By Animesh Singh

New Delhi, Feb 16 (IANS): The National Informatics Centre (NIC), which provides critical e-governance support and state of the art solutions to the Central government as well as states, has been grappling with acute human resource shortage, as since 2014, almost 1,400 posts are lying vacant there.

According to highly-placed sources, despite several rounds of parleys between the Ministries of Electronics and Information Technology (under which NIC falls) and Finance, the body continues to face shortage of manpower as 1,392 posts have been lying vacant since the past nine years now.

The manpower shortage is all the more acute in the light of the fact that NIC plays a pivotal role in pushing the Centre's ambitious Digital India programme as well as making the last-mile delivery of government services to the citizens a reality.

Also, over the past few years, the number of projects under NIC have increased exponentially and their national roll-outs have necessitated the need for increased manpower resources across these and core services such as data centre, network operations, cyber security and video conferencing among others.

Despite the proposal of filling the 1,392 posts having been cleared by the Ministry of Electronics and IT in 2014 itself, the matter has been hanging fire owing to certain clarifications sought by the Finance Ministry, thus leading to a huge manpower crunch at NIC, sources said.