West Bengal becomes the 33rd legislature to join the NeVA platform, advancing the 'One Nation, One Application' vision.
NEW DELHI: India’s push to digitise its state legislatures has reached a significant milestone. In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha on July 27, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Dr L Murugan confirmed that 33 out of 37 state and Union Territory legislative bodies have signed on to the National e-Vidhan Application, with 21 legislative houses already conducting fully paperless floor proceedings.
Backed by a ₹673.94 crore outlay over a decade, NeVA represents one of India’s more ambitious “One Nation, One Application” digital governance efforts, aiming to replace fragmented state-specific software systems with a single standardised platform for the entire legislative workflow, from filing questions to tracking bills through to passage.
A Comprehensive Digital Overhaul
What makes NeVA notable is the sheer breadth of what it digitises. The platform comprises 11 distinct modules covering everything from member dashboards and ministerial question routing to bill tracking and the daily Order Paper, effectively rebuilding the entire administrative backbone of a legislative secretariat in digital form. Crucially the system also connects directly into state executive departments, meaning when a lawmaker files a question electronically, it routes straight to the relevant government department for a digital response, eliminating the physical courier networks that historically slowed this process down.
The platform’s cloud migration to NIC’s MeghRaj 2.0 infrastructure adds meaningful resilience, ensuring stability even during high-traffic periods like simultaneous state budget sessions. Its integration with BHASHINI, India’s AI-powered language platform also allows citizens and lawmakers to access legislative documents in 23 constitutionally recognised languages, a thoughtful touch that makes India’s legislative process more accessible across its linguistic diversity.
Strong Early Adopters Leading the Way
States like Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Odisha and Gujarat have already achieved fully paperless operations, with Nagaland notably becoming the first North-Eastern state to do so. In these assemblies, physical paper has been removed from the floor entirely, with legislators accessing bills, committee reports and ministerial answers through touchscreen terminals mounted at every desk. Odisha’s transition alone eliminated millions of printed pages per session, translating into real, recurring savings on printing and document handling costs.
The measurable efficiency gains extend well beyond paper savings too. NITI Aayog’s mid-term evaluation found that digitising the question processing module cut turnaround times for legislative questions from weeks down to days, a meaningful improvement in how quickly citizens’ concerns raised through their representatives get addressed by the government.
A Sensible, Federal Approach to Rollout
Because state legislatures are constitutionally autonomous bodies, NeVA’s rollout has wisely been structured around voluntary adoption rather than central mandate, with funding shared between the Centre and states based on region, ranging from full central funding for Union Territories to a 90:10 split for hill states and 60:40 for larger general category states. This flexible cooperative federalism approach respects legislative autonomy while still providing strong financial incentives for states to come on board.
Dedicated support infrastructure has also been built into the programme’s design. State Project Management Units embedded within each secretariat handle localised technical setup, while NeVA Seva Kendras, on-site training centres inside assembly complexes, provide real-time help to lawmakers during live sessions. This kind of hands-on capacity building has proven particularly valuable in helping legislators from diverse technological backgrounds adapt comfortably to digital workflows.
Room to Grow, With a Clear Path Forward
Of the 37 legislative bodies in scope, 12 have signed on but are still completing their transition, typically a process that takes 18 to 30 months given the practical realities of hardware procurement and integrating dozens of executive departments into the new digital workflow. Given how quickly early adopter states like Odisha and Gujarat moved once political backing and funding aligned, this remaining gap looks more like a natural implementation timeline than any structural weakness in the programme itself.
Looking ahead, NITI Aayog’s recommendation to create a national digital maturity index for state assemblies offers a constructive way to encourage healthy competitive momentum among states, while ongoing efforts to digitise historical legislative archives promise to make decades of India’s legislative history far more accessible to researchers and citizens alike.
A Meaningful Step Toward More Transparent Governance
With most of India’s states already on board and a genuinely comprehensive technical foundation now in place, NeVA represents substantial progress toward more efficient, transparent and accessible state legislatures, an encouraging example of large-scale digital governance being implemented thoughtfully across India’s diverse federal structure.
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