A part of its e-governance initiative, the Andhra Pradesh government is introducing e-procurement transactions soon. There are approximately five lakh industrial units in Andhra Pradesh and the state government is procuring products worth Rs 10,000 crore every year.

Initially, the state government would be launching e-procurement transactions for the benefit of five major departments, i.e. AP State Road Transport Corporation, medical and health, irrigation, information technology and roads & buildings, according to J Satyanarayana, principal secretary, IT&C department of the state government.

Speaking at the sidelines of the second India IT Forum, Satyanarayana said that the five departments alone carry an annual e-procurement transaction of nearly Rs 2,000 crore. This initiative is being taken in association with Commerce One India.

According to Vivek Agarwal, chief operating officer and president of Commerce One India, the company is ready with software for the initiative. As per an agreement with the state government, Commerce One has been asked to set up the e-procurement software solution for 150 government departments in a span of three years.

Commerce One has so far invested Rs 5 crore during the last nine months and is expected to get 0.24 percent as commission from every successful transaction between the state government and the vendor.

The objective of e-procurement and e-governance initiatives is to smoothen the government to business (G2B) and government to citizen (G2C) road. “This can be made possible by using state-of-the-art technology to change the art of governance,” said Vivek Kulkarni, IT & biotechnology secretary to the Karnataka government.

Paneer Selvan, director, Central Service Government of Singapore, said, “The challenges of governance in the information age include balancing the needs of people, government employees, vendors, organisational change and implementation problems.”

Providing citizen-centric government services, reforming processes and providing the right kind of leadership can overcome these challenges, said Selvan.

Nirmaljeet Singh Kalsi, director-cum-secretary IT, Punjab government said that services to citizens will change more in the next 10 years than in the preceding 50 years. He added, “To meet this challenge governments must improve their processes of governance. They can do this by improving efficiency, transparency and objectivity.”

E-governance helps in modernising government functions. “It focuses on better services for citizens and businesses and more effective use of the government’s information resources. Implementing it will create an environment for the transformation of government activities by the application of e-business methods throughout the government. The strategy challenges all government organisations to innovate,” says Col. M Vijay Kumar, director, Software Technologies Parks of India (STPI), Hyderabad.