State to provide computers to all gram panchayats

Taking a cue from the Karnataka government which has provided mobile handsets to the gram panchayat secretaries for communicating government programmes through SMS, the Orissa government has decided to provide computers with internet connectivity to all the 6,234 gram panchayats in the state.

“The ICT infrastructure is being extended to the gram panchayats in a phased manner and the gram panchayats will have their own portal to share information with the public”, state Panchayati Raj minister Prafulla Samal said on the sidelines of a workshop at Chhatrapur near here.

Samal said, the state government has decided to install the computer sets at the gram panchayats and connect them with the block, district and state headquarters in the next two years.

The state owned Orissa Computer Application Center (OCAC), the technical directorate of the Orissa IT department, has been entrusted with the task.

The Panchayati Raj department has started its own Virtual Private Network (VPN) centre for achieving a close network to connect to all the districts, blocks and panchayats at a later stage.

The main objective of this ICT infrastructure is to maintain transparency in all the schemes including NREGS at the gram panchayat level, he said.

The minister was at Chhatrapur, the district headquarter town of Ganjam district to inaugurate a two-day peer learning workshop on National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).