A keynote address on “Digital Transformation in Times of Pandemic” was delivered by Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC at the National Governance Virtual Summit held on 19th June 2020, hosted by ETGoverment. It is a one-stop platform for key government officials, industry, and academia to discuss how to continue the public services in the time of the pandemic.

In the address, Dr. Verma described how technology has played a significant role in planning, management, and execution of measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. She further highlighted the role of NIC as a technology partner of the Government providing state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure, digital platforms, and services connecting citizens to the Government. NIC has established a holistic digital landscape to extend ICT support systems to the Government and Citizens.

NIC’s robust and scalable cloud infrastructure has supported most of the platform and services function seamlessly during the COVID-19 period. During the lockdown period, many of the services provided by NIC such as eOffice, VPN, messaging, and video conferencing witnessed an exponential rise in their demand and usages. Provisioning strong and scalable infrastructure has helped NIC to cater to the ever-growing need of such services during the lockdown period thereby enabling work from home solutions to ensure the continuity of business and services provided by Governments at Central, State and District levels. 

Dr. Neeta Verma emphasized that enabling technology solutions would help to ensure business continuity during situations like COVID-19. Suggesting on post COVID scenario, she stressed the need of enabling more and more applications on Cloud technology, API interfaces for their easy integration with other systems, use of Artificial Intelligence, and Analytics.