Where was the 25th National E-Governance Conference, 2022 held ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), Katra in Jammu and Kashmir. The 25th National Conference on e-Governance was held on 26 and 27 November 2022 at Katra, the town in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir that serves as the base for the pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi. It was organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, which belongs to the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, together with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in association with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir. The theme was 'Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer'. Dr Jitendra Singh, the Union Minister of State with independent charge of Science and Technology and Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office and for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, inaugurated it, and the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Shri Manoj Sinha, presided over the valedictory session on 27 November. More than sixteen hundred delegates attended, drawn from central ministries and departments and from twenty-eight States and eight Union Territories, and the National Awards for e-Governance were presented in five categories to eighteen initiatives at the central, State and district levels and in academic institutions and public sector undertakings, nine of them gold and nine silver. The choice of venue was itself part of the message: holding the country's principal e-governance conference in a Union Territory that had only recently been reorganised, and in a pilgrimage town rather than a metropolitan centre, was a deliberate signal about where digital administration was expected to reach. Option (4) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Kollam in Kerala did not host this conference. Each option in this question is printed as a place paired with its State, which is a small kindness from the examiner — it means a candidate who remembers the State but not the town, or the town but not the State, can still answer, and it also means that a mismatched pair could in principle be eliminated on geography alone. Here the pairing is accurate, so nothing can be gained that way. A candidate who chooses this option is usually reasoning from Kerala's general reputation in literacy and citizen services rather than from anything about the twenty-fifth conference. That kind of reasoning is a poor guide for an event that moves from year to year, since the venue is chosen through an arrangement between the central departments and a host State government rather than awarded on performance.  (b) Mumbai in Maharashtra is the home-State option, included in a Maharashtra paper for the reason such options are always included: a candidate who does not know the answer will gravitate towards the familiar. Nothing connects the city to the 25th National Conference on e-Governance, which was held at Katra. It is worth naming this instinct so that it can be resisted, because MPSC papers place a Maharashtra option in a great many current affairs questions where the correct answer lies elsewhere, and answering from proximity rather than knowledge is a systematic way of losing marks with a quarter of the marks for the question deducted each time. Where the State genuinely is the answer, there is usually a specific reason that the candidate can name; where no such reason comes to mind, the familiarity of the option is not evidence.  (c) Ahmedabad in Gujarat is the most plausible of the three wrong options, because a large metropolitan centre in a State with a substantial information technology and administrative reform presence is exactly the kind of place a candidate expects a national technology conference to be held. That expectation is what the option trades on, and it is what makes the real answer memorable: the conference went to Katra, a small pilgrimage town in a Union Territory, and not to a metropolis at all. Conferences of this kind rotate among host States, and the choice is a matter of arrangement between the organising central departments and the State or Union Territory government rather than of the host's size. A candidate who has registered that the 25th conference was held in Jammu and Kashmir will not be drawn by any of the metropolitan options offered.

Concept: The National Conference on e-Governance is the annual gathering at which the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology bring together central ministries, State governments, industry and academia to review the country's progress in digital administration and to confer the National Awards for e-Governance. Its subject matter has broadened as the field has: the earliest editions were about computerising records and putting services online, while recent ones have dealt with digital public infrastructure, interoperability between departments, data-driven decision making, grievance redress and the delivery of entitlements to the last mile. The policy background is a sequence of national programmes — the National e-Governance Plan approved in 2006, which built the common service centres, the State data centres and the State wide area networks; the e-Kranti component of Digital India, launched in 2015, which extended the approach across sectors; and the platforms that now carry much of the load, from Aadhaar-enabled authentication and the Unified Payments Interface to DigiLocker, UMANG and the government's e-marketplace. The conference's annual theme is a good short guide to where the emphasis lay in a given year, and 'Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer' places 2022 squarely in the phase of platform-based service delivery.

State PCS 2023 Q97 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q97 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer