A delegation of MLAs from Gujarat visited the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly on June 9, to learn about the novel e-Vidhan system for paperless proceedings that has been recently adopted by the UP state assembly. Uttar Pradesh is one of the few state legislatures in India that has implemented the digital Vidhan Sabha system, and its last session was completely digitised. Earlier in May, a training programme was organised to familiarise the representatives with the technology. The National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA) is a system for digitising the legislative bodies of all Indian states and the Parliament through a single platform on which house proceedings, starred/unstarred questions and answers, committee reports etc. will be available. Nagaland became the first state to implement NeVA, in March this year. What is the National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA) system? The NeVA system has been developed to make all the work and data related to legislative bodies available online for the use of both citizens and the members of Assemblies. It includes a website and a mobile app. There has been a shift towards digitisation in recent years by the government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned the idea of “One Nation One Legislative Platform” in November 2021. “A digital platform, a portal that not only gives the necessary technological boost to our parliamentary system, but also works to connect all the democratic units of the country,” he said. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla also said this year that the proceedings of all legislatures - both Houses of Parliament and state Assemblies and Legislative Councils - will be available on one platform by 2023. Why is NeVA being introduced? This has been done for streamlining information related to various state assemblies, and to eliminate the use of paper in day-to-day functioning. Its website states: “Several thousand tons of papers would be saved, which in turn would help in saving lakhs of trees annually”. Himachal Pradesh’s Legislative Assembly implemented the pilot project of NeVA in 2014, where touch-screen devices replaced paper at the tables of the MLAs. The then Chief Minister, the Congress party’s Virbhadra Singh, had inaugurated the e-Vidhan system. Though reluctant to learn the new system at the age of 80 years, he later appreciated the technology becoming “more useful for the MLAs”. According to the state government’s website, by adopting the digitised system, the state has annually saved 6,000 trees, and around Rs 15 crore in expenditure. Has this been done elsewhere? Though both Houses of Parliament have not gone fully digital yet, governments world over are heading towards embracing the digital mode. Newsletter | Click to get the day's best explainers in your inbox In December last year, the Government of Dubai became the world’s first government to go 100 percent paperless. It announced all procedures were completely digitised. This, as per a government statement, would cut expenditure by USD 350 million and also save 14-million-man-hours. The US government announced in 2019 that by the end of 2022, all government agencies would stop dealing with paper. What are the challenges? The International Parliamentary Union, an organisation of more than 170 parliaments including India, in a 2018 report outlined some challenges in this regard. Access, particularly for legislators representing rural constituencies, to devices and reliable internet and electricity was an issue. In its 2020 report, it said lack of training and heightened concerns over security are some more recent issues in the road to digitisation.
