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State govt to deliver services via WhatsApp

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Chennai: Tamil Nadu govt has decided to deliver its services through WhatsApp application, state information technology and digital services minister P Thiaga Rajan said in the assembly on Friday.

Public can get citizen services, utility bill payments, services currently provided under e-sevai (e-governance) through the messaging platform, making it easy and fast to access and the public can avoid visits to e-seva centres while reducing the cost of delivery for the govt.

The govt announced the introduction of an e-KYC application and web platform for verification and implementation of govt welfare schemes.

He said the govt will launch a ‘Deep Tech Hardware Product Design Scheme' to support hardware design, manufacturing and value addition by startups.

The scheme will support design and commercialisation efforts through a public private partnership model with 75% subsidy and a cap of 15 lakh.

Students taking Tamil literature and linguistics will be taught relevant advanced technological skills including natural language processing, machine translation, and speech recognition.

Thiaga Rajan said IT parks are with the industries department for a long time and his comments about fund allocation for the department have been misinterpreted. He said that IT gets inadequate funds for the past 18 years and this is an issue across party lines.

He further said, "Efforts are being made to develop software programs, applications and language models in Tamil. Similarly, we have signed an agreement with the Union govt's Bhashini AI (project). We are taking efforts to prepare Tamil for the AI era."

Tamil Nadu FibreNet Corporation's project to connect all villages in the state is completed 93% with 11,639 village panchayats out of 12,525 getting the connection, he said.

"So far 2,000 govt offices receive internet through this and parallel efforts are made for last-mile connectivity for the public. Soon internet would be provided to individual homes with 100 Mbps speed for 200," he said.

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