A 3-Day workshop was held by NIC Himachal Pradesh for the Budget Controlling Officers of the State Government at HP Secretariat, Shimla from 19 to 21 April 2012. A total of 150 officials attended the workshop on online distribution of budget and financial reporting software. Both these Software, eVitran for Online Budget Distribution and eKosh for MIS Reports, have been developed by the NIC Himachal Pradesh.

The participants included, Heads of about 85 Departments, Budget Controlling Officers and their support staff from various Directorates. From the current financial year, the Treasuries have stopped accepting manual sanctions. Now all budget distribution from the Heads  of Departments to their respective Drawing and Disbursing Officers will take place through the eVitran SW only. The eVitran SW picks up Budget from the eBudget Software implemented for the HP Finance Department for generation of various Budget Books. This HoD wise Budget data is used in the eVitran SW for distribution to various Departmental DDOs by the HoDs. The online copy of the distributed budget is used in the Treasuries for controlling the expenditure as the budget distributed to the DDO is matched against the balance budget available to the DDOs for passing the various expenditure bills presented in the Treasuries. 

The eKosh SW is an integrated web-version SW comprising of eVitran, Onilne Treasury Information System and eBudget software. The bills presented by DDOs against the budget distributed to them by the HoDs are booked in the treasuries and MIS reports are generated by matching the expenditure with allocated budget and its distribution. Therefore, reports at Departmental level are available to the Heads of Departments for Monitoring, Control and Reconciliation of their budget. Similarly, all reports are accessible to the respective DDOs also. The most important part is that the Budget Section of the Finance Department uses eKosh reports to find out the departments who are unable to spend their budget and hence these unspent or unused amounts are used to reallocate the budget to other departments. This data is very helpful in preparation of the supplementary budget which is generated automatically through surrender and additional allocation.

Sh. Vijay Kumar Gupta, Principal Systems Analyst and his team of Sh. Munish Sharma and Sh. Manoj Thakur gave detailed presentations on the eVitran and eKosh SW. They also addressed the queries raised by the participants in the interactive workshop. Sh. Kishan Lal Kashyap, Deputy Secretary Finance also addressed the participants and clarified the Finance related issues.