NIC and Covid-19

• 15 Apr 2020

Why in News

According to the National Informatics Centre (NIC), traffic on the websites of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has gone up significantly as people looked for information about Covid-19.

Key Points

• Citizens look up to a source of genuine information on the pandemic.
• Various State centres of the NIC are working with the State governments to develop tracking and management portals to help the State and the district administration to combat the pandemic.
  
  • This is done on similar lines of those already launched in Kerala and Meghalaya.
  • For example, Covid-19 Jagratha: This portal was launched in Kerala.
    
    • It is a one stop platform for the public to avail emergency services and information related to Covid-19 and ensures transparency and quality in public services and welfare measures.
• NIC also highlighted some of the challenges of Work From Home(WFH) such as:
  
  • Configuration Challenges: Configuring Virtual Private Network (VPN) access — core to enabling government employees to work from their homes — to a large number of employees in a span of three or four days.
    
    • A VPN provides online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from a public internet connection.
  • Limited Manpower: Given most of the members at NIC were also working from home, executing change at different levels was difficult with a limited manpower.
  • Logistical Constraints: Availability of laptops or a home desktop for every resource was another challenge.
• Apart from increased traffic on ICMR's and Health Ministry's website, NIC’s videoconferencing service is also being extensively used due to social distancing norms.
  
  • The videoconferencing service used by government officials, including the President and the Prime Minister, besides Union Ministers, Governors and Chief Ministers.

National Informatics Centre

• NIC provides network backbone and e-Governance support to the Central Government, State Governments and UT Administrations.
• NIC has been closely associated with the Government in different aspects of Governance besides establishing a Nationwide State-of-the-Art information and communication technology (ICT) Infrastructure.
• it has also built a large number of digital solutions to support the government at various levels, making the last-mile delivery of government services to the citizens a reality.
• It is under the aegis of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
• It was established in 1976 and is located in New Delhi.

Source: TH