‘Tatkare still FM on ministry website’

In a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra government that has been boasting about its efforts towards e-governance, Opposition leader in the legislative council Vinod Tawde on Tuesday pointed out the finance department’s website still lists Sunil Tatkare as the finance minister. Mr Tawde made this statement in his budget reply in the presence of current finance minister Ajit Pawar and urged him to take e-governance seriously.
Starting the discussion on the budget in the legislative council, Mr Tawde asked the government to clarify who the finance minister and the minister of state for finance is. “I checked the website of the state finance department (http://finance.mah.nic.in [1]) in the morning. It said that Mr Sunil Tatkare is the finance minister and Vijay Wadettiwar is the MoS for finance,” he said.
Mr Tatkare and Mr Vadettiwar had held finance portfolios in 2010. The finance department website has not been updated for two years since then; the budget speech on the website is also from 2010. No information is available on the site on the budgets of 2011 and 2012.
“I wrote to the national informatics centre (NIC), Pune that manages the government websites. They replied saying that every effort has been made to ensure accuracy of information on the website. This information is supplied by the state finance department and the NIC can’t be responsible for any information that may be incorrect,” Mr Tawde said.
The Opposition leader reminded MLCs that e-governance had been mentioned in the governor’s address to the state legislature as well as in the finance minister’s budget speech.
In his address on the first day of the budget session, governor K. Sankaran-arayanan had said, “My government is focusing on better service delivery to citizens through the Citizen Service Centre. E-governance policy is being implemented for database inter-operability, UID linkages, and setting up Marathi interfaces for all websites and applications, which will provide better citizen services and increase internal efficiencies.” The finance minister will give his reply to the budget discussion on Thursday.