The government's IT wing is doing odd things in the name of digitization and IT revolution, yesterday Ravi Shankar Prasad, Communication and IT Minister of India, unveiled the egreetings.india.gov.in portal yesterday as a part of the new government's Digital India initiative. The eGreetings portal has an aim of propagating eco-friendly ways of sending greetings by government officials and ministers to friends and colleagues.
The portal which looked like a retarded portal of 90's era was unveiled on the eve of the country's 68th Independence Day celebrations. Govt. claimed that it houses a grand collection of designs made by people from all over the country.
At the launch, the Communication and IT Minister lauded the efforts of the IT department and its officials for coming up with such a novel idea of having this kind of IT greeting card, as if they have invented ground-breaking internet technology by developing egreetings portal.
Although there are plenty of e-greetings portal in the country, the objectives of launch of such portal and that's too by govt. is unclear, instead they could have made a portal where the reports of all inquiry comissions on incidence such as communal riots, corruption charges etc. are available for public view and this is kind of portal could have been example of good digital transparency initiative by new govt. However they chose making egreeting portal which gives impression of very childish thoughts of new govt. and doing formalities on the name of digitization.
According to Prasad, this initiative by the IT department is in agreement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment to ensure a proper IT revolution in the country followed by connectivity. On a second thought a large area of Indian geography is still untouched with basic internet connection, dont' know how come govt. IT department bring out IT revolution by launching egreeting portal.
Advice to IT minister - An IT revolution comes in any nation by strengthening its internet connectivity in both rural and urban areas and building broadband infrastructure and cheap computer peripherals and not by launching egreetings portal, what would 60% of Indian population will do with egreetings portal when they dont even have basic internet connection nor the computer to operate from.
IT minister Prasad also said that, enhancing Internet connectivity by launching the eGreetings portal on 15th August was a great idea and by cooperation of the citizens of the country through crowd sourcing, this could prove to be a huge success.
Prasad further hoped that the portal will not only be used by government officials and ministers but also by the people of the country although there are plenty of egreetings portals in the country already don't know why would common people will choose govt. egreetings portal which doesn't look good in comparison to existing egreetings portal.
According to R S Sharma, who is the Secretary of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, the department had received 3,572 entries in total for the greeting card designs and out of these entries, the best 14 were selected. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology has made six greeting cards in total.
All the selected 14 entries will be awarded by the department. They would be given a cash prize so as to encourage more and more people to make designs for the portal.
The eGreetings portal also provides the option of selecting a quote of Prime Minster Narendra Modi which would then be sent as a part of the greeting.
In order to use the portal, the user is required to be a registered user of MyGov platform or the government’s email service or the India Gov platform.
The NaMo government has a plan of spending around 5000 crore this fiscal under the Digital India initiative, bizarre isn't it ?, if 5000 crore of money will be spending on craps like egreetings portals only God can clarify that will this bring our IT revolution or utter waste of money.A question arises does a egreetings portal needed that badly by Indian public.
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