Om Birla launches e-Vidhan app at Bihar Assembly, Nitish Kumar skips event

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Saturday launched the National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA) at the Bihar Legislative Assembly, marking a significant step towards digitising and making legislative processes paperless across the country.

The launch event was held at the Central Hall of the state legislature and was attended by Bihar Assembly Speaker Prem Kumar, Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju, along with senior officials and legislators.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar , however, remained conspicuously absent from the programme. Explaining his absence, State Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary said the chief minister had prior official engagements and skipped the event with the permission of the Assembly Speaker.

Leader of Opposition in the Bihar Assembly Tejashwi Yadav also did not attend the function.

NeVA is a workflow-based digital platform hosted on the National Informatics Centre (NIC) cloud, aimed at enabling legislatures to function in a completely paperless manner. The application allows legislators to access essential documents such as rules of procedure, list of business, notices, bills, questions and answers, bulletins, and committee reports on their handheld devices.

Officials said the initiative is designed to enhance efficiency, transparency and ease of legislative functioning , while also reducing paperwork. A key objective of the project is to connect all legislatures across the country on a single digital platform , creating a large national repository of legislative data.

With Bihar adopting the system, NeVA continues its gradual rollout across state legislatures, aligning with the Centre’s push for digital governance and institutional modernisation .