Migrating from .paper to .docx and how it enhances governance.
For the first time in 30 years in India, the BJP government came to power with an absolute majority and it appeared through proposed promises projected through the campaign that Team Modi was ready with a game-changing plan for the country. It soon became apparent that Prime minister Narendra Modi has a vision larger than what people had imagined. That vision was of a ‘Digital India’. Transforming and digitizing services and creating a transparency in governance. A shift from from the current e-governance to m-governance, that is mobile governance.
Digital India is a Programme to prepare India for a knowledge future. A programme to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It is an ambitious programme of Government of India which will be for preparing India for the knowledge based transformation and delivering good governance to citizens by synchronized and co-ordinated engagement with both Central Government and State Government.
With the advent in technology, it is inevitable that the government embraces the need for digitization and help permeation of technology throughout the organizational systems. In order to thrive in today’s challenging environment and to keep up the pace with the global developments, it is necessary that the governmental organization in charge of running a country undergoes this transformation and tries to modify its administrative set up. One of the biggest challenges in this transition is to convert paper documents to digital formats.
Dusty paperwork that has piled up over the years and occupied large office closets has tremendous amount of data that has been recorded over the years and the main concern in keeping up the promise of transparency is to improve the accessibility to all this data. There are a lot of reasons why it is necessary that this data is being converted into digital formats. One of the prime reason being accessibility as mentioned before, it is also easier to search and find information faster, it protects data from being destructed and manipulated as well.
Delhi’s bureaucrats had become too lazy even to clear the dust-laden files submerging them in a sea of decaying paper. After Modi ordered a cleanup, the home ministry discovered 150,000 unwanted files in its cupboards. One was from 1948, the year after Indian independence, and related to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India. The document records the sanction of “Rs 64,000” as travel allowance to Mountbatten for his final return to Britain. The file went straight to the National Archives.
In India, the government offices are chaotic with undone paperwork, pending legal cases, broken records, partially executed policies, unregistered citizens, unprocessed pension plans, incorrect records. It requires an extremely lengthy and painful procedure to get anything done. This eventually affects the entire system and it’s functioning. If every time a person walks into a bank, needs a minimum of two hours waiting to accomplish his objective, it is crippling the speed of a larger system and affecting its efficiency. The conversion of data will essentially help in streamlining various governance processes as the work which would otherwise take days and months, could be accomplished within hours.
So why is it important that this data is converted from the .paper to the .docx format in the first place? There are a few obvious advantages very elaborately mentioned in one of the articles and listed below: https://www.imrdigital.com/document-conversion-the-benefits-of-going-digital/
Increased Productivity : having digital documents reduces the time required for handling, storing, retrieving, distributing and destroying paper documents.
Greater Information Availability : Digital documents can be accessed and shared from a single user to multiple users across the organization.
Reduce Storage Costs : Going digital reduces the hard costs of paper procurement and storage and also realizes savings by eliminating time staff must spend managing records.
Better Security & Compliance : Scanned documents have added security and compliance thanks to user permissions and other efforts that help maintain tighter controls of confidentiality. The ability to search for and quickly access specific records as also also provide the additional security of disaster data recovery.
Enhanced Customer & Employee Satisfaction: The needs of customers can be fulfilled more efficiently when records are quickly accessed and moved through the workflow process.
Digital India will help in achieving this goal of simplifying data and accessibility. One of the major reasons for digitizing data is to analyse it for planning future improvements in policies and its execution, as also for development of infrastructure in towns and cities. A perfect example of this would be the announcement of smart cities mission which involves making cities all over the country citizen friendly and sustainable. Data will play a larger part in rolling out the first proposal of a smart city design and also getting reviews for future rectifications.
Analyzing and understanding data and its implications is extremely important in today’s day and age. It affects an individual in more than one ways and hence the need to convert existing data and create new data in a digital format will not only help the government to be more transparent but also build trust of the people being governed.
