The Centre is implementing a ₹1,900 crore e-governance project called ‘Panch Deep’ to automate transactions of the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), Union Minister for Labour Bandaru Dattatreya said here on Sunday.

Under the project, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution would be installed across the country which will give a unique card to the employees and facilitate clearance of third party bills. “It will help in doing away with all the middle layers and make the process easier,” Dattatreya said.

Addressing a press conference here, he said the unique bio metric cards given to the members would make authentication easier. Besides, the ERP solution would help build a massive database of health records of all the members. “It is going to be one of the biggest online databases in e-governance,” the Minister said.

State level panels The Ministry has asked the States to set up executive committees with a Principal Secretary as its head to deal with funds for the employees’ health schemes.

“We have decided to decentralise the procedures. They are empowered to enlist hospitals for the health insurance schemes,” the Minister said.

Besides, the Centre has decided to revamp public hospitals.

“We will give ₹5 crore each to repair or renovate hospitals with 200 or more beds. Hospitals with less than 200 beds would get ₹3 crore, while smaller dispensaries ₹50 lakh,” he said.

He said the Government has increased the spending on insured persons to ₹2,000 from ₹1,500.

EPFO Referring to the Employees Provident Fund Organisation, he said the Universal Account Number system would change the way the members operate their PF accounts.

“We have allotted numbers to 29 lakh members. PF details of 7.41 lakh members are ready. This will help remove the Inspection Raj. We do inspect the organisations for erratic behaviour based on the inputs from computers,” he said.

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