MUMBAI, Feb 20: Maharashtra has found as many as 10 million fake ration cards using technology tools, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said Wednesday.
He also announced the new model request for proposal
(RFP) while tendering out IT contracts, developed by industry
lobby Nasscom and the Union ministry of electronics and IT.
“The public distribution system (PDS) has changed
through technology initiatives. With all the digital
initiatives, we have actually found out 10 million fake ration
cards,” Fadnavis told the annual Nasscom leadership forum
here.
The Western state, having a population of over 11
crore, is using technology across all spheres to drive
efficiency and for better allocation of resources, he said.
Technological tools have taken down malnutrition
related deaths to zero in Harisal village of Amravati
district, Fadnavis said.
On the industry’s long-standing demand of tender
contracts structuring, Fadnavis announced that the model RFP
will be adopted in two months by the state.
It can be noted that the IT industry has had concerns
regarding selection of bidders and payments for IT contracts.
The industry says an IT contract is different from other works
and the government cannot insist on aspects like lowest bidder
and also payments only at the end of the work.
Fadnavis said 55 million transactions have happened
using the state government’s citizens portal, Aaple Sarkar,
which has benefitted one million citizens.
He said a special CM’s dashboard has been created to
monitor all the projects and schemes centrally, and added that
the war room on infra projects also uses a lot of technology
to monitor progress.
The government demand for paper is also coming down
and has halved over the last few years, the chief minister
said, adding that the broad objective is to be paperless in
future.
Fadnavis said technology will help bring equity in the
society through democratisation, and will be used more
aggressively as the government goes about meeting its social
sector goals.
He said the state is targeting to be a USD 1 trillion
economy by 2025 from the present USD 400 billion.
The services sector will have to grow at 15.5 per
cent, industry at 13 per cent and agriculture at 6 per cent to
achieve this target, he said, inviting the tech industry to
set up base in the state.
Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh said the domestic IT
industry has become a USD 180 billion behemoth, employing four
million people directly and serving 75 perc ent of the Fortune
500 companies.
She said four global sourcing centres got added in
2018, taking the total number of such centres to 1,000.
The challenges before the IT industry are trust,
governance, maintaining a balance between privacy and
innovation, and the huge talent crisis, she said. (PTI)
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