Port Blair, Jan 20: The 2nd General Body Meeting of the Society for Promotion of Vocational & Technical Education (SOVTECH) was held under the Chairmanship of the Lt Governor A&N Islands, Lt Gen. AK Singh (Retd), who is also the President of SOVTECH, in the conference hall of the Megapode Resort here today. The Vice President & Chairman, Executive Council, SOVTECH, Shri Anand Prakash, Adhyaksha ZPSA, Smt. Minati Biswas and Chairperson PBMC, Smt. Sheela Singh, as Members besides all the General Body Members attended the meeting.
Appreciating the SOVTECH for its efforts towards providing IT support for implementing eGov initiatives in A&N Islands for extending e-services to the citizens of these Islands, the Lt Governor stated that despite bandwidth constraints the Administration has prepared the framework through which services are being provided to the people by connecting Common Service Centres and Departments with State Data Centre. Once the undersea cable network is established, the IT related services will work in a faster mode, benefitting the Islanders in a big way.
The Lt Governor further advised the SOVTECH to hold regular interactions with the Zilla Parishad and PBMC to know about the ground realities; whether IT based services launched by the Administration are beneficial to the general public or not.
While listening to the agenda points, the Lt Governor underlined the need for obtaining feedback from the elected representatives about the Citizen Charter which was launched in the Islands, a year ago and directed IT department to build a solution to track the delivery of services within the timeframe stipulated in the citizen charter.
The Lt Governor further directed that the PBMC should start receiving complaints through SMS from the city dwellers for its immediate redressal of grievances. He urged SOVTECH & PBMC to work jointly to prepare an application for this and start it as a pilot project by selecting one Municipal Ward immediately, to begin with. Once successful, this can be replicated in all the wards of the Municipal Council and further it can be implemented in the rural areas also.
The Lt Governor directed SOVTECH and Civil Aviation Department to work out modalities to issue tickets of the chartered flights to the general public through Common Service Centers (CSCs). This will be a great relief to the Islanders if they can purchase the tickets from the nearest CSCs.
The Lt Governor also asked the PBMC and Zila Parishad to avail loans from NABARD to execute their need based projects for the general public. He said this while citing the example of Puducherry where many a public oriented projects were executed by availing loan from NABARD, the interest rate for which is very less. The Lt Governor urged the GM, NABARD to co-ordinate with the PBMC and Zila Parishad and apprise them about the loan schemes available with NABARD for its fuller utilization.
At the outset, the Member Secretary SOVTECH, Shri Utpal Sharma apprised the President and Members of the General Body, SOVTECH about the objectives of the Society. A detailed presentation on various activities undertaken by SOVTECH since its inception, was also made on the occasion.
