Chief Secretary directs for launching RTI portal by December 10

Jammu, Nov 23: Chief Secretary, Atal Dulloo today while taking stock of the development of online RTI portal here in J&K impressed upon the concerned to make all efforts to dedicate this service to public by December 10 this year.

Those who were present included Principal Secretary, Finance and IT Departments; Commissioner Secretary, GAD; SIO, NIC and other concerned officers.

Dulloo while going through the developmental plan of the NIC for development of this significant public service urged them to create an end to end digital solution for the same along with gateway for payment of fees and sending email and SMS alerts to the applicants.

He enjoined upon the General Administration Department to make provisions for on-boarding all the public authorities and nodal officers from each department. He stressed on monitoring its progress on daily basis till its launch in the next month.

The Chief Secretary also advised for imparting necessary training to Public Information Officers (PIOs) and Appellate Authorities from the Departments and Districts to make them well versed about the use of portal for swift disposal of applications swiftly as per the provisions of law. He also asked for carrying out necessary security audit of the portal before its launch here.

The Commissioner Secretary, GAD, Sanjeev Verma apprised the meeting about the present status of the development of this portal. He revealed that the portal based on the software employed byDoPT, GoI has been used here as well.

He further gave out that few of the Departments had been on-boarded till now and the training of Nodal officers and PIOs of Civil Secretariat has also been accomplished already.

The SIO, NIC, JS Modi informed the meeting that nearly 3300 PIO/FAAs had to be on-boarded on the portal before dedicating it to public. He made out that an end to end solution for filing of applications would be developed here for the UT.

About the status of the portal it was revealed that the necessary customization has already been done alongwith integration of payment gateway and SMS templates development.

It was further added that 41 Public Authorities had been on boarded by GAD and the creation of other PIO/FAA is under progress. It was given out that the site will be live for general public once officially launched here.

Later the Chief Secretary went through the plans of the augmenting the NIC connectivity across J&K. It was said that the Informatics Centre is going to develop Mini NOC at Srinagar and Security Operations Centre (SOC) at Jammu for enhanced cyber and security monitoring from central NOC.