Shri Arjun Munda to Virtually Receive SKOCH Challenger Award Conferred to Ministry of Tribal Affairs For E-Governance

Shri Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Tribal Affairs will virtually receive “SKOCH Challenger Award” conferred to Ministry of Tribal Affairs for e-Governance tomorrow for its IT-led initiatives and other transformational initiatives  leading to outcome-based performance improvement. Shri Deepak Khandekar, Secretary, Ministry of Tribal Affairs will be present.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) has taken up several transformational initiatives recently.  It has digitalised all the processes leading to paperless office, monitoring is data driven, communication to states is online report system and is analytics based and a performance dashboard is updated on a real time basis. There is transparency with tribal related  data available in public domain across the following: Performances Dashboard, Prayas-PMO Dashboard, NITI Aayog and DBT Mission.

Shri Arjun Munda said, “ There is a dramatic change in our approach to policy making and action. We want evidence-based policy making which will be realistic and address the problems of tribals at the grass root. Also, for transformational changes, we are adopting the digital route which ensures transparency and ensures speed of delivery”.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has digitalised the entire scholarship release process. Beneficiary data is available online and 19 States/UTs are sending data using web services and 12 on National Scholarship Portal (NSP). All 5 scholarship schemes have been digitalised as per DBT Mission mandate. 13 schemes are on Ministry dashboard, 6 initiatives are on Prayas PMO dashboard. Making the entire scholarship release process online has enabled 64 lakh beneficiaries to receive scholarships directly into their accounts through DBT. The availability of data on PM Dashboard, MoTA and DBT dashboard adds to the transparency.

Ice-Stupa is a unique project to solve water problem in Ladakh region which faces shortage due to  climate change. It is a way to store frozen melt water in the winter which can be used during the spring sowing season. The structure is built comprising of locally found material with large water retention capacity, which looks like Stupa. “26 such Ice-Stupas were establish in 2019-20, which stored  about 60 million litre of water. More than 35 villages have been benefitted from this already. The projects is owned by the community and is scaling up to include another 25 Stupas”.

Also Swasthya portal is one -stop solution presenting health and nutrition status of the tribal population in India. This is facilitating evidence-based policy making.