National Meet on Grassroot Informatics 08-10 February 2018, New Delhi
VIVID’18, the 2nd season of the National Meet on Grassroot Informatics organized by NIC was held in New Delhi at India Habitat Centre during 8th to 10th February 2018. An extensive platform to 240 NIC District Officials from across the country to share their knowledge, interact & leverage each other’s experience and best practices VIVID’18 was organized with the theme, ‘Cyber Security and Innovation’.
The three-day event was inaugurated by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon’ble Union Minister of Electronics & IT and Law & Justice, GoI, in the presence of Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Smt. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC, Smt. Rama Nangpal, DDG, NIC, Shri G.K. Gaur, DDG, NIC, Shri D.C. Misra, DDG, NIC, Smt. Nandita Chaudhary, DDG, NIC on dais, witnessed by an elite audience consisting of delegates, awardees and media personnel.
Two innovative products developed by NIC were also launched by the Hon’ble Minister. These were S3WaaS i.e. ‘Secure, Scalable and Sugamya Website as a Service’ and ‘Centre of Excellence for Application Security’ (CoEAS).
VIVID 2018 ceremonial lighting of lamp by Hon’ble Union Minister, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad
Praising the efforts of NICians, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad gave a challenge to all DIOs to use S3WaaS to create their separate websites in a time bound manner. S3WaaS is a website generating framework to develop, configure, deploy and manage secure, scalable and accessible websites without much effort and technical knowhow.
As security of cyberspace and various innovations would remain the main aspects of Digital World, Hon’ble Minister suggested to make low cost Cyber Security products which should be relevant for India as well as for the world. He urged DIOs to have innovative thinking and advised to play a pivotal role in creating technology solutions. He stated that NIC officers should get more exposure in the emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, Internet of Things (IoT), Data Analytics, etc. or can further make innovations.
Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad encouraged NIC being the backbone of technology, to feel proud for their products such as e-Visa, e-Procurement, e-Office, e-Hospital, e-Prison, Open Data, Soil Health Card and National Scholarship Portal. He emphasised and stated the importance of capacity building, technical awareness and pro-activeness and further discussed his plan to make six crore people digital literate, out of which one crore target has already been achieved. In order to encourage officers at grass root, awards were presented to NIC DIOs for their exemplary work in the five categories including Emerging Technologies, Innovation in Service Delivery, Mobile Applications, Web Applications and Data Visualisation. Three awards were also presented for “Swachhta Pakhwada Abhiyaan”.
The first session of VIVID18 was attended by Senior Government Officials, In-charge MeitY, NIC and discussed various important aspects related to ICT. Around 400 officers, from all over India, participated in this meet. Technology sessions were conducted on different topics such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics. Open sessions for technical discussions were held to address the queries raised by DIOs related to various deployments and other critical issues which the DIOs faces at work front. Head of groups of key areas took part as panelists to address various technical questions and queries covering technologies, platforms and services.
Dignitaries at the vibrant dais set for the event
Audience at the inaugural ceremony
On day 2, sessions were organised to focus on significant subjects like Cyber Threats & Counter measures, Cyber Security, Understanding Enterprise Architecture, Scalable Web Application Architecture, Database Scalability etc. In order to encourage DIOs further, a session took place as a platform to share their
“Let us commend the silent NIC, which is giving digital backbone to the entire Government. There is a need for greater inspiration to do better & the best way would be inculcating innovative spirit. Digital Governance of India has the footprint of NIC.” — Ravi Shankar Prasad Union Minister Electronics & IT and Law & Justice
“With human presence, expertise infrastructure, there is a massive resource for Central Government, State Government and even Local Government to the extent that we have this huge facility and it is NIC which is an in-house resource, so we don’t have unnecessary apprehension.” — Ajay Sawhney Secretary, MeitY
“NIC, the flag bearer of IT services and infrastructure in the Government sector has been in the forefront of the e-Governance initiatives across Centre and State Governance. There is a huge potential and lots of good work is being done by our District Officers.” — Neeta Verma Director General, NIC
Release of S3WaaS (above) and DIOs being felicitated (below) for their exemplary achievements
Shri D.C. Misra, DDG Shri G.K. Gaur, DDG Smt. Rama Nangpal, DDG Smt. Nandita Chaudhary, DDG
achievements. Success stories from the States of Arunachal, Himachal, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal etc. were showcased.
VidyaKosh’, a Learning Management System (LMS) for NIC officials and a ‘Handbook of Core NIC Services’ which provides an overview of all the core services of NIC were launched by Smt. Neeta Verma, DG, NIC during the occasion. LMS helps officers to make use of the latest digital Technologies in their day-to-day activities and upgrading their skills to provide better services to the citizens.
The meet was concluded by a visit of participants to the National Data Centre, Shastri Park, New Delhi. During the visit, DIOs attended the sessions conducted by various project heads of NIC on ICT Infrastructure. Presentations were also made by concerned senior officers on NICNET, the largest network across the nation, National Knowledge Network (NKN), the largest research & education network globally, NIC-CERT and the NIC Data Centres.
Glimpse of the technical seminars and presentations held during the 3 days of VIVID’18