Government should mandate the use of technology and digital methods: Dr Santhosh Babu

In this time of crisis when the whole nation is in a lockdown state, advance technological measures are the solution to keep operations ongoing. Be it work from home, monitoring of quarantined cases, online education, or more, everything that comes to aid during this time of COVID19 crisis is powered by technology. And, there is a need to mandate digital interventions and technological methods of functioning by the Government of India, says Dr Santhosh Babu, former Principal Secretary IT to the Government of Tamil Nadu and CMD of Poompuhar, in a live webinar with Elets Technomedia hosted by Dr Ravi Gupta, Founder and CEO, Elets Technomedia.

Dr Babu, during the webinar, emphasised on the significance of technology, especially at this hour of crisis. He said that technology has given a makeover to our government systems which earlier used function on the basis of physical file movements that made the process slow and tedious. Also, the level of productivity was way less compared to the present day.

While addressing the webinar, Dr Babu said that almost all the functions in a government office can be made online, leaving out a few. He further said that the government had also realised the fact and has been regularly putting in efforts to revamp the existing systems using the new technologies. The Centre and the State have invested huge sums of money to upgrade the existing infrastructure to improve governance. Today, we have new software, applications, more bandwidth, and apt technology and we need to implement it to all the offices and systems for enhancing our functioning. And, I am quite confident that post COVID19, the government will be upgrading to better systems and technology, he added.

e-Governance in Tamil Nadu and the state’s Handicraft department

Talking about the governance in Tamil Nadu, Dr Babu said, we have almost every office tech-enabled. Taking the example of the Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation popularly known by its brand name Poompuhar, he said that we won the National Award for e-Governance in 2018, he added. Detailing the implementation of the technological solution at Poompuhar, he said that all four pillars — administration, marketing, design, and production were targetted and digitised. This led to every aspect of governance within Poompuhar becoming online.

To know more: https://egov.eletsonline.com/2020/04/government-should-mandate-the-use-of-technology-and-digital-methods-dr-santhosh-babu/