Launch of the first edition of Janaagraha Urban G2C Awards
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1. PROOF has been chosen as a World Bank best practice in the Asia-Pacific
2. It has been named by the UNDP as a successful accountability idea.
Launch of the first edition of Janaagraha Urban G2C Awards
Janaagraha launched the Janaagraha Urban G2C Awards program to benchmark citizen-centric e-Governance of city governments in India on Monday 23 January 2012 in New Delhi, under the aegis of P.R.O.O.F, its public disclosure and accountability initiative. The Jury for the G2C Awards is led by Sam Pitroda, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations. Other jury members include Arun Maira, Member-Planning Commission, Government of India, Dr M Ramachandran, Former Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman, Info Edge (India) Limited (of naukri.com fame) and Dr Anil Menon, President-Globalisation and Smart Connected Communities, Cisco Systems.
The Awards seek to measure and benchmark the quality and the extent of urban e-Governance in India and thereby envisions catalysing a vibrant, transparent and participative e-Governance culture in urban India. The G2C Awards Jury would evaluate and rank websites of the top 28 cities of India along with 7 international cities as global peer benchmarks and consequently recognise city governments that have outperformed their peers in delivering high quality governance to their citizens using their websites as a channel. The parameters that the Awards Jury would use comprise Transparency and Accountability, Online services, Citizen Voice and User Experience. This effort recognises the trend that globally, websites and online media have become customer/citizen-centric and in many instances assumed the avtar of social networks.
The curtain-raiser of scores of international cities placed New York at 82, London at 80 and Sydney at 74 on a scale of 100.
Whilst the Government of India and various State Governments are making big-budget spends on ICT and e-Governance through initiatives such as the National e-Governance Plan, the G2C Awards stand out as a program that doesn’t just reward or recognise innovation and superlative efforts but instead the real outcomes of such spends and efforts on the lives of urban citizens. By including international cities in its ambit, the Awards also lends itself as a platform for sharing of global best practices in urban e-Governance.
The G2C Awards 2012 function and release of the Janaagraha G2C Awards Report 2012 is likely to be scheduled during late March-April 2012. Watch this space for more!
