E-payroll inaugurated

SHILLONG, SEPT 3: Meghalaya chief minister Mukul Sangma inaugurated the ‘electronic-payroll system’ for automation of payroll processing and generation of salary bills of the employees of the different departments of the state government.

Making the inaugural speech, Sangma the state has achieved another milestone in its journey to the path of e-governance and joins the group of state governments in India which have implemented the electronic payroll system for automation of payroll processing and generation of salary bills from the employees database.

Informing that a large number of initiatives have been undertaken by central ministries and state governments to usher in an era of e-governance, Sangma underscored that the use of technology for increase efficiency in government service and public service delivery is highly important.

Though creation of employee database itself was a challenging task, Sangma said, “There are reports of some states in India, which has to abandon halfway the initiative they have undertaken and has to restart the process afresh but Meghalaya begun wisely by taking a decision to adopt the best practice of other states.

The initiative to create the employee database started in the state in July 2011 and was completed only in March this year.

According to Sangma, with the electronic payroll now fully integrated with the database, the state is in a position to automate the payroll processing and generation of salary bills of government employees from the databases in treasuries at the district and sub-divisional head quarters in the state.

Sangma was hopeful that with automation in payroll  processing not only the process will rid of errors which the government  encountered in manual system, but the recording of financial transactions shall enable the state to have the actual expenditure on salary, either DDO-wise, department-wise, district-wise or the state figure readily available as and when it occurs.

Sangma also said that the state would be able to assess and forecast future expenditure on salary and plan or commit expenditure towards development outlays.

Sangma informed that the challenge now is to ensure that the database is dynamic to have an updated reliable databank of employees, which would be useful to the government in many aspects, including assessment of the quality of manpower and necessary capacity building for increase efficiency in government service and public service delivery, and also in generation of an e-service book for prompt settlement of pensionary benefit of government employees.

Sangma congratulated the state finance department and the entire team involved in the project including the officials of NIC Pune and NIC Shillong who were involved in the development of the application for the employee database and its integration with e-payroll system.- By Our Reporter