 Chennai:
The
pressure to deliver efficient and reliable services to
citizens at a lower cost is what is driving the world
towards e-governance and hence it should be citizen-centric.
Citizens want more at a lower cost. As a result the investments
made in infrastructure (hardware and software) should
be future-proof and should be scalable, said Anthony
OHara, director, government and public services, Oracle
Corporation Asia Pacific, Singapore.
He was speaking
on Preparing for the Future at Connect 2002, the second
international conference on IT Communication, Technologies
and Bioinformatics, organised by the Confederation of
Indian Industry (CII) in Chennai.
According to him once e-governance is put in place, government
officials should be sufficiently empowered to take decisions
for citizens to benefit. Ascertaining the goal of Media
Labs Asia in providing affordable, robust high bandwidth
connectivity to every Indian child, director Michael Best
said his organisation is now working on developing multilingual
operation systems useful for the rural populace.
While calling for greater efforts to bridge the gap that
exists in the availability of quality healthcare between
urban and rural areas Dr P Namperumalsamy, director, Aravind
Eye Hospitals, Madurai, pointed out that 56 per cent of
medicos live in urban areas to serve a mere 10.9 per cent
of the patient population.
According to him the Indian healthcare industry in general
lacks competence in usage of IT, thereby not impacting
favourably the management of patient information and the
spread of tele-medicine across the country.
But
there are islands of excellence. One such field is ophthalmology
where advanced IT is used effectively, and Aravind Tele-ophthalmology
is a shining example. According to him with an ISDN connection,
Aravind Eye Hospital is able to conduct live classes,
video conferencing and real-time patient consultations
in Tamil Nadu.
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