Express News Service By

VISAKHAPATNAM : Expanding its Digital India-Digital AP initiative, the State government will unveil its e-Pragati scheme here on October 9. Chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu will launch the novel initiative which aims to bring together 745 services offered by 33 departments and more than 300 government agencies in State. It would provide an integrated ‘One Governance’ system which will be citizen-centric, transparent and effective.

e-Pragati has been designed with an estimated investment of `2,358 crore. The State government’s share of it will be `1,528 crore over a period of three years.

The project is aimed to bring together 745 government-to-businesses, government-to-citizens, government-to-employees and government-to-government services offered by 33 departments and more than 300 government agencies. The project is envisaged to be implemented in three phases and set for completion by December 2017.

The first phase will comprise three packages namely core governance, agriculture and education.

The ambitious project is a comprehensive framework for implementing e-Governance holistically, to provide a large number of e-Services to the citizens and businesses in the state. It adopts the best principles of enterprise architecture, following the internationally known framework - the Open Group Architecture Framework.

It was designed in association with IT giant Wipro over the last eight months where as many as 72 projects of various departments of similar nature, have been grouped under 14 packages.

“When implemented, it will place Andhra Pradesh globally among the top governments implementing e-Governance,” said IT minister Palle Raghunadha Reddy in a release.

The CM would also release a detailed document on e-Pragati project during the launching ceremony. The different projects will be awarded to bidders through e-procurement policy.

Raghunadha Reddy, HRD minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao, Panchayat Raj minister Ch Ayyanna Patrudu, chief secretary IYR Krishna Rao, IT adviser J Satyanarayana, and NASSCOM president R Chandrashekhar will be present.

Heads of multi-national companies from IT industry such as CISCO president Dinesh Malkani, Oracle managing director Sailender Kumar, Wipro chief executive officer Soumitro Ghosh, Cyinet founder chairman BVR Mohan Reddy and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) vice-president V Rajanna are also expected to attend the event.