Overview

• IT Minister Ashish Shelar directed changes to the consultancy GR to mandate disclosure of all consultant appointments and payments to the IT department, with a new GR to set penalties after consultation with the chief minister.
• A centralized portal will record consultant profiles, deployments and remuneration across departments, and MahaIT has been told to reduce its administrative costs to 5%.
• Officials identified six empanelled agencies placing 246 consultants across state offices, with some individuals holding multiple appointments and drawing four to five times higher pay.
• The Golden Data Maha-Samanvay project remains in pre-launch preparation with about 15 crore records collected, 5–6 crore verified and 144 attributes completed, alongside directives for security hardening, high-load testing, DigiYatra integration and an AI search tool.
• The WhatsApp citizen-services pilot is delivering the first 100 services via a vendor, with a capacity reassessment and a revised RFP planned to scale toward 1,000 services under the state’s agreement with Meta.