics policy for the year 2013, which aims to boost socioeconomic growth in the region, promote e-governance and also bridge the digital divide between the electronics and IT industries.
According to the official press release by the www.igovernment.in, the policy visualizes empowerment for all sections of the society. Having many firsts to its credit, the policy will enable government officials as well as citizens to have access to rules and regulations. The policy also includes incentives for IT entrepreneurs.
The salient features of the policy are:
• To make two persons, at least one female in every house e-literate
• To create a Venture Capital Fund, with a corpus of Rs. 2000 million to provide funds to medium and small enterprises (MSEs) and young entrepreneurs in the IT industry.
• To set up of IT Incubation Centers in colleges, for students interested in startups.
• To use upcoming technologies like Near Field Communications, Cloud Computing and Social Media to promote delivery of public services.
• To set up a knowledge resource / digital library to maintain a repository of documents for use by public and government authorities
• To use emails for responding to email-based correspondence of citizens and for intra- and inter-departmental communication within the city administration
• To have a strong e-governance in place and mandate funds for the action.
• To facilitate setting up of user-friendly e-Vault and email IDs – for lifelong archiving for each citizen, company and department of correspondences and important documents
• To install smart city infrastructure like City Wi-Fi and fibre-ready homes etc.
• To facilitate creation and upgradation of IT infrastructure for interactive education at schools and promote advanced virtual classroom courses
• To facilitate participation of MSE IT units in the tenders/ RFP issued for the procurement of IT goods/ services
• To introduce a friendly tax regime for industries that adopt technologies developed by Indian institutes/organizations/laboratories
• To work cohesively towards notifying Chandigarh as a Brownfield Electronic Manufacturing Cluster.
