WP vehicle revenue licences to be issued on line

Gayan KANCHANA

Sri Lanka country portal www.srilanka.lk and eRevenue Licence facility was officially inaugurated by Secretary to the President Lalith Weeratunga at the Western Province Department of Motor Traffic yesterday.

The issuing of new vehicle revenue licences in the Western Province will take place online. eRevenue Licence is a facility under the Lanka Gate Project put in place by the Re-engineering Government Program of the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) which implements the eSri Lanka initiative.

Speaking at the event, Weeratunga said: "Because of these new facilities under the 'e-Sri Lanka Development initiative citizens can apply for the Revenue Licence even from their households which is very simple to implement. "IT literacy rate of this country in 2004 was below 10 percent. President Mahinda Rajapaksa was the Prime Minister at that time and IT came under the Prime Minister's purview. We have gone a long distance under a concept and direction of the President during the past few years," the secretary said.

"IT is particularly important for a country's development. We see IT as a tool to improve efficiency and carry out people's tasks at a high level of accuracy, fairness, convenience, speed, transparency in the year of English and information technology. At present 30 percent of the total population of the country are computer literate and 45 percent has computer awareness. Today there are more than 600 Nanasala Centers islandwide. Three thousand six hundred schools have computer laboratories. This will be increased to 5200 in the near future," he said.

ICTA Senior Project Manager Kanchana Thidigala said, "This new portal Lanka Gate has been developed in three languages (English, Sinhala and Tamil) and will be updated in all the three languages and every citizen can create their own user account in the site. "We provide three services e-Revenue Licence Portlet, Railway Portlet and Weather portlet. Lanka Gate has been linked to both private and public institutes. This website works with Lanka Gate infrastructure and the main service of this portal is the newly introduced e-Revenue Licence," he said.