Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur inaugurated first e-cabinet at Shimla today, with this Himachal Pradesh becomes first State in the country to make the end to end processing of the cabinet paperless by implementing e-cabinet application. The entire process from initiation of a cabinet memo, approval of the cabinet memo through concerned Secretary, Chief Secretary, concerned Minister and finally by Chief Minister to place in the cabinet has been made online. The date of cabinet meeting will also be notified through this system after the approval of Chief Minister. The cabinet proceedings and recording of the cabinet decisions on respective agenda items and further issuance of advice to the concerned departments will also be done through the e-cabinet application.The IT application for e-cabinet has been developed in-house by the Department of Information Technology and is one of the first such electronic platform in the entire country. About 32 cabinet memos were discussed and processed through this application.The e-cabinet provides for generation of automatic alerts through SMS on real time basis for various stages involved in processing cabinet issues like receipt of cabinet memo, finalization of cabinet meeting, advice received on cabinet memo etc. for various level like Secretaries, Ministers etc.
The application helps in removing information asymmetries by providing more efficient process handling in the form of a dashboard to the concerned Secretaries. The e-cabinet application is also available as a Mobile App on android devices and will be made available on iOS devices soon.The security of the application has been kept at highest priority and features like giving access to specific users on specific computers, automatic generation of alerts on attempt of unauthorized access and maintenance of logs if the user tries to take screenshots of the cabinet notes, not allowing cabinet memo to be downloaded or printed and a secure loging using OTP, etc. All the cabinet memos generated through this application will have special QR code with date & time stamp.The new system will bring greater efficiency in the overall process of conducting a cabinet meeting by removing dependencies which arise due to the physical movement of cabinet memos. It will also bring an added layer of security and confidentiality to cabinet proceedings. Through this application the cabinet memorandums will have a standard template for the ease of decision makers. The system will create institutional memory by safety storing the cabinet memos/proceeding for future references. It will also be possible to monitor the status of implementation of cabinet decision more effectively through this application.