 Welcome to Geneva and Wissis Forum 2022 and I'm delighted to be joined now by Comrade Sangwa, who is Chief Minister of the Government of Meghalaya. Chief Minister, welcome. Thank you so much. You've just flown in and you've been nominated. That's right. We have been nominated and we are one of the top five champions in the use of ICT in governance and development. So we're waiting for the results and we're hoping that we win ultimately. And tell me about the project. It's a project that's quite simple and it really looks at ensuring that different departments in the government sometimes tend to work in silos and don't talk to each other and also at the same time how these departments then further provide services at the grassroot level to the public. This entire project, which we are calling the Meghalaya Enterprise Architecture Project, really brings a full blueprint into that project and allows departments to talk to each other and at the end also the department and the government to allow the services to flow to the people. So that's really what it is all about and if you flip the coin it ultimately leads to the sustainable development goals being achieved. So really the point is here how the governance and how use of technology can improve the overall services to the people and in the process achieve the sustainable development goals. So did you implement a specific sort of IT project to help with communication or was it simple? So basically what it is it's actually a complete architecture of the entire governance and we have multiple services. We have over 1000 services that we provide within departments, interdepartmental and to the people. So this enterprise architecture allows all these services to be connected and therefore what happens is at the end we're able to perform and deliver in a much more efficient manner and we're able to provide the services in a much more quicker manner to the people. As I said ultimately achieving the sustainable development goals also in the process. So it just emphasizes the importance of collaboration and communication? Absolutely and the use of technology in that entire process and what we have started off you know a simple example I can give you is that one part of this project is something which we call e-proposals. So traditionally a proposal that we used to put up by particular department could take anytime between 45 to 60 days for the proposal to process and to be cleared simply because there were multiple layers in it. Now what we do is using technology the same process which took 45 days is to be completed in the manner of 2 to 3 days. So that's the kind of time we save and the overall efficiency that goes up. So now imagine this multiplied into every single department multiplied into every service we provide to the people at the end and you know if you look at the country in India we have a lot of areas which are very far-flung and not connected and administration is not within the reach of the general public in some areas. Hence again technology helps us to reach out to these people and save that entire time and also the effort for them to get the services that they need. So all this entire enterprise architecture encompasses all these aspects into governance and delivery and development at the grassroot level. Yeah and that's really interesting we had a really shocking statistic today which was 46% of learners who were impacted by COVID and couldn't go to school and not connected to the internet. That's right. Yeah that's true and in fact in our country also we had similar challenges but then again with the use of technology and with the use of connectivity though we were not able to reach all because there are some parts which still don't have the required bandwidth and the connectivity but to a large extent we were able to overcome that because of the fact that we had technology with us to reach out and have online classes even in rural areas of the nation. And what are you most looking forward to your time here at WSIS Forum 2022? Well I look forward to really listening to others and seeing what other champions have done in their field what other countries and other states are doing. I think it's a great platform and an opportunity to learn from each other. Our challenges might be different in nature but sometimes the different technologies that are there which we may not have thought of I think would really allow us to learn more. So I really look forward to what others have done and to learn from the others. Chief Minister thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much.