SeMT

Background

• Digital India envisages to transform the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of information technology. The vision of Digital India is to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. The focus is on making technology central to enabling change and implementing e-Governance across the country. The Digital India Programme is centered on 3 key areas viz: Digital Infrastructure as a Core Utility to Every Citizen, Governance, and Services on Demand, and Digital Empowerment of Citizens. The program has widened its scope beyond e-Governance and has strived to bridge the digital divide. With the greater devolution of funds after implementation of the 14th Finance Commission Recommendations, the States may need to gradually take up ownership and develop the e-Gov support system on their own to ensure sustainability. In the last 10 years, many States have also developed in-house capacity in e-Governance related projects.
• The need for building the capacity of States through SeMTs was earlier approved under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in the year 2008. The endeavour was to “Make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency & reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man”. Most of the States were short on capability to deal with the complexity of issues involved. Thus, for NeGP and MMPs to achieve its stated goals and to fast-track implementation of the MMPs, this was the first gap that was addressed through Institutional Framework of State e-Mission Teams (SeMTs). In the last 10 years, the States/UTs were provided with these high-quality specialized IT and e-Governance professionals recruited and deployed through a centralized system by NeGD/MeitY. The team was created in all the States/UTs to support ICT & e-Governance projects right from conceptualization stage, DPR/RFP, Implementation & post implementation assessment and to provide guidance to all the departments for their projects.
• In the much wider mandate under Digital India, State e-Mission Team (SeMT) is to ensure comprehensive planning and implementation of the infrastructure, to assist in development of related applications for citizen centric service delivery to establish a more connected government. All this has further necessitated a redefinition of the roles and responsibilities of the SeMT in the States/UTs. The team’s responsibility would entail undertaking the groundwork for providing an overall technical direction, standardization, and consistency through program management of all the e-Governance projects and all other initiatives of Digital India in the State/UT.

Roles and Responsibilities of SeMT

The SeMT should help develop the capability in the areas of preparation of scope of work, carrying cost-benefit analysis amongst various technological and policy options, preparing RFPs, selection of implementing agencies, managing and getting the best out of implementing agencies and technical support so as to optimize the benefits. All interdependencies, overlaps, conflicts, standards, overarching architecture, interoperability, security, legal aspects, etc. across projects, as well as core and support infrastructure, shared across several projects would fall under the purview of this team. The team will work under the State IT department but will provide support to all the Departments in the implementation of IT projects in the State/UT related to various projects under Digital India. The following support will be provided by the SeMT team.

Program Management

• To support the implementation of various Digital India initiatives and co-ordinate with NeGD/MeitY
• To support all the State Government departments’ needs/projects (both Central and State Projects)
• To ensure the alignment of the State e- Gov. projects with the overall objectives of Digital India Program.
• To bring standardization and consistency across e-Governance initiatives, leveraging external resources and implementing best practices from across the industry
• To ensure compliance with Government of India Policies and e-Governance Standards and Guidelines like Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software, Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, India Enterprise Architecture Framework (Ind EA), Digital Service Standards (DSS), E-Mail Policy, Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Policy on use of IT resources, Interoperability Framework for e-Governance(IFEG), Meta Data & Data Standards (MDDS), ePramaan Framework, Guidelines for Indian Government websites (GIGW), Model RFP Templates & Guidance Notes for e-Governance Projects, etc.
• To support progress of various initiatives under Digital India in the State and highlight any issues/slippages to higher authorities
• To identify the critical success factors for implementation of e-Governance projects in the State.
• To identify the risk factors and provide risk mitigation for implementation of e-Governance projects in the State.
• To develop and establish suitable program monitoring framework for the State under guidance from NeGD
• To drive Capacity Building initiatives in the State/UT

Technology Management

• In coordination with the Technology Division at NeGD, assist the State Government in implementing e-Gov standards for application, designing technology architecture, database design, development and infrastructure deployment
• To assist the State departments in technology selection, handholding department staff from requirements to implementation
• To ensure that individual project level initiatives are interoperable, standardized, scalable and secure across various areas of software, hardware and infrastructure
• To analyze the existing/ proposed projects in regard to strategic control, cyber-security, disaster recovery and business continuity
• To study the status of IT Infrastructure of State and assist the State Government in coming up with a robust IT infrastructure to support the roll out of e – governance projects
• To ensure implementation of NeGD/MeitY’s projects namely UMANG, Digital-Locker, NCoG, RAS, Digital Payments etc.and other core projects like Aadhaar, NKN, CSC, SWAN etc.
• To work with MeitY/NeGD in embracing emerging technologies/areas like AI, Blockchain, IoT, Big Data, Data Analytics, Augmented and Virtual reality etc for the State projects and to build capability in the State/UT in these areas
• To partner with the PeMTs and help them in adhering to technical standards / architecture/ product and strategic control, specifications for the e – governance projects
• To ensure utilization of Digital India common infrastructure including GI Cloud infrastructure (MeghRaj)/ State Data Centre
• To conduct technical appraisal of the various project reports received from the State Departments and technical evaluation of various proposals received from bidders.
• To study trends on projects run on PPP mode, gaps/challenges/learning’s etc.

For better and effective leveraging of these resources by the various departments, SeMTs are entrusted with the responsibility of supporting multiple Departments needs/projects. They can be made to travel to various locations of the State for short durations in order to fulfill the above responsibilities and support the teams stationed at the district level. They also need to be leveraged across the various departments as resources for augmenting the Capacity for e-governance rather than just resources for the IT departments.

SeMT is functioning as full-time advisory body in the Govt. of Haryana in undertaking e-Governance projects and advising high level committees on IT/e-Governance projects in the State. The current team composition of the SeMT in the State as following;

Click here to view the list of key initiatives taken by the SeMT