Geneva: The Meghalaya government key initiative of e-proposal system, part of Meghalaya Enterprise Architect (MeghEA), has won a coveted UN Award — World Summit on the Information Society Forum (WSIS) Prize at Geneva in Switzerland on Tuesday.
Meghalaya received the best project award (Winner Award) in the category of “the role of governments in the promotion of ICTs for development”.
Secretary General of ITU, Houlin Zhao presented the winner award to Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma in the WSIS Forum Prizes 2022, held at Geneva, Switzerland. A total of 360 projects nominated from different countries passed the test of the UN jury.
Post this there was voting to select the best 90 projects which were invited in Geneva, Switzerland for the final award.
Meghalaya had to compete with projects from Australia, China, Argentina and Tanzania. Meghalaya was declared as the best project in the category and MeghEA is the only project from India to win the Winner Award this year.
MeghEA project is being implemented by Planning Department, Government of Meghalaya. The project has several components such as Government to Citizen or Business services, Government to Employee services and Government to Government services.E-Proposal system, part of the Government-to-Government component, enables faster processing and tracking of schemes.
“The system transforms the entire administrative approvals and sanctions of citizen’s schemes. Through the use of modern technology, the system integrates multiple departments, directorates and other Government agencies. In merely two months, close to 1600 proposals have been submitted through this e-Proposal system and an amount of Rs.790 crores have been sanctioned. The transformation has led to processing in days which used to take months in the previous process,” a Planning department official said.
He said the Meghalaya government is also progressing towards enabling Government to Citizen and employee services where citizens would be able to view their benefits and apply from anytime, anywhere and through multiple channels. MeghEA is a transformation from department centric service delivery to citizen centric service delivery
Speaking at the award ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, Chief Minister Sangma congratulated the people of Meghalaya for winning a prestigious award in the WSIS summit and making the nation proud of Meghalaya. He also thanked the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for believing in Meghalaya to implement India’s 1st Enterprise Architecture initiative.
Sangma further added that MeghEA is about delivering citizen centric services and transforming internal processing of schemes with maximum efficiency. He said that the Government’s effort is to provide services digitally to even the citizens of the remotest villages.
In addition to the Enterprise Architecture Project, the State Government is also implementing digitally enabled solutions for supporting pregnant women, for supplying medicines using drones and for digitizing agriculture. Through ICT, the Government wants to bridge the geographic disadvantage of difficult terrain and dispersed habitations.
MeghEA was initiated under the guidance of NeGD(National e-Governance Division). Collaborative effort of several Government Departments and support of external agencies have led to the success of the project.Government of Meghalaya has recently submitted a proposal to the World Bank for upscaling the project.
