India has long been a torch bearer for promoting cooperation among countries on the areas of development such as science and technology that enables the involvement of all countries’ citizens in the arrangement to lead enriched lives.
In furtherance of India's collaborative external affairs policy, an agreement between the National Informatics Centre, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), the Republic of India and eGovernment System Development Centre, the Ministry for Development of Information Technologies and Communications, the Republic of Uzbekistan was signed on cooperation in the area of e-Governance on September 28, 2018 at New Delhi for a period of 3 years. From NIC, Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General and from Uzbekistan, Mr. Olimjon Umariov, First Deputy Minister, signed the agreement in the august presence of Hon’ble Union Minister of Electronics & IT and Law & Justice, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad and H.E. Mr. Shuhrat Sadikov, Minister for Development of Information Technologies and Communications, Uzbekistan.
This agreement sets forth the framework for cooperation between both the organisations in the development of e-Government through exchange of experience, research, knowledge and modern methods and improving public administration broadly in following areas:
••Knowledge and experience sharing on emerging trends, practices, and prospective view on e-Government necessary for further development of e-Government and policy implications
••Cooperation on extending public services, enhancing transparency, promoting decentralised planning and management, resulting in better efficiency and accountability, to accelerate delivery of e-services in the country while optimising ICT spending of the Government
••Establish cooperation in the implementation and roll out of NIC generic configurable eGovernance products/ services in various sectors
••Knowledge sharing on standards and policies for an effective implementation of e-Government systems such as enterprise solution architecture, interoperability, metadata and open government data. ••Develop joint projects within the framework of e-Government for further expansion of fields of cooperation ••Sharing best practices in organisational management based on successful experiences of NIC ••Sharing expertise in other areas of mutual interest, related to e-governance falling within the scope of this agreement
The terms of the agreement are proposed to be achieved by extending support ranging from planning to improving of online public services by adopting Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) techniques for sustainable outcomes. Infrastructure shall be enhanced based on state-of-the-art cloud technologies, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Storage as a Service (STaaS), and existing resources will be optimally utilised after learning from India's experience in the setup and operation of data centres.
Study tours, training sessions, seminars, and webinars are envisaged to be conducted for sharing knowledge with the Government of Uzbekistan and public sector officials. Reciprocal exchange of publications and scientific research outputs is also envisaged to help meet the desired objectives of the agreement.