Jamshedpur, Feb. 2: Typewriters and long power-cuts are making a mockery of the state government?s drive for e-governance, in addition to the reluctance of a large body of employees to master the computer.

The paradoxical picture emerged on a day when the IT secretary, R.S. Sharma, received the second prize for the state in e-governance, at Kochi. Uttar Pradesh has bagged the first place.

Contacted in Kochi, the IT secretary did not deny the bottlenecks. ?We have to address the twin issues soon,? he said.

A block office in Palamau had installed computers a year ago but continues to do bulk of the work manually, confirmed a senior officer.

?You need uninterrupted power supply to operate computers. But that is severely in short supply in our district,? admitted the officer. He also narrated the experience of a neighbouring district, where the education department was forced to hire outsiders to operate computers because the employees refused to learn computer operation. The state clearly has a long way to go in e-governance.

The IT secretary said on telephone that his department had so far extended e-governance to 20 projects and will extend it further. More to the point, Sharma explained that, at present, there are two training centres set up by his department to train employees and both are in Ranchi. By the end of March, he informed, five such centres will be set up in each of the five commissionaries of the state. By March next year, he hoped, each district will have its own training centre and help speed up the process.

Senior officers pointed out the co-existence of obsolete typewriters and computers in government offices. ?They cannot co-exist and if we have to make any headway in e-governance, typewriters must be thrown out,? said one of them.

Others lauded the public relations department of the government, which has stopped entertaining requests from government departments for releasing advertisements unless they are in computerised format. This has forced each department to use computers to prepare the advertisements and submit them in CDs. ?Why can?t the government insist on computerised transmission of data,? wondered another official.

Sources in the state IT department conceded that although district transport offices and treasuries have been computerised, prolonged power cuts have led to applications piling up.

Officials are also critical of the slow pace of work in computerising land records. Only initial work has been done in East Singhbhum while most of the other districts are yet to begin work in this direction, they point out.