Introduction

	Introduction

	Gujarat , today, already is among the leading states to invest money and resources for Information & Communication Technology (ICT) implementation in governance and citizen services. Achievements have already been made in the policy, infrastructure, application development, data-warehousing areas and endeavors are on to achieve more in the areas of industry, networking, content creation and information management.
	Though the pace of activities for eGovernance has been hectic and the results noteworthy so far, increasingly, there is the realization that eGovernance is not just a one time change process, but an inevitable way of governance, that brings with it the promise of convenience and transparency. Also, it has been understood that the actual achievement of an eGovernance would not be complete without having proper laws, legislations, standards and best practices in place.
	With significant efforts being made by the Government and its constituent offices across the state, there is now an impending desire to make clear the objective of using eGovernance as a tool for building a more capable state and not just as an end in itself. The Government of Gujarat through its eGovernance initiative, is thus proliferating the idea of building capacity and capability into the Government, oriented towards better delivery of services to the citizen

	Enabling Mechanism has also been spelt out for the implementation of the eGovernance as under:
1	All departments have prepared their IT Action Plan, which has a one-year focus and a five-year perspective.
2	One percent of the State Government budget is committed to IT related activities, which is rose to 3% in the year 2005.
3	To ensure quicker availability of funds, a separate IT sub-head is created within each major head. IT related funds are not subject to any economy measures and they are made available as far as practicable in lump-sum to the departmental heads rather than in the form of quarterly/monthly releases.
4	To oversee implementation of IT strategies in the departments, each department has Chief Information Officer (CIO) who reports directly to Secretary of the department.
5	All departments are in process of creating shareable databases of rules and other related information. This includes information such as budget, recruitment/service rules, plan achievements for various schemes etc.
	Back