Awareness & Sensitization workshop for Ministry of Home Affairs Officials

The GIGW Team conducted a Awareness & Sensitization workshop on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 for approximately 50+ officials from 4 of the 20 Divisions of Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), viz., Administration, Naxal Management, Police-II and Union Territories Divisions.

The workshop began with an inaugural address by Shri Kumar Alok, JS (Coordination & Public Grievances), who is also the Web Information Manager for the Ministry of Home Affairs Website. Shri Kumar encouraged the participants to make the most of the workshop by understanding how their daily official responsibilities need to be conducted in a citizen-centric manner to help Indian citizens benefit from the information & services available on the MHA website.

Participants engaged keenly and expressed commitment towards continuous improvement by seeking empirical clarity on the effectiveness of functionality such as Search on MHA website. They made the session more interactive by sharing how they perceived quality of other Govt. websites that they use frequently, thus, showing their inclination to subject their own department website to critical scrutiny with the intent to keep enhancing it further. The participants also expressed their concern over the issues of security in transactional websites and on ensuring the authenticity of website by the use of accepted domain names like gov.in and nic.in

Shri Anurag Kumar, Section Officer IT, added further that considering the motivating response for the session, more sessions would be conducted for officials of the remaining Divisions to enable them also to come up to speed on their awareness levels about GIGW & the role compliance to these guidelines can play in empowering Indian citizens & other MHA stakeholders.

The workshop concluded with a commitment from MHA to initiate the process to get MHA website certified by STQC for GIGW compliance.