To make websites user-friendly, Centre eyes the cloud 12-24

To make websites user-friendly, Centre eyes the cloud

All department websites to be available in local languages  

In a bid to make its websites more friendly and transparent to citizens, the Centre will soon migrate its websites to open source and making the contents available in local languages as well.

This is part of the ‘Digital India’ campaign and a step forward to improve Government websites, a senior official at Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), told BusinessLine.

Better interface

He said the look and feel of the websites would be much better and translation of contents will be available from English to a local language or vice-versa.

“We have already started the framework to migrate all the Central and State Governmental Departments’ websites and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is working on a fast track on this. Out of around 100 websites, NIC has already done around 50 sites, which are on open source now,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

He said NIC is also working on hosting the websites on cloud model as well and may involve multi-national companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, to keep the data on their servers.

“The NIC has developed the templates for the contents and apart from keeping the database, it may also take some help from few MNCs because it is a major migration,” the official said.

In order to utilise and harness the benefits of cloud computing, the Government is also embarking upon an important initiative – ‘GI Cloud’ which has been coined as ‘MeghRaj’.

Roadmap

The initiative is to evolve a strategy and implement various components including governance mechanism to ensure proliferation of Cloud in Government.

To adopt all these plans, the Government recently also held a conference on ‘Open Data and Open API (application programme interface)’, where in Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the digital world has the potential to change the mindset and empower equally the under- privileged.

As of now, Government has published over 12,000 data sets released by 81 Ministries/ Departments/ States (64 Central and 17 State departments) participating under this initiative.

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