Kerala Wins India Today’s Best Big State Award in Governance Category

India Today’s ‘State of States Study’, which closely monitors the performance of India’s 28 states and 7 union territories across a wide range of categories including agriculture, health, education, governance, investment, macro-economy, consumer markets and infrastructure, has adjudged Kerala the best in governance . Chief Minister V.S Achuthandan received the Best Big State Award in Governance from Mohammad Ansari, the Vice-President of India, at the ‘States of States’ function organised by the India Today group at Hotel Hyatt Regency at New Delhi.

Much of the credit for winning the prestigious Best Big State Award in governance has been attributed to Kerala’s Chief Minister, V. S. Achuthanandan. Kerala’s growth rate was 6.9 per cent in the year 2008-09 as against a national rate of 6.7 per cent. The CM has built on early investments in education and health and also managed to keep the crime rate low. V.S. has proved that he is not a “conservative Stalinist trapped in outdated slogans” when he took over the State’s IT portfolio and tripled the sector’s export earnings to Rs 3,000 crore in the four years between 2006 and 2010. This is the highest growth rate in the country. In the last two years alone, an investment of more that Rs. 10000 crore has been made in the state’s IT sector.

Kerala is the first state in the country to take an initiative for IT exports. The Technopark at Thiruvananthapuram, inaugurated in the year 1991 was the first of its kind in India. Kerala did not want to limit IT development or its benefits to its cities and is now in the process of setting up IT parks in different parts of the state. A record growth in Kerala’s IT infrastructure can be witnessed with the commissioning of 10 new IT parks. IT exports have grown by 300 per cent.

The IT policy of the state aims at creating a knowledge society. Initiatives like ‘IT@School’ and ‘Speed IT’ will no doubt enable Kerala to become a major IT force in the nation. Other ICT initiatives of the state include Computing for Common People- made possible through regional language computing and Open Source IT Training Module for Blind People.

There have also been a host of other E-governance IT services such as Data Centres, File Tracking System, Office Map-based Service gateways, Mobile Governance, E-Procurement, Video Conferencing, Service and Payroll System Kerala (SPARK), Digital Workflow System and India’s first State-level Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

source: keralait.org