e-States: #18 West Bengal

West Bengal being the second most densely populated state, with pressure on its scarce land resource, the IT and ITeS industry provides the high employment potential.

The government has initiated various measures to take the fruits of the information technology to the common man by identified various services as mission mode projects, apart from certain integrated projects, where the citizen-eNagariks-would be the beneficiary. These include land records, road transport, property registration, agriculture, treasuries, municipalities, gram panchayats, commercial taxes, and police departments. Other projects that come under e-governance would be the e-commerce, e-business, common service centers, and setting-up of the EG gateway, e-courts, and e-procurement.

West Bengal is the third largest economy in India and it is now the third fastest growing economy among all the states and UTs of India because its current prices, the gross state domestic product (GSDP) was about $ 114.7 bn in 2011-12. The average annual GSDP growth rate from 2004-05 to 2011-12, was about 13.8%.

The state has worked aggressively to improve its e-Governance image. A number of projects such as telemedicine project, smart card based driving license, agri-portal, agricultural integrated management system are some of the project where the government have tried to offer better and fast services to citizens. Besides, the state has progressed in terms of integrated land records, e-District, roll out of CSCs, etc.