70% Govt employees watching YouTube videos in office are choking e-office project. Here’s how

Indian Government’s ambitious plan to convert its ministries into e-office has hit a hurdle. Two big hurdles are excessive YouTube videos viewing in offices that clog the bandwidth and small computer monitors allotted to junior officials that hamper their ability to see digitized files.

The issue surfaced at a workshop when the Rural Development Ministry, which became the first one to become an e-office, was holding a session on how to digitize files and move to a paper-less office and showed them how to scan a 700-page file in just six minutes and how an e-file was retrieved from the system in about five minutes.

During the briefing, Rural Development Ministry Joint Secretary Santosh Mathew highlighted two issues in his presentation.

"Sufficiency of bandwidth is an issue. It is said that 30 per cent of people in government work and 70 per cent watch videos on You-Tube, choking the bandwidth. Please tell your officials that logs can be pulled out to detect who is watching how much YouTube, this e-office will not succeed if this is not checked,” said Mathew, adding “Physical files have two sides - correspondence and the noting side. On a small monitor, a junior official is not able to see it properly. Senior officers don't have this problem as they have large monitors.”

He added it was a challenge to encourage the junior officials to adopt e-office since they will end up being monitored. "Rajpath has the most costly real estate in the world. It will be shame if we use it to store paper," Mathew said.

(Image Credits: ET)