Fresh advisory issued, compliance report sought
*Numerous instructions since 2017 fail to bring improvement
Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Jan 29: Admitting that websites of several departments, Deputy Commissioners and Heads of the Departments are lacking vital information about various schemes and programmes, the Government of Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir has issued fresh instructions and sought compliance report from all the concerned authorities by February 18, 2021.
The situation is prevailing despite repeated instructions from the General Administration Department during the past several years as a result of which people have remained deprived of vital information about latest Government schemes and activities.
The Government vide Circular No.1 dated April 11, 2017 had observed that official websites of various departments were not being updated properly or have incorrect information thereby presenting a bad image of the Government and its functioning.
“Website updation is a recurring task which needs to be looked after regularly by the authorized officers and officials of the particular department”, the Government had mentioned in the Circular No.1 of April 11, 2017 while designating website content manager and website administrator and issuing directions to all the administrative departments to strict comply with the guidelines.
As there was no strict compliance to the directives, the Government vide Circular dated July 9, 2018 forwarded a copy of e-mail received from the Governor’s Secretariat regarding the updation of websites along with e-mail address and contact details of the officers.
Accordingly, all the Administrative Secretaries were directed to update the websites within two days positively under intimation to the Governor’s Secretariat as well as to General Administration Department.
Much to the disappointment of the Government even this communication failed to receive due attention of the departments and accordingly the Government vide Circular No.11 dated August 29, 2018 observed, “it has again come to the notice of the authorities that official websites of various Government departments are not being properly updated as such all the Administrative Secretaries should personally monitor the updation of their departmental websites”.
All these instructions have fallen on deaf ears and this can be gauged from the latest circular issued by the General Administration Department wherein the Government has admitted continuous non-compliance by majority of the departments.
“The official websites of various Government departments are increasingly used as a tool for interface with the citizens for implementation of various governance initiatives”, the GAD Commissioner Secretary Manoj Kumar Dwivedi said, adding “a slew of guidelines have been issued by the Government of India for ensuring coherence in technical, design and navigation standards across all Government websites”
However, while navigating websites of several departments, Deputy Commissioners and Heads of the Departments it has been observed that these websites are either having non-functional e-mail IDs or don’t have information of latest Government schemes and activities etc for public information, the GAD Commissioner Secretary said.
“It has further been observed that the websites are not user-friendly besides being non-compliant to Right to Information regime. These issues have been viewed seriously by the authorities”, he said.
Accordingly, Government has impressed upon all the Administrative Secretaries, Deputy Commissioners and Heads of the Departments to immediately comply with the guidelines for Government websites in consultation with NIC for enhancing the quality of online delivery of information of schemes, programmes and services and also ensure high degree of consistency and uniformity in the Government web-space.
The Government has sought compliance report in this regard from all the concerned authorities by February 18, 2021 which is to be submitted to the General Administration Department.
It is pertinent to mention here that as per the provisions of the Right to Information Act, all the Government websites are required to host vital information about the schemes, programmes and other details of functioning voluntarily for the information of public.
“By not acting the Government departments are not only violating the repeated instructions but also creating impediments in implementation of the provisions of the transparency law”, sources said and hoped that the concerned authorities would not compel the General Administration Department to issue instructions in future.
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