City govt to save paper, go online

The Delhi government has initiated a paperless system to circulate information. Primarily, the initiative is focused on Directorate of Information and Publicity’s paper-clipping circulation system but the officials are planning to practice it on a big scale.

 If the result of the trial is satisfactory and hassle-free, the department officials are planning to apply paperless system in the Assembly session. The initiative will save at least 500 trees in a year.

“Wastage of paper has become a big issue in the offices. Every day, the DIP has to circulate newspaper clippings of Hindi, English, Urdu and Punjabi language dailies to the Delhi government’s departments. It circulates files of 100 pages to 40 departments. This takes so much of time and a lot of paper gets wasted. We have initiated a trial run of online newspaper clippings,” said a senior DIP official.

In the manual system, about 10 officials had to work for hours to gather news clippings and making photocopies. 

But in the online system, only few officials scan the clippings only once and mail it to all of the department heads, he said.

If the initiative works smoothly, the officials are planning to apply it on the Assembly sessions.

“During each proceeding of an Assembly session, thousands of A3 and A4 size papers are used. At many occasions, we had to ferry the copies of agenda, reports and other documents in a mini-truck,” he said. 

“We are planning to only generate 70-80 hard copies of agenda and send rest of the copies online. It will take a little effort and save a lot of paper and trees,” he added.The official estimates of saving about 500 trees per year if they completely apply the online information system in government’s functioning.

“We will become the first state of India to follow such environment-friendly rules in office related work,” he added.