Bhubaneswar, June 11: The state government has started an initiative to evaluate websites of various departments to make them citizen-friendly.

There have been frequent allegations that the websites of various departments were not updated. Even names of ministers and secretaries were not being changed.

Sources said that even a month after former women and child welfare minister Pramila Mallick’s resignation, her name continued to be on the ministry’s website. She had been succeeded by Anjali Behera, but the new minister’s name appeared much later. Several important notifications issued in the interest of the public were also not being put on the government website regularly.

Responding to these issues, the administrative reforms cell of the general administration department took up evaluation of websites of 25 state government departments recently.

The evaluation committee, headed by special secretary Vijay Arora, asked the departments to update their websites regularly. Evaluation of various government websites would be conducted from time-to-time and the websites would be ranked on the basis of their updating of information and relevance for the users, said a senior official of the general administration department.

The evaluation committee stressed on compliance to the citizens charter, proactive disclosure of information under the Right to Information Act and quality upgradation of information, apart from regular updating of information and statistical data. The departments were also suggested ways to make their websites user-friendly.

Evaluation of the websites was taken up in view of the state government’s thrust on e-administration and online monitoring.

Recently, chief secretary Bijay Patnaik had reviewed the progress in the computerisation and consignment of files at the meeting of all secretaries. The review revealed that there had been encouraging results in last couple of months with more than 3.35 lakh files enlisted in computer. The chief secretary had directed the secretaries to complete the enlisting of files by end of this month.

It was decided that a system would be introduced for opening of new files with software generated numbers for facilitating the tracking of files.

The departmental heads had been asked to ensure that all files relating to disciplinary proceedings were dealt with on computers to quicken the process.

The secretaries were advised to expedite online tracking and monitoring of files.