Patna, Sept. 13: The state department of science and information technology (IT) today notified the Information and Communication Technology Policy (ICTP), 2011. The state cabinet had approved the policy on August 23.

Wide-scale use of information and communication technology for delivering services to people in transparent manner, attracting investors for setting up IT-based industries in the state by offering them several incentives, promoting IT education in the state and use of the new technology in functioning of government departments are the broad outline of the policy.

“The new IT policy is aimed at providing all basic services to the common citizens with the help of e-governance. The new policy would connect 8,463 panchayats through common service centres in place through which the government to citizen (G2C) and government to business (G2B) services would be delivered. Moreover, apart from English and Hindi, the new IT policy also includes usage of Urdu language. Moreover, major thrust has been given on providing IT training at high-school level,” said Shahid Ali Khan, state minister of science and information technology department.

The ICTP, 2011, has been divided into four parts with each part dealing with different aspects of the new technology. As far as the part dealing with industries is concerned, it talks of creation of venture fund with a corpus of Rs 100 crore for setting up an incubation centre. A separate single-window system would be put in place for dealing with investment proposals in the sector and these units would be free from zoning constraint as applied in case of other industrial units.

Keeping the IT sector requirements in mind, the policy also exempts the investors from the provisions of labour laws and these units would be free to function 24x7.

On the education front, the ICTP 2011 talks of promoting IT education both in schools and higher levels and also talks of setting up five IT training centres in each of the 38 districts under the public-private-partnership mode.

Apart from IT training, the policy says that French, German, Arabic and Japanese languages would be taught so that those having IT knowledge could avail job opportunities in non-English speaking countries as well.

Regarding the use of IT in government services, the policy talks of making all the government offices paperless by 2016 and all the government departments dealing with public services would have to earmark 3 per cent of the budget amount on IT related works.