Karnataka to set up its own Centre for Smart Governance

BENGALURU: The Karnataka State Government has decided to set up its own Centre for Smart Governance (CSG) to provide targeted software solution to its different government departments instead of giving tender to private companies or the National Informatics Center for all the software solutions.

The CSG will be registered as not for profit society with a dedicated team of software engineers and experts, will work independently like a private company. The Department of Administrative Reforms (DAPR) issued the orders to set up CSG two months ago. After setting up the CSG, the state government departments don’t need to outsource projects to private vendors which is the case till now and will also not avail service of NIC.

According to the officials, the need of developing in-house team is a must due to ongoing issues with existing system. With the increase in demand of IT requirement from every department NIC is not able to provide service to all which leads to giving contract to private vendors. The government agencies also faced issues working with private vendors like unjustified demands for project extensions, not handing over the source code to the department etc.  

Karnataka is not the first state in the country to do such project, earlier Maharashtra and Telangana have also developed state run centers to implement e-governance projects.

According to Rajeev Chawla, additional chief secretary (e-governance), they are in-process of hiring about 200 software engineers who will work in CSE on contract basis and will be paid as per the market standards.