Interviewtimes 
Manoj Mishra, Secretary, Electronics & IT
Manoj Mishra is spearheading a ‘digital revolution’ in governance. His efforts to leverage IT in an array of government to citizen (G2C) services is positioning Odisha as one of the pioneer states in adoption of digital technologies. His vision is in sync with Naveen Patnaik’s 5T governance framework which envisages exploiting technology to deliver transparent services in a time bound manner.
Today, more than 250 services (of various departments) under 5T framework have been made online and work is in progress to bring 150+ more services online. The State has also announced a project for bringing all public services under a common unified portal (“Odisha One”) for the convenience of its citizens.
“Odisha has consistently pioneered the use of technology as an enabler for achieving good governance. The state has recently rolled out multiple digital initiatives for augmenting efficiency of processes resulting in better service delivery to citizens”, Mishra said.
The 5T framework has got a thumbs up with the roll-out of some monumental, IT driven reforms. To illustrate, the department of agriculture & farmers’ empowerment has a string of initiatives like State Farmers’ Database (76 lakh farmers) for easy identification, e-licensing for agri-input dealers, online certification for agriculture university students, registration of fishing boats & licences, registration of brackish water farms and subsidy for setting up of new livestock and fishery units. In the realm of education, Odisha now boasts of an integrated scholarship portal streamlining the management of 21 scholarship schemes of 6 major departments on a single portal – minimizes duplication and ensures leakage free scholarship disbursal to 11 lakh+ beneficiaries. All courses of government schools have been brought online. Hybrid model of learning has been adopted to ensure that teachers, students and guardians can gradually adapt to virtual learning. Hence, school teachers have been deputed to go from village to village to deliver instructions to students. Almost 5 lakh SC/ST students studying in government schools are expected to .be benefited under this program. With respect to mining, IoT based stockyard management system for faster ore evacuation & enhanced productivity of mines (managed by state PSU) and use of advanced analytics for monitoring customer registrations, sales contracts & ore accounting has redefined customer management and productivity growth.
Under the stewardship of Mishra, the electronics & IT department encourages all state departments to use the cloud enable State Data Centre for hosting of applications. In cases of unprecedented footfalls on applications, the auto scaling process in cloud based data centres ensures that applications run smoothly without compromising service standards. The department has also designed, deployed, integrated and configured and implemented the Government of Odisha private cloud (GO Cloud). This comprises software defined infrastructure services for computing, networking, storage, tenancy security & service management using cloud computing technologies. The infrastructure is designed to be easily and quickly provisioned with minimal effort and cost.
“To foster innovation and improve collaboration between departments, we are planning to enhance our proficiency in providing services such as PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). We are also targeting to provide departments with properly configured secure private environments so that they can deploy applications using self-service portals at minimum internal and external risks”, Mishra says.
One of the striking takeaways in his IT leadership is manifested in the way the Odisha government tackled a colossal crisis like Covid-19 by leveraging technology. “The unprecedented spread of the Coronavirus pandemic presented itself as a great opportunity for innovation. As the first responders, governments worldwide were expected to rise to the occasion and take the lead in bringing all stakeholders – public sector, private sector and the civil society – to combat the pandemic. The Government of Odisha was nimble enough to recognize this and prepared itself in advance. It had the foresight to leverage technology for closely monitoring suspect COVID-19 suspect carriers, enforcing social distancing and augmenting infrastructure capacity on testing & medical treatment to deal with the crisis. Rich datasets structured around user journeys & captured through various ICT tools implemented have proved critical for evidence-based policy making in Odisha”, said he.
Getting citizens connected with the government for availing the entire suite of services is what Mishra is striving for. And, he has found a bankable ally in technology.
