Govt to punish any delay in e-services

Soon, when you face a delay in online services - such as obtaining a marriage certificate or setting up an appointment for a driving licence - any employee responsible will be punished for it.

Updated on: Jan 20, 2013, 24:08:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Soon, when you face a delay in online services - such as obtaining a marriage certificate or setting up an appointment for a driving licence - any employee responsible will be punished for it.

So far, according to the draft Electronic Services Delivery Bill, 2011, punishment was prescribed only for government officials responsible for the delay.

Now, the government has agreed to make changes to the bill to ensure private players are also held accountable.

The bill was introduced in Parliament in 2011 after social activist Anna Hazare's agitation against corruption.

It prescribed levying a fine of up to Rs. 5,000 for the first violation and Rs. 20,000 for persistent failures, but only on government officials.

However, a parliamentary standing committee found that since most online services were "outsourced" by the government, public officials would often blame private employees, who could not be punished, for delays.

Now, the department of information technology has agreed to make changes in the draft bill to also cover all employees of private agencies that provide online services.

The new law, when enacted, would supersede all existing rules and cover the entire country.

An official said that most state governments have agreed to adopt the proposed law, which gives them up to five years and, in some cases, a maximum of eight years to provide all public services through the online mode.

In 2011, 77 million online transactions were made in India. However, internet penetration in the country was only 1.4%.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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