Maharashtra becomes country’s first state to allow the members of state legislature to raise online questions

Maharashtra has become country’s first state to allow the members of state legislature to raise online questions in an effort to move towards complete digitization of the process. 

 

The step is aimed at bringing the paper work to minimum.

The experiment was tried for the first time before the ongoing winter session of the state legislature at Nagpur. “It has received satisfactory response from the MLAs and MLCs. We have managed to cut down 30% of the paperwork.

 The idea is to raise it to 100%,” said Anant Kalse, principal secretary, Maharashtra legislature.

As per the programme, the State government has given unique user names and passwords to each of the members and a server has been set up. Laptops of members have been configured to server, which is set up by Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited. 

It has eight sections, such as star questions, calling attention motion, proposals, etc. Each member was given training once by MKCL to use the facility, while members’ personal assistants were trained twice. The entire system is available on Unicode and can be accessed in Marathi.

While the first stage of this three-tier plan is nearing completion, the government is also preparing for the next two phases. In future, answers given by ministers will also be made available online and in the last step all members, ministers and assembly speaker will be given touch screen tablets, which will be connected via-wireless network. 

In a run up to that, Assembly and council have been connected through Wi-Fi for the first time.

“We started the service one month before the commencement of the session and received 275 calling attention motions within 14 minutes,” said Mr Kalse.

The whole exercise called ‘Digital MLAs’ is expected to cut paper cost and time, while it will also enhance the accuracy.