The Meghalaya Legislative Assembly will soon become paperless and all its legislative transactions will be on digital platforms including information exchange with the State government departments.
The State Assembly will implement National eVidhan Application (NeVA), a mission mode project for digital legislatures to make the functioning of all legislative houses in the country paperless.
NEVA has been developed on the theme of ‘One Nation – One Application’. NeVA is transforming all State legislatures into ‘Digital Houses’ so as to enable them to transact all businesses on digital platforms. Even information exchange with the State government departments will be in digital mode.
NeVA is not only bringing greater synergy, coordination, transparency and accountability between the legislature and the executive in a State, but also across the states. Keeping in view the latest technological development in the field of ICT, maximum use of artificial intelligence and internet of things (IOT) has been made to make NeVA a robust IT product.
Since, the process involving the functioning of all legislatures are similar except some minor variations, enabling provisions have been incorporated in NeVA for onboarding it by the two Houses of Parliament also.
To adopt NeVA, Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) have been signed with 18 states comprising of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Sikkim, Punjab, Odisha, Bihar (both Houses), Gujarat, Puducherry, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh (both Houses).
Out of these 18 states, Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) have been submitted by13 states which included Meghalaya, Nagaland, (5) Manipur, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Sikkim, Punjab, Odisha, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh for sanction of funds.
All but Arunachal Pradesh have been sanctioned necessary funds as per the requirement of respective legislature for implementation of the NeVA project.
All these legislatures have also begun the procurement of various devices as per their requirement following the respective procurement procedure and general financial rules/regulations and guidelines without any interference by the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs.
As a special achievement, Bihar Legislative Council became the first House in the country to transit to NeVA platform completely on November 25, 2021 and conducted the Winter Session, 2021on the NeVA platform in paperless mode. They will also be conducting the ensuing Budget Session, 2022 on the NeVA platform.
Odisha Assembly also presented their budget 2021 in paperless mode using NeVA. Other Assemblies are also adopting the same path and during next few months with the completion of procurement of IT devices and installation of necessary infrastructure in and around the houses, noticeable changes would be visible in the functioning of all state legislatures.
Keeping in view the federal structure and autonomy of the State and Union Territory legislatures, all are being encouraged to adopt NeVA.
NeVA is a Unicode compliant software having provision for easy access to various documents in the Assembly like list of questions, list of business, reports etc bilingually – English and any regional language.
Technical and financial provisions have been made under NeVA for creating digital archives of entire legacy data and making it available to users including MLAs and MLCs and citizens in easy to search mode through mobile App and website as well.
