AP tops in e-transaction volumes

Online citizen services, including transfer of money towards pensions and scholarships by the government, fuels the e-culture in the state

Andhra Pradesh, which had introduced online citizen services platform e-Seva way back in 1999, tops with a maximum number of e-transactions involving state level citizen services and money transfers under various welfare schemes, among all other states in India.

According to the data available with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, AP has registered 659.2 million e- transactions pertaining to state government services in little over 7 months between January 1, 2015 and August 11, 2015.

The department's eTaal portal captures the near real time data of e-transactions across all the states under various categories including Central and the state government-sponsored e-governance and citizen services projects.

With around 50 million people or just about 4 per cent of the India's population, AP accounts for close to 23 per cent of the total e-transactions registered across the states during this period. At the all-India level, total number of e-transactions registered were around 2.9 billion.

The state government offers 332 services through its on-line 'Mee Seva' platform including utility bill payments, caste or family income certificates apart from making on-line payments to a cross section of citizens in terms of social welfare pensions, student scholarships or payment of treasury bills etc.

The officials of the AP's IT department say that they were now planning to move a number of citizen services to mobile platform where the government recently introduced over a dozen services such as property tax payment to the citizens.

AP is distantly followed by Telangana, which was a part of the undivided AP till June 1, 2014, with 497.5 million e-transactions while Kerala (411.4 million), Gujarat (356 million) and Uttar Pradesh (277 million) stood in the next three places in that order.

The picture slightly changes if the number of e-transactions were calculated for every 1000 people in each state as is done by eTaal.

Bihar stands just above Arunachal Pradesh at the bottom with only 39.2 e transactions for every 1,000 people. The northeastern state registered the lowest, at 38.9 e-transactions per 1,000 people.

At the top end, however, Telangana stood first with 14,138.4 e-transactions for every 1,000 population followed by 13,487.6 e-transactions per 1,000 people in Lakshdweep while AP came third with 13,324.5 transactions per 1,000 population.

Even in states like Maharashtra (344.7 e-transactions for 1,000 people), Karnataka (741.5) and West Bengal (367.2) the online transactions remained proportionately low.