4-Year India eOffice Story: Sixfold Jump to over 26 L eFiles, Only 10 L Paper Files in Govt Now - News18

A few days after the abrogation of Article 370 sections in Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, V Srinivas, then additional secretary in the department of administrative reforms, was asked to lead a delegation to the erstwhile state where the annual Darbar Movement came up as the most pressing issue. This is one highlight of India’s eOffice story that is convincing the government’s Babudom to give up its love for physical files and file notings and move to e-files that can be signed digitally and approved much faster for policy decisions in the government. Growth story Srinivas in his lecture at the IIPA said he had since 2018 witnessed the “linear expansion” in the number of files on eOffice from 4,00,000 to 26,36,116 in 2022. Srinivas said the government also approved policy amendments in the Central Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure 2019, making it possible to issue virtual private networks to deputy secretaries of the Government of India and digital signature certificates up to section officers. Myth-buster The e-file system rolling out in the DRDO this year was a milestone as it “shattered the notion that field offices with heavy project files could not handle paper on e-file system”, Srinivas said.