New Delhi, May 8 (IANS): Amid the nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of novel coronavirus, RailTel has successfully completed Phase-2 of implementing NIC e-office 55 days before its target.
RailTel in a statement said that it has successfully completed Phase-2 of implementing NIC e-office. It said that it has started the work of Phase-2 in 46 divisions with 31,637 users in the month of February this year with a target of completion by June 30. "But despite lockdown restrictions, RailTel continued the pace of implementation and completed the work 55 days before deadline," it said.
RailTel further said that a total of 17,981 users of 25 divisions offices were enabled with e-office platform, along with user trainings over video conferences, during the lockdown period. "In two phases, RailTel has enabled 87,629 users across 105 establishments of Indian Railways to handle all their manual file work remotely on digital platform," it said.
According to RailTel officials, till date 1.63 lakh e-files and 5.04 lakh e-receipts have been created, replacing the manual work mode by railway officials.
Earlier, RailTel had successfully completed the Phase-I execution of NIC e-office for 50,000 users in 58 units of Indian Railways.
Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel, on completing the work ahead of its deadline said, "It was big challenge for RailTel team to complete the work during the lockdown phase as resource movement was restricted. RailTel team could not visit the division offices due to the lockdown and the implementation work needed to be done remotely and it was very time consuming as well."
The CMD further said that RailTel team completed the majority of the work remotely in coordination with railway officials over phone and email. "The crucial part of implementation is the training of officials to handle the platform. Since physical presence of RailTel officials and railway users were not possible, the entire training was also done remotely using video conferencing and on call support," he said.
He also said that training videos were prepared so that users can see them again and again to get a grip on the e-office usage procedure. RailTel said that it has also provided virtual private network connections to railway officials for enabling them to process the file works remotely.
A RailTel official said that due to availability of e-office, majority of file work in the national transporter can continue smoothly without physical presence in offices which is a boon in a time of crisis like this.
NIC e-office implementation is a mission mode project (MMP) under the national e-governance programme of the government. According to RailTel officials, the project aims to usher in paperless, more efficient, effective and transparent inter-government and intra-government transactions and processes. It is a cloud-enabled software developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) that is being deployed or hosted from RailTel Tier III certified data centres at Secunderabad and Gurugram.