The State must soon build an infrastructure for e-government, as its prime goal is to provide a favourable environment for the supply of services for the benefit of people and the national economy, officials have said.

Officials from ministries, ministerial-level agencies and 45 provinces and cities shared this view at a national symposium on e-government in Ho Chi Minh City on July 16.

Present at the event, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said he was satisfied with the cost-saving aspect of the application of e-government, judging it as one of the successes the e-government programme has achieved.

“The government currently organises online meetings with all 63 provinces and cities with the participation of up to 1,000 officials, and the expense of doing this is dropping sharply. Previously, such a meeting saw the attendance of 120-200 officials from 63 cities and provinces and expenses amounted to 500-800 million VND,” Deputy PM Nhan calculated.

The Deputy PM also pointed to the need to get at the root of the difficulties in building and applying e-government as “the application of information technology helps better the relations between governance and the supply of services for the people.”

The www.hochiminhcity.gov.vn and www.agroviet.gov.vn topped the national ratings for websites and the supply of public administrative services nationwide.

According to Deputy Head of the Ministry of Information and Communication’s IT Application Pham Van Hai, 57 percent of local officials were provided with email addresses for work but 19 percent of them did not use them.

At ministries and ministerial-level agencies, 80 percent of officials were given email addresses in service of their work but 33 percent of them did not put those addresses into use./.