The IT policy pro­duced here­below is the dir­ec­tion doc­u­ment that the policy mak­ing group has come out with. In our opin­ion, it was extremely imper­at­ive that Delhi has a ded­ic­ated growth path defined for the IT industry, more so in con­sid­er­a­tion of the growth of this industry in the sur­round­ing mar­kets of Gur­gaon & Noida. A policy doc­u­ment is only a dir­ec­tion doc­u­ment, until the spe­cific reg­u­la­tions are released. Please do not treat the inform­a­tion avail­able on these pages for the pur­pose of decision mak­ing or busi­ness assumption.

A . V I S I O N

1. The rapid advance­ments in the field of Inform­a­tion, com­mu­nic­a­tion and Enter­tain­ment Tech­no­lo­gies and the res­ult­ant explos­ive growth of the inform­a­tion intens­ive ser­vices sec­tor have rad­ic­ally changed the world eco­nomic land­scape. These changes have given rise to a new society

based on know­ledge. This has fur­ther res­ul­ted in the new aven­ues of devel­op­ment, employ­ment, pro­ductiv­ity, effi­ciency, and enhanced factors ofe­co­nomic growth.

2. Gov­ern­ment of Delhi recog­nises the enorm­ous poten­tial of the IT and has decided to embarkupon an ambi­tious jour­ney to her­ald the bene­fits of IT to the people of the state.

3. It envi­sions that by the year 2003, Delhi shall have real­ised this huge poten­tial and, as a res­ult, would emerge as a premier cyber state in the coun­try with its cit­izens qual­i­fy­ing to be e-citizens.

B. ASPIRATIONS 1. The aspir­a­tions of the IT policy in the state of Delhi are gov­erned by the fol­low­ing 6 E’s i.e. Elec­tronic Gov­ernance, Equal­ity, Edu­ca­tion, Employ­ment, Entre­pren­eur­ship and Eco­nomy. The object­ives of the policy are as follows.

a) E-Governance : To use e-governance as a tool and deliver a gov­ern­ment that is more pro­act­ive and respons­ive to its citizens.

b) Equal­ity : To use the power of the IT to achieve the object­ives of erad­ic­at­ing poverty, improv­ing health­care, empower­ing women and eco­nom­ic­ally weaker sec­tions of the soci­ety. The Right to Inform­a­tion Act that the gov­ern­ment of Delhi pro­poses to enact will empower the people and ulti­mately help to empower the people and ulti­mately help to bring about social and eco­nomic justice.

c) Edu­ca­tion : To encour­age the use of IT in schools, col­leges and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions in the state of Delhi so as to enable the stu­dents to improve their skills, know­ledge and job pro­spects and enable them to obtain employ­ment in this sun­rise industry.

d) Employ­ment : To use IT for gen­er­at­ing addi­tional employ­ment for the new digital

eco­nomy. To facil­it­ate loc­al­isa­tion of soft­ware, so that bene­fits of IT could per­col­ate not only in Eng­lish lan­guage, but also in Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi.

e) Entre­pren­eur­ship : To unleash the Delhi incub­a­tion engine, pro­mote entre­pren­eur­ship, earn for­eign exchange, and increase IT’s con­tri­bu­tion to the eco­nomic growth of the state.

f) Eco­nomy : To encour­age and accel­er­ate invest­ments and growth in IT hardware,

soft­ware, Inter­net, train­ing, IT enabled ser­vices, tele­com, e-commerce and related sec­tors in the state. To use IT effect­ively in indus­tries to make them com­pet­it­ive and web-enabled. To provide adequate infra­struc­ture in the state so that IT sec­tor can flour­ish. To use IT for ush­er­ing world-class e-tourism in the state.

C. ENABLERS

Advis­ory Council

Core Groups

1. While it is essen­tial to announce an IT policy for the State of Delhi, it is equally import­ant to put together an enabling pro­cess for its imple­ment­a­tion. For this, we pro­pose to put two pro­cesses in place. A high-powered com­mit­tee under the Chair­per­son­ship of the Chief Min­is­ter and form­a­tion of core-groups for imple­ment­ing the policies of the gov­ern­ment in respect of E-Commerce, IT enabled ser­vices, Egov­ernance and E-Education.

a) Advis­ory Coun­cil : The gov­ern­ment shall set up high-powered Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy Advis­ory Coun­cil under the Chair­per­son­ship of Chief Min­is­ter of Delhi.

This advis­ory Coun­cil would have rep­res­ent­at­ive from the industry, gov­ern­ment and aca­demia. This Coun­cil will review the imple­ment­a­tion of the IT policy and also advise the state on fur­ther improve­ments as may be required from time to time so that Delhi con­tin­ues to keep pace with the global IT scenario.

b) Core Groups : To over­see the imple­ment­a­tion of the policy in key areas of inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy such as ECo­m­merce, IT enabled ser­vices, EGov­ernance and E-Education, as also to assist the Advis­ory Coun­cil, the gov­ern­ment shall set up ore Groups for each of these key areas, which shall have rep­res­ent­at­ives from the industry,government and academia.

Depart­ment of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy to be strengthened Milestones

c) Strength­en­ing of the Depart­ment of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy: The Depart­ment of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy will be suit­ably strengthened to enable it to dis­charge its role of act­ing as a single win­dow agency for an all-round imple­ment­a­tion and mon­it­or­ing of the state IT policy.

d) Mile­stones on the road map to cyber city : While Govt. of Delhi is com­mit­ted to achieve its object­ive of trans­form­ing Delhi into a premier cyber city by the year 2003, the gov­ern­ment real­ises that it is equally essen­tial to set up import­ant mile­stones on this jour­ney. These mile­stones will allow the gov­ern­ment to take stock of what has been achieved, what hurdles need to be removed, and whether any mid-course cor­rec­tion is required to reach the des­tin­a­tion. These mile­stones are Decem­ber 2000, June 2001 and Decem­ber 2001. At appro­pri­ate places this policy doc­u­ment will enu­mer­ate the object­ives, which the depart­ments are expec­ted to achieve by these dates.

D. STRATEGY The private sec­tor has been in the fore­front of devel­op­ments of IT sec­tor. As the gov­ern­ment seeks to trans­late its vis­ion into real­ity, it expects the private sec­tor to con­tinue to play its pivotal role. How­ever, the vis­ion will not be real­ised early without the gov­ern­ment play­ing an act­ive role in the fol­low­ing three areas.

a) Pro­mot­ing IT for masses.

b) Ush­er­ing E-Governance.

c) Cre­at­ing an atmo­sphere con­du­cive for the growth of IT Industry & IT Infra­struc­ture.

IT to improve the qual­ity of life

a) PROMOTING IT FOR MASSES

1. The two strategies — pro­mot­ing the IT sec­tor and infra­struc­ture and pro­mot­ing e-governance — will bring enorm­ous bene­fits of IT to the cit­izens of Delhi. While the gov­ern­ment will take a num­ber of pro-active steps to pro­mote the growth of IT industry and e-governance, it is equally con­scious that these devel­op­ments do not cre­ate new divi­sion in soci­ety — referred to as digital divide by some people — divide between those who have access to IT based industry and those who do not. Gov­ern­ment is there­fore determ­ined to see that the bene­fits of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy do not remain con­fined to higher classes of soci­ety. In fact gov­ern­ment intends to use IT as a major instru­ment to provide new oppor­tun­it­ies to those seg­ments of soci­ety who do not see oppor­tun­it­ies to improve their qual­ity of life and tend to recon­cile to their qual­ity of life and tend to recon­cile to their fate.

 

Bridging gap between haves and have-nots Enabling Pro­cess

2. It is the firm view of the gov­ern­ment that if any tech­no­logy can cre­ate new oppor­tun­it­ies to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots in soci­ety in the present times, it is IT.

3. To give a con­crete shape to this think­ing, the gov­ern­ment shall take the fol­low­ing cata­lytic, pro-active and enabling steps.

i. Enabling Lit­er­acy and Edu­ca­tion for the masses

ii. Ful­filling local inform­a­tion needs of the people

iii. Edu­cat­ing cit­izens about their duties

iv. Enabling e-tourism

v. Enabling women

Spread­ing lit­er­acy and education

i. Enabling Lit­er­acy and Edu­ca­tion for the masses

a) Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy with con­ver­gence of vari­ous tech­no­lo­gies related to com­mu­nic­a­tion and deliv­ery of inform­a­tion such as video, audio, tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, news­pa­pers, com­puters etc. into one uni­fied net­work, provides for the first time a unique oppor­tun­ity to spread lit­er­acy and edu­ca­tion on a mass scale at afford­able costs. The con­ver­gence enables ease of provid­ing edu­ca­tional mater­ial, which is one of the pre­requis­ites to spread lit­er­acy and education.

b) The gov­ern­ment pro­poses to spread lit­er­acy and com­puter edu­ca­tion by ini­ti­at­ing action under the fol­low­ing broad policy framework.

 

“Teach the Teach­ers” Pro­gramme Com­puter Labs

 

• The gov­ern­ment shall start a “Teach the Teach­ers” pro­gramme for upgrad­ing the IT know­ledge and skills of teach­ers on a reg­u­lar basis. A Spe­cial Cell will be set up in State Coun­cil for Edu­ca­tion, Research and Train­ing to work out details of this

pro­gramme. The gov­ern­ment intends to take up train­ing of at least 10% of teach­ers in Higher Sec­ond­ary Schools dur­ing 2000-01. There shall be an incent­ive scheme to attract teach­ers to this pro­gramme and to encour­age them to com­plete it uccessfully.

• The gov­ern­ment will estab­lish com­puter labor­at­or­ies in all gov­ern­ment schools by the year 2003 in col­lab­or­a­tion with private sec­tor. About 115 schools will be covered in the first year i.e. 2000 – 2001. The Gov­ern­ment will also encour­age aided schools to set up com­puter labs in col­lab­or­a­tion with private sector.

Com­puter Lit­er­acy cam­paign in slums

• The gov­ern­ment will launch a lit­er­acy cam­paign in slum areas using ICT. It pro­poses to start a pilot pro­ject in a slum colony under which 30 com­puter kiosks will be set up with Inter­net con­nectiv­ity to enable the chil­dren to learn com­put­ing skills on their own without any adult intervention.

Upgrad­ing ITIs

• The gov­ern­ment shall upgrade Indus­trial Train­ing Insti­tutes for provid­ing train­ing of skills for data entry, mar­ket­ing, tran­scrip­tion, call centres, con­tent cre­ation and data pro­cessing. This will give neces­sary boost to the IT enabled ser­vices in the state.

Train­ing Centre for unemployed

• The gov­ern­ment will encour­age private sec­tor ini­ti­at­ives in set­ting up Train­ing Centres for the Unem­ployed Edu­cated Youths. The gov­ern­ment aims to start at least 10 Centres in the year 2000– 01.

IT Open University

• The gov­ern­ment will take steps to estab­lish an IT Open Uni­ver­sity. It will also encour­age tech­nical courses in its uni­ver­sity, schools and ITI’s. The gov­ern­ment hopes to take edu­ca­tion and lit­er­acy to a much lar­ger sec­tion of pop­u­la­tion in the next three years.

Set­ting up an IIIT

• The gov­ern­ment will also set up a premier Indian Insti­tute of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy to impart high qual­ity IT edu­ca­tion and train­ing to the people.

Digital Lib­rary Cit­izen Ser­vice Points Suwidha Points

• It will also set up a Digital Media Lib­rary that would be a cent­ral store­house of digit­al­ised data con­tain­ing gov­ern­ment records, industry inform­a­tion and inform­a­tion on edu­ca­tion, tour­ism and archaeology.

 

ii) Ful­filling local inform­a­tion needs of the people.

a) The gov­ern­ment has already pro­posed set­ting up of Cit­izen Ser­vice Points all over the state, which could be used by the cit­izens to access any inform­a­tion about gov­ern­ment ser­vices from any loc­a­tion within the state and out­side. These CSPs will be elec­tron­ic­ally linked to gov­ern­ment depart­ments through their web­sites. These will be set up by the private sec­tor that will be allowed to recover the costs by char­ging the user an afford­able trans­ac­tion fee.

b) The gov­ern­ment has also pro­posed to set up Suwidha Points at each of its major offices. These Suwidha Points will be single user-friendly win­dow for deadline-based hand­ling of applic­a­tions. At this point a cit­izen will also be given an acknow­ledge­ment with a prob­able date of response to his application.

Cyber Cafes and InformationKiosks

c) In addi­tion the gov­ern­ment will encour­age the private indi­vidu­als to set up inform­a­tion kiosks all over the city. The kiosks shall provide free access to a wide range of citizen-oriented access to a wide range of citizen-oriented inform­a­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, all the e-governance related inform­a­tion should be avail­able through these kiosks. They need not have Inter­net con­nec­tions. They could simply have data stored for access to the cit­izens. These kiosks will be encour­aged to use touch-screens requir­ing no use of either the key­board or the mouse. The gov­ern­ment will assist the entre­pren­eurs in get­ting space where demand for kiosks could be fore­seen. Some examples of such places are bus stops, mar­kets, colleges,community centres, res­id­ent asso­ci­ation offices, clubs, tour­ist places, air­ports, rail­way sta­tions and schools. In addi­tion the gov­ern­ment will encour­age the own­ers of STD / ISD booths to con­vert them to cyber cafes all over Delhi.

iii) Edu­cat­ing cit­izens about their duties

a) Inter­net based inform­a­tion deliv­ery sys­tems in com­bin­a­tion with con­ven­tional broad­cast media, TV and Radio, could act as a major vehicle to edu­cate cit­izens regard­ing their duties to the nation and the state. This will immensely help in people’s par­ti­cip­a­tion in pro­gramme like fam­ily wel­fare, con­ser­va­tion of envir­on­ment, and pre­ser­va­tion of eth­ical, moral and cul­tural values.

b) The people could also be informed about the rich her­it­age of the cap­ital and the need to pre­serve the ancient monu­ments which dot the city land­scape and the dangers of van­dal­iz­ing city land­scape and the dangers of van­dal­iz­ing them.

c) The nuis­ance cre­ated by lit­ter­ing pub­lic places, parks, roads and places of reli­gious and tour­ist interests will be high­lighted using IT technology.

 

iv) Enabling E-Tourism

a) Tour­ism is one industry that can effect­ively use IT to pro­mote itself. The use of inter­net for pro­mot­ing tour­ism is only one example.

b) Innov­at­ive solu­tions using IT can help Delhi to attract more vis­it­ors and tour­ists by provid­ing them with inform­a­tion about the many places of his­tor­ical interest in the city.

c) To take advant­age of IT in the tour­ism sec­tor the gov­ern­ment would encour­age andini­ti­ate the following:

 

• E-Tourism Portal:

There are cur­rently many web sites provid­ing inform­a­tion about the tour­ism sec­tor of the state. How­ever, there is a need for set­ting up com­pre­hens­ive tour­ism portal for the state of Delhi. This portal could have com­pre­hens­ive inform­a­tion on the tour­ism industry, hotels, places of reli­gious and his­tor­ical interest etc. The idea is to not only provide basic inform­a­tion but also cyber­cast­ing, video clips, and graph­ics etc. The portal will have cyber­cast­ing of major events in the State of Delhi.

The portal will also encour­age e-commerce by selling local han­di­crafts, agri­cul­ture and industry products through the web site. The portal will also have a rev­enue model of earn­ing through on-line book­ings, advert­ise­ments and broker­age from eco­m­merce transactions.

Tour­ism Marketing:

 

• Mar­ket­ing : An aggress­ive mar­ket­ing plan would be designed to mar­ket the state of Delhi through the net.

v) Enabling Women

a) Empower­ment of women is an integ­ral part of the pro­cess of devel­op­ment of any eco­nomy. The trans­ition to a know­ledge based eco­nomy includes the par­ti­cip­a­tion of all sec­tors of the society.

b) The gov­ern­ment of Delhi con­siders the role of women to be very import­ant in the Eco­nomic and social devel­op­ment. With the increased emphasis in IT by the gov­ern­ment, there is a need to intro­duce spe­cial scheme for provid­ing the bene­fits of IT to the women in the state.

c) The IT can play a cata­lytic role in the pro­cess of empower­ing women. Gov­ern­ment will take the fol­low­ing ini­ti­at­ives in this regard.

Lit­er­acy cam­paign for women

• An IT lit­er­acy pro­gramme spe­cially dir­ec­ted towards spread­ing lit­er­acy among women would be launched by the year 2001.

Set­ting up web sites

• Gov­ern­ment will encour­age NGOs to set up B2C (busi­ness to con­sumer) and B2B (busi­ness to busi­ness) web­sites to pro­mote interest of women doing busi­ness in the state.

b) USHERING E-GOVERNANCE

I. Cit­izen interface

Re-inventing Govt. Processes

1. Gov­ern­ment of Delhi will use IT not merely to auto­mate its exist­ing pro­ced­ures but also to rein­vent gov­ern­ment pro­cesses and to redefine the role of bur­eau­cracy. This would enable the gov­ern­ment to make its func­tion­ing citizen-centric, trans­par­ent and efficient.

Nine Depart­ments to go “on-line”

2. The gov­ern­ment has iden­ti­fied nine major pub­lic deal­ing depart­ments that will go ‘online’ by the year 2002. These depart­ments are rev­enue, trans­port, sales tax, excise, edu­ca­tion, social wel­fare, co-operatives, health and labour. Of these sales tax, excise and trans­port will go on-line by June 2001. The gov­ern­ment will provide assist­ance for com­pu­ter­isa­tion of Local and Autonom­ous Bod­ies such as MCD, NDMC, DVB, DJB etc. work­ing under it.

Govt. trans­ac­tion through Internet

3. In order to this, the gov­ern­ment will set up the legal machinery to imple­ment cyber law pro­vi­sions regard­ing recog­ni­tion of digital pro­vi­sions regard­ing recog­ni­tion of digital sig­na­ture and elec­tronic records and their use in gov­ern­ment. By Decem­ber 2003, it shall enable the cit­izens to con­duct most of their trans­ac­tions with the gov­ern­ment through the Inter­net. Some examples of these trans­ac­tions are: obtain­ing driv­ing licenses, regis­tra­tion of vehicles, regis­tra­tion with employ­ment exchanges, regis­tra­tion of births and deaths, obtain­ing ration cards, pay­ment of vari­ous bills,lodging of vari­ous com­plaints and their redressal, deliv­ery of pen­sions, ten­der­ing, fil­ing of tax returns and apply­ing for admis­sions. To ensure that this pro­cess is mon­itored peri­od­ic­ally some import­ant mile­stones have been fixed.

 

Heads of Depart­ments and the OSDs

4. The heads of depart­ment shall be respons­ible for the pre­par­a­tion and imple­ment­a­tion of their respect­ive depart­mental action plans. An Officer on Spe­cial Duty will assist each head of depart­ment in this task. He will also act as the nodal officer in the depart­ment for imple­ment­ing IT policy. The head of depart­ment shall have full powers to send up to 3% of his department’s budget for imple­ment­a­tion of this policy.

Employee sup­port

5. In addi­tion, a detailed plan for employee train­ing shall be imple­men­ted. The Civil Ser­vice Train­ing Insti­tute shall design new mod­ules for IT courses for impart­ing com­puter train­ing and edu­ca­tion to pro­duce know­ledge work­ers in the gov­ern­ment. The annual con­fid­en­tial reports of the employ­ees shall reflect the employee per­form­ance in imple­ment­a­tion of this policy. The pos­sib­il­ity of relax­ing the scheme for loan to employ­ees for pur­chase of com­puters and peri­pher­als shall be explored. For all new employ­ees appro­pri­ate level of com­puter lit­er­acy shall be made an essen­tial require­ment in the recruit­ment rules.

Mile­stone One: Decem­ber 2000

Inform­a­tion through Internet

1. By the end of Decem­ber 2000, the cit­izens will be able to access inform­a­tion relat­ing to trans­ac­tions with the gov­ern­ment through the Inter­net. Some examples of such inform­a­tion are: down­load­ing of non­priced forms, inform­a­tion about eli­gib­il­ity, rules, doc­u­ments required to be sub­mit­ted along with vari­ous applic­a­tion forms, formats of affi­davits, and inform­a­tion relat­ing to tenders. The fil­ing of com­plaints of sug­ges­tions through the Inter­net will also be made pos­sible. Sim­ul­tan­eously, the gov­ern­ment will also put on the inter­net inform­a­tion that ought to be in pub­lic domain. This will enable the cit­izens to play the role of a watch­dog and to ensure transparency.

Some examples of this type of inform­a­tion are: land owned by the gov­ern­ment and the gaon sabha, details relat­ing to the civil works and pay­ments made for them,mandi mar­ket prices, avail­ab­il­ity of hos­pital beds, cit­izens’ charters, cause list of vari­ous rev­enue courts, names of licensees under dif­fer­ent pro­vi­sions of law and the terms and con­di­tions thereof.

 

Right to Inform­a­tion Act

2. Later this inform­a­tion set will be fur­ther expan­ded and their place­ment in pub­lic domain will be made leg­ally enforce­able through the Right to Inform­a­tion Act.

Mile­stone Two: June 2001

Cit­izen Ser­vice Points

1. By this date some trans­ac­tions with the gov­ern­ment will be car­ried using tele­phones, stored-value credit or debit cards. This will be achieved through the inter­me­di­ation of the banks. Pay­ing bills for gov­ern­ment ser­vices is one example. IT will make travel to the gov­ern­ment offices unne­ces­sary. The cit­izen will be able to trans­act busi­ness with a few major pub­lic deal­ing depart­ments from one place. These points — Cit­izen Ser­vice Points (CSPs) — will be elec­tron­ic­ally linked to these depart­ments. These Points will be set up in private sec­tor that will recover its ini­tial cost of set­ting up these Points by char­ging the cit­izens a trans­ac­tion fee.

 

Suwidha Points

2. Besides these CSPs, the gov­ern­ment will set up Suwidha Points in each depart­ment to enable the cit­izens to inter­act at only a single point called the Suwidha or single user-friendly win­dow for hand­ling applic­a­tions which have to be sub­mit­ted by a cer­tain date. At these Suwidha Points the applic­a­tions will be accep­ted and acknow­ledged and the cit­izens will be given a date by which they may expect a response from the depart­ment. The gov­ern­ment pro­poses to allot these

Suwidha Points to senior cit­izens who will be allowed to charge hand­ling costs.

Self Cer­ti­fic­a­tion exemp­tion for IT Industry

3. By this date the depart­ment will explore the pos­sib­il­ity of intro­du­cing self certification/ exemp­tion for IT soft­ware industry under vari­ous Acts/Regulations men­tioned in para D (a) (viii) above.

 

 

Mile­stone Three: Decem­ber 2001

Use of Smart E-cards

1. The third mile­stone will be reached when cit­izens will be able to use elec­tronic cards for access­ing ser­vices offered by dif­fer­ent depart­ments. The gov­ern­ment will con­sider issu­ing multi-purpose cards to cit­izens that would serve the pur­pose of being a ration card, an iden­tity card, a driv­ing license etc. The cit­izens will be required to register their per­sonal details only once. To begin with, ration cards and a single elec­tronic card in selec­ted areas on an exper­i­mental basis will replace driv­ing licenses by June 2001.

RACE TO THE FINISHING LINE

1. Sim­ilar mile­stones will be iden­ti­fied for the between Decem­ber 2001 to March 2003 in detailed depart­mental plans in such a man­ner that the goal of trans­act­ing busi­ness over the inter­net is achieved.

II. A more effi­cient government

Improv­ing internal efficiency

1. IT will also be deployed to improve government’s internal effi­ciency. This will be done in two main areas: in internal com­mu­nic­a­tion and in data handling.

Use of E-mail, Bul­letin Boards and Video Conferencing

2. Internal com­mu­nic­a­tion will be improved by increas­ing use of e-mail, bul­letin boards and video con­fer­en­cing in the gov­ern­ment. Routine cir­cu­lars, meet­ing notices, and minutes will be com­mu­nic­ated through e-mail. Video­con­fer­en­cing will be used to decide urgent mat­ters in con­sulta­tion with senior officers without call­ing them over from their offices. This will make them access­ible to the people even while being in a pos­i­tion to con­fer with other officers in mat­ters which are urgent and can­not wait for a formal meet­ing to be convened.

Data Hand­ling

3. Data hand­ling com­prises data cap­ture, data shar­ing, data stor­age, and data retrieval, data pro­cessing and data present­a­tion. Some examples of the pro­jects which lend them­selves to data hand­ling are Exec­ut­ive Inform­a­tion Sys­tems for the depart­mental heads, com­pu­ter­isa­tion of land records and hos­pital OPDs, ICT based deliv­ery of edu­ca­tion in formal, informal and non-formal sec­tors of edu­ca­tion, data cap­ture on viol­a­tion of laws/rules using remote cam­eras or other record­ers with online data upda­tion and gen­er­a­tion of reports in such areas as traffic gen­er­a­tion of reports in such areas as traffic viol­a­tion and pol­lu­tion mon­it­or­ing. These pro­jects with their tar­get dates of com­ple­tion shall be detailed in depart­mental plans of action. The expec­ted pro­gress at the mile­stones iden­ti­fied earlier i.e. Decem­ber 2000, June 2001 and Decem­ber 2001 are stated below.

Mile­stone One: Decem­ber 2000

Routine Com­mu­nic­a­tions

1. By Decem­ber 2000, all routine com­mu­nic­a­tion between CM’s Office and depart­ments and among depart­ments them­selves shall be done through email and bul­letin boards. A begin­ning in the use of video con­fer­en­cing will be made by that date.

Mile­stone Two: June 2001

Net­work­ing Departments

1. The next mile­stone will be reached in June 2001. By this date all the depart­ments shall be intern­ally net­worked and pro­jects of all depart­ments will be under implementation.

Mile­stone Three: Decem­ber 2001

Land Records Computerisation

1. By Decem­ber 2001 some import­ant pro­jects would have been com­pleted. These include net­work­ing of dif­fer­ent depart­ments, the depart­mental Exec­ut­ive Inform­a­tion Sys­tems and the Land Record Computerisation.

III. Imple­ment­a­tion enabling mech­an­ism.

 

Task Force

1. A mech­an­ism to ensure that these mile­stones are reached is neces­sary. This is spe­cially so because at the time of imple­ment­a­tion many com­plex tech­nical, legal, fin­an­cial and insti­tu­tional prob­lems will arise. Some of these will be related to the need for pro­cess change and cul­ture change. The gov­ern­ment will, there­fore, con­sti­tute a Task Force headed by the Chief Sec­ret­ary to imple­ment this policy. It will lay down uni­form guidelines for the depart­ments to fol­low so that com­mon issues are not handled dif­fer­ently by dif­fer­ent depart­ments. A tech­nical com­mit­tee com­pris­ing rep­res­ent­at­ives from IT industry and aca­demia will assist the task force. The Task Force’s first main respons­ib­il­ity will be to ensure that all the major pub­lic depart­ments pre­pare their respect­ive plans to imple­ment this policy.

c) Cre­at­ing an atmo­sphere con­du­cive for the

growth of IT Industry & IT Infra­struc­ture.

 

Incub­a­tion Centre

i) The state gov­ern­ment will set up an “Incub­a­tion Centre” that will guide entre­pren­eurs to make busi­ness plans, advise on mer­gers and acquis­i­tions and net­work with ven­ture cap­ital com­pan­ies includ­ing the Ven­ture Cap­ital Fund Com­pany to be cre­ated by the gov­ern­ment of Delhi. The Centre will under­take fin­an­cing of small IT companies.

 

Zero Sales Tax on IT Soft­ware andHardware

ii) The gov­ern­ment is in favour of zero sales tax on the trans­ac­tions of the fol­low­ing IT related hard­ware and software.

• Sale and leas­ing of com­puters and its accessories.
• Inter-state sales of com­puters, parts, accessor­ies and com­puter consumables.
• CD-ROMS, optical disc media or mag­netic media con­tain­ing text, data, or multimedia.

How­ever in keep­ing with the rul­ing of a uni­form sales tax in all states, the gov­ern­ment shall fix the sales tax on hard­ware and soft­ware not above the agreed Uni­form Floor Rate (UFR). The state gov­ern­ment would how­ever lobby for zero sales tax on all IT products along with other states and cent­ral government.

IT Indus­tries in res­id­en­tial localities

iii) The state gov­ern­ment shall strongly recom­mend to the Govt. of India to per­mit soft­ware and ser­vice units to func­tion in res­id­en­tial areas sub­ject to such reas­on­able restric­tions as may be imposed by the gov­ern­ment in pub­lic interest.

 

IT Soft­ware & ser­vice industry entitle to Industry status

iv) All IT soft­ware and ser­vice indus­tries includ­ing Ser­vices and Train­ing Insti­tu­tions in IT will be entitled to “Industry” status. Such units shall be eli­gible for all con­ces­sions and incent­ives applic­able to Indus­tries. For the pur­pose of this clause, accred­ited Train­ing Insti­tu­tions will also be eli­gible to claim industry status sub­ject to cer­tain norms which will enable them to obtain Term Loans and Bank Fin­ance at industry rates.

Exemp­tion from Routine inspec­tion for IT industry and facil­ity for self certification

v) IT Soft­ware and IT ser­vices com­pan­ies, being con­stitu­ents of the know­ledge industry, shall be exemp­ted from routine inspec­tion by inspect­ors like those for Fact­ory, Boiler, Labour, Pol­lu­tion, Envir­on­ment, Industry in line with the approved policy of Gov­ern­ment of India. Moreover, the State Gov­ern­ment agrees in prin­ciple to self certification/exemption as far as pos­sible for the IT soft­ware Industry from the pro­vi­sions of the fol­low­ing Acts/ Regulations.

• Factor­ies Act;
• Employ­ment Exchange (Com­puls­ory Noti­fic­a­tion of Vacan­cies) Act;
• Pay­ment of Wages Act;
• Min­imum of wages Act;
• Con­tract Labour (Reg­u­la­tion and Abol­i­tion) Act;
• Work­men Com­pens­a­tion Act;
• Shops and Estab­lish­ments Act; and
• Employ­ees State Insur­ance Act.

 

Per­mis­sion for three shift operation

vi) Gen­eral per­mis­sion is accor­ded, sub­ject to such orders issued by the Police Com­mis­sioner of Delhi as may be neces­sary from time to time in pub­lic interest, to run a three-shift oper­a­tion to the IT soft­ware and Ser­vices industry.

ROW Clear­ance

vii) The gov­ern­ment shall assist in get­ting speedy clear­ance for Right of Way and use of infra­struc­ture of util­it­ies like DVB.

Pro­tec­tion of IPR

viii) The gov­ern­ment shall set up a reg­u­lat­ory frame­work to imple­ment cyber laws. The intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights of cre­ator of con­tent intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights of cre­ator of con­tent and soft­ware shall be pro­tec­ted through vig­or­ous enforce­ment of rel­ev­ant copy­right laws.

IT Parks

ix) The gov­ern­ment will estab­lish mod­ern IT parks in col­lab­or­a­tion with private sec­tor. The park will have high speed tele­com facil­ity and plug and play built up mod­ules for min­im­ising gest­a­tion period of new pro­jects. The first such park will be estab­lished by the year 2002.

Inter­na­tional Gateway

x) The gov­ern­ment will encour­age private com­pan­ies to set up inter­na­tional gate­way for provid­ing high-speed Inter­net connectivity.

Cam­paign for Ecommerce

xi) A massive cam­paign will be launched to encour­age e-commerce and com­pu­ter­isa­tion in the local indus­tries. It shall attempt to increase e-commerce activ­it­ies by at least three times in the next two years. A suit­able frame­work to encour­age and sup­port elec­tronic money trans­fer, elec­tronic benefited trans­fers (EBT­cards) and elec­tronic tag­ging like bar cod­ing will be established.

 

IT for Industries

xii) The gov­ern­ment will ini­ti­ate an “IT for indus­tries” pro­ject. Under this pro­ject, advicewill be given to the local indus­tries to adopt use of IT or to diver­sify into IT activities.

 

IT Enabled Services

xiii) IT enabled ser­vices like Med­ical Tran­scrip­tion, Call Centres, Data Pro­cessing, Back-Office Oper­a­tions, GIS, Rev­enue Account­ing etc. are con­sidered as niche areas for the state. A spe­cial scheme will be announced to help local indus­tries to diver­sify into IT enabled ser­vices. The bene­fits of the scheme would also be applic­able for com­pan­ies set­ting up IT enabled ser­vices in the State.

Sem­inars and Workshops

xiv) The gov­ern­ment will encour­age con­duct of seminars/workshops to dis­sem­in­ate inform­a­tion of IT to local indus­tries and thus work towards increase in usage of IT in local industries.

Estab­lish­ment of regional hub

xv) With an extremely wide­spread tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion sys­tem, the state of Delhi can take lead in estab­lish­ing and serving a regional hub for Inter­net, E-commerce and digital ser­vices traffic.

State Level Awards

xvi) State level awards will be given to IT com­pan­ies with out­stand­ing per­form­ance in exports and in domestic segments.