Sunday, September 26, 2010

Shri MN Vidyashankar Principal Secretary e-Governance, Karnataka

Mr MN Vidyashankar Chief Election Officer Karnataka , meeting representatives of Praja, a citizens organisation of Bangalore
The above photo downloaded from the internet represents the way of working of Mr Vidyashankar whch is of being extremely accessible  to both citizens and private sector, understanding their point of view and incorporating their suggestions after due evaluation.

In the past decade, Mr Vidyashankar has served the State Government of Karnataka in some important positions namely Chairman BWSSB, Commissioner BDA, Secretary Medical Education, , Principal Secretary IT BT & ST , Chief Electoral Officer and Principal Secretary e-Governance. In all these positions besides running the regular routine operations of the departments with a high degree of efficiency, he has kept the citizens interests paramount and introduced numerous IT based innovations.






As Chairman of BWSSB, as a rare gesture, he had widely publicized his mobile number to enable citizens to contact him with their greivances related to water supply. In BWSSB besides using modern GIS technology in projects, he introduced an IT application for consumer billing and established anytime anywhere bill payment kiosks to facilitate easy payment of water bills by the Citizens of Bangalore.
An Anytime anywhere payment kiosk in Bangalore


As the Chief Electoral officer of Karnataka, besides conducting both the Assembly and Parliamentary elections in a fair and efficient manner he introduced IT applications for efficient management of election process and to enable speedy declaration of election results. Another notable  aspect of his assignment as the CEO of Karnataka was that his strict enforcement of the election code of conduct (  see NDTV Video on EC's crackdown on liquor in Karnataka) , led to numerous seizures of currency notes. Consequently  the value of the seized currency exceeded the expenditure of the State Government on the conduct of the elections. 

In his current role as Principal Secretary e-Governance he has implemented numerous e-Governance programs namely the Karnataka State Wide Area Network , e-procurement platformNemmadi  Human Resource Management System. Under the leadership of Shri Vidyashankar, the Government of Karnataka has also launched several new e-Governance initiatives like establishment of a modern State Data Centre,   computerisation of the State Planning department, Integrated system for Grievance Management and filing of RTI applications, establishment of 5000 Common Service Centres, establishment of services similar to Bangalore one in all important cities of Karnataka.  It is expected that  the tireless efforts of the e-Governance department of Karnataka under the leadership of Shri Vidyashankar will both improve the efficiency of the functioning of the Government as well as ease the lives of common citizens of Karnataka. 



An update to the blog, as of March 8th 2011, Shri Vidyashanker has also been given additional charge of the IT BT & ST department in the Karnataka Government

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