JAMMU, Nov 25: After successfully migration of e-office instance to National Informatics Centre Services Inc. (NICSI) managed RailTel Cloud to prevent cyber-attacks, the Government of Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir has started extension of e-office up to the Tehsil level in order to achieve the objective of simplified, responsive, effective, accountable and transparent working in the offices.
The announcement about extension of e-office up to Tehsil level was first made by the Government on March 14, 2022. “e-office has been implemented in Civil Secretariat including Raj Bhavan and it will be implemented in all offices of Jammu & Kashmir in 2022-23”, the Government had stated.
On March 13, 2023, it was announced that Jammu and Kashmir is 1st amongst Union Territories to fully implement e-office in 300 plus offices with highest 97% disposal rate and e-office will be extended to all the offices of J&K shortly.
Thereafter, on February 5, 2024 it was disclosed that Union Territory Government has transitioned from physical files to e-office and over 450 Government offices up to district level have adopted the e-office thereby ushering in a new era of digital governance. It was further announced that digital system of handling files will be extended up to Tehsil level.
Now, the repeated announcements have started becoming reality with the beginning of exercise to extend e-office up to Tehsil level offices, official sources told EXCELSIOR, adding “Jammu and Kashmir e-Governance Agency (JaKeGA), which functions under the administrative control of Information Technology Department, has started accepting the requests from the Tehsil level offices for extension of e-office facility”.
“Such requests have been received from several Tehsils in both the divisions of the Union Territory and hopefully within next eight to 10 months all the Tehsil level offices will start disposal of files on e-office”, sources informed.
They said that extension of e-office up to Tehsil level will go a long way in making officials accountable and check their efficiency. Further, with the rolling out of e-office at Tehsil level the Government will come to know about the exact requirement of manpower in each office and surplus manpower can be diverted to those offices which are facing dearth of same.
In response to a question, they said that since migration of e-office instance to National Informatics Centre Services Inc. (NICSI) managed RailTel Cloud to avoid any sort of vulnerability to cyber-attacks was the top most priority as such there was delay in starting extension of e-office up to the Tehsil level.
Earlier, the e-office application in the UT of Jammu & Kashmir was being managed by JaKeGA (front-end support, rollout support), DCO CDAC (hosting support) and NIC (application team). JaKeGA and JKSDC were having dependency on NIC application team for resolution of application-related issues and as the NIC Project Management Unit (PMU) is responsible for pan-India instances there were frequent delays in resolving application-level issues.
As an epilogue to ensuring business continuity of e-office, a plan for migration of e-office instance of Jammu & Kashmir to NIC/NICSI managed RailTel Data Centre was undertaken to ensure a seamless e-office experience as also to do away with unscheduled downtimes/disruptions, which were impacting e-office functioning. The migration has been completed with zero data loss, complete data integration and 100% replica of the existing e-files.
“The migration to the highly secured data centre will go a long way in preventing cyber attacks”, sources further said, adding “this step is helping the Government in professionally managing services for up to 25000 e-office users”.
