Itanagar: The chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, launched “e-Abkari” on Thursday, an online portal of the state tax, excise and narcotics department, which enables seamless online communication between all excise officers across the state, all licensees, administrative departments and enable other stakeholders.
Khandu congratulated the department on its new initiative in line with the government’s mission to digitize governance and paid tribute to the state unit of the National Informatics Center (NIC), which, together with the West Bengal unit of the NIC, has built the portal based on the successful model of the West created Bengal, the first state in the country, launches e-Abkari.
He was optimistic that by using the excise department online, transparency would not lose any income.
“This is a step towards e-governance under our motto ‘reform, performance and transformation'”, he stated.
Khandu reiterated his commitment to transparent, inclusive and humane governance of the people of the state and said: “We believe in less government and more governance.”
However, he urged the department to give top priority to the training of its officials, especially those in the excise wing who deal with the portal. He called on the NIC to help the department build the capacity of officials.
“This is a simple business initiative. Therefore, officials need to be well trained in order to achieve the goal, ”he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Khovna Mein, who is also responsible for taxes, excise duties and narcotics, said the government intends to make extensive use of information technology to address citizen complaints through web-based applications.
‘The main motive behind this is to simplify business transactions, transparency and increase sales by eliminating any possibility of lost sales. There has to be a minimal human interface to time-bound services, ”he said.
Mein also announced that import and transport authorization modules will be implemented in phase 1 of the project. The beneficiaries of the project would be licensees, departments and citizens.
At the beginning, the Prime Minister gave the first transport permit to one of the private companies that imported packaged spirits produced on site by the e-Abkari portal.
The e-Abkari portal is the state government’s reform initiative that uses state-of-the-art technology to carry out various activities of the excise tax wing.
This is done using workflow-based systems hosted on the state excise tax portal https://www.eabkari.arunachal.gov.in.
The e-Abkari will have various modules that will be introduced gradually.
Among these, licensees tracking, trademark management, licensing, issuing permits / IDs, assigning branches, monitoring enforcement, managing excise stocks, and integrating with the Treasury are the most important features.
The full rollout of the project will have a lasting impact on excise tax collection by checking revenue leaks and monitoring the activities of individual licensees, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries in real time.
Tracking the movement of all excise items, timely and prompt provision of services, and verification of sales of illegal and counterfeit products that are dangerous to human health and safety are all carried out.
The opening ceremony was also attended by Liromoba MLA and advisor to the Minister of Taxes, Excise Duties and Narcotics Nyamar Karbak, Chief Secretary Naresh Kumar, officials of the department and representatives of the NIC.
The Deputy Director General of the NIC and the Excise Duty Commissioner of West Bengal also took part in the start practically from Delhi and Kolkata, respectively.