DNA of Bharat Nirman

What connects Poonamma, a forty-seven year old Dalit woman living in
Tiruvarur in Tamil Nadu; Babu Nair, a forty-four year old coconut seller in
Palakkad in Kerala; Amol Phadnis, a fifty-something small time trader from rural
Latur in Maharshtra; Bhrigu Hazarika, a thirty-five year old primary school
teacher in Goalpara in Assam; Haladhar Nayak, a twenty-seven year old sweetshop
vendor from Ganjam in Orissa; Shish Ram Bhagat, a forty-plus small time
transporter from Rohtak in Haryana; Sebastian Barla, a tribal tea plantation
worker from Jalpaiguri in West Bengal; and Rachna Goel, a twenty-eight year old
running a beauty parlor in Ghaziabad in UP is the Union Governments ambitious
e-district project.

Earmarked as a State Mission Mode project (MMP) under the National
e-Governance Plan (NeGP), this is another e-governance program that could impact
the lives of millions of Indian citizens across the country. The Barlas and
Hazarikas are after all living in few of the thirty-seven districts across
fourteen states where the e-district project is currently being piloted. The aim
is to e-enable the delivery of high-volume citizen-centric services, such as
issue of certificates, pension, and ration card related services, at the
district level.

With a budgetary allocation of around Rs 110 crore, out of which around Rs 51
crore has already been disbursed, e-districts could not just herald a new dawn
in citizen services, but even help meet the objectives of Bharat Nirman, both
directly and indirectly. E-districts would not just benefit citizens through a
better delivery of Bharat Nirman schemes, but also fetch IT players nearly Rs
2,000 crore by way of contracts spanning hardware, software and systems
integration.

Critical Assessment

With more than 70% of the ambitious CSC project already underway,
administration of many of these services has been decentralized beyond the state
capitals. There are CSC centers across many rural areas in various states from
which citizen-centric services are getting delivered. The e-district scheme is
taking this one step further where all basic services are not just automated but
integrated togetherwhat is happening today as pilots in districts is obviously
a precursor to statewide rollouts subsequently.

The pilot stage, currently ongoing in the thirty-seven districts, entails an
expenditure of about Rs 4 crore in each district and the target is to complete
all of these by February 2010. Subsequently, the national rollout for the
project, involving 600 districts, is likely to kick-off by March-April 2010. The
entire project is scheduled to be completed by December 2011. Prior to the first
phase of implementation, the DIT had however undertaken an assessment of five
designated districtsGandhinagar, Ahmedabad in Gujarat; Palakkad in Kerala; West
Godavari in Andhra Pradesh; and Tiruvarur in Tamil Naduwithin the country,
where significantly visible e-governance initiatives have taken root. Palakkad
and Tiruvarur are among the thirty-seven districts where the e-district project
is now underway.

While at best one can express cautious optimism in terms of whether a
government project of such scale would ever meet the deadlines (we are being
optimistic enough), the indications till now are mixed. While the modalities of
the national implementation are yet to be finalized, at least it has been
decided that broadly it would entail the entire IT hardware infrastructure,
besides application development and middleware, systems software, consultancy,
program management, and support. This effectively translates into automating the
back-end of district level offices, especially the more important ones like the
district collectors office and the revenue court among others.

In the pilot phase, however, the scheme involves six to ten categories of
services. A core list of six categories of services has been, in fact, drawn up
at the national level, for implementation by the fourteen states involved. These
include issue of certificates (employment, nationality, marriage, income),
social welfare pensions, revenue court (case listing, stay orders, case
adjournment, orders), government dues and recovery as part of land revenue
(issue of notices, recording payments, tracking of default processes) and RTI
services (application, tracking, monitoring, and redressal).

All these services are being delivered though the CSCs and ride on the State
Wide Area Networks (SWANs) and State Data Center (SDC) infrastructure that are
envisaged under the NeGP. A citizen can access the e-district services either
through the portal (useful for more IT savvy citizens like Goel or Hazarika) or
through the CSCs (suitable for Barla or Nair). The CSCs are connected to the
e-district application hosted at the district level through SWAN or alternate
connectivity (where SWAN has not been established).

The implementation of the typical e-district application involves three
componentsfront-end, middleware, and back-end. Single window delivery of
seventy-five services/points of citizen contact or e-district society created
for management of the Jan Sewa Kendras in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar would be
front-end examples, online tracking of the application status, forms created for
select departmental interfaces like land records or police in Palakkad or
effective grievance redressal module in Tiruvarur would be examples of
middleware while the generation of MPHS database in West Godavari or data
digitization of revenue court cases in Ahmedabad are back-end examples.

There are a few common characteristics of all districts where the model
assessment is currently being conducted. These include a generally conducive
economic and social environment, higher per capita income, high IT adoption
rate, high literacy, well established local industries including agriculture
plus a well established civic infrastructure. The teams of field officers
involved in these projects have been instrumental in conceptualization and
implementation under the guidance of a project champion. The efforts of the
former UP Board of Revenue chairman, Vinod Kumar Malhotra is a shining example
in this respect.

To ensure that there is continuity and sustained activity through the project
lifecycle, the government plans formulating a mandate to ensure that the project
team remains the same at least for three years, as far as possible. The
government has also understood the need to incorporate a provision for
empowering local functionaries to be able to deliver services with speed and
certainty. While this is possible with some amount of standardization, it would
be necessary to make the data necessary for service delivery very comprehensive
and reliable. The ownership of the projects too needs to be vested with the
district administrationthe experience with champions like C Umashankar in
Tiruvarur, Sanjay Jaju in West Godavari, or Sonal Mishra in Gandhinagar
vindicates this stand.

Given the regional focus of the projects, implementing agencies (either NIC
or private vendors including Wipro Infotech, 3i Infotech, TCS, IL &FS, PwC,
Teledata, or SRIT) need to ensure that there is very high degree of localization
in the project in terms of service modes, transaction modalities, communication
techniques, languages, technologies, etc. This will give the projects a higher
degree of adoption and recognition amongst the final beneficiaries. Since the
pilot implementation will form an input towards statewide rollout, language
could be used as the common denominator for ensuring consistency for this
initiative.

Successful Role Models

The West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh (yes it will remain there even
after Telengana) has its headquarters in the town of Eluru. The Rural e-Seva,
implemented in West Godavari was among the early e-governance initiatives in the
country that grabbed attention. This initiative was envisioned by the then
district collector, Sanjay Jaju and implemented by the district information
officer (DIO).

The delivery channels comprised service centers set up in large numbers
across the Mandals in the district. A unique feature about these centers is that
they are run and managed by persons (mostly women) from self-help groups. Within
a period of approximately six months, forty-six kiosks in the district were
established in each of the Mandals to provide single window government and other
services.

The funding and subsidies for this were aggregated from multiple sources and
a well defined model of the rural kiosk was evolved and implemented. The Rural
e-Seva centers have been able to deliver 750,000 certificates while over 16,000
grievances have been redressed using the facilitation provided by the eSeva
system. In excess of Rs 16 crore has been collected for the payment of
electricity bills without any hitch. More than Rs 4 crore of Panchayat Taxes has
also been collected. All the centers are doing good business and have become
self-sustainable. They are earning anything between Rs 3,000-15,000 per month
depending on the location and average number of monthly transactions. The system
has also facilitated the rectification of incorrect data of citizens to as much
as about 10,000 cases.

Tiruvarur in Tamil Nadu was a new district carved out from Thanjavur and
Nagapattinam districts. The pilot e-district rolled out over twenty e-governance
applications covering various areas of citizen interface with the government.
The major beneficiaries were agriculturalists, land owners, students, widows
like Poonamma, agricultural laborers above sixty-five years of age as well as
schools. What specifically benefited underprivileged women like Poonamma was the
full automation of the Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY), right from the receipt of
application stage. Similarly, the credit-cum-subsidy scheme aimed at providing
self employment opportunity to the rural masses was fully automated at the DRDA
and block level with vertical linkages.

One of the key success factors for Tiruvarur e-district implementation was
the involvement of the then district collector (C Umashankar) and his project
team in all aspects of implementation. The value of localization was highlighted
by the fact that Tiruvarur had developed Tamil/English bilingual interface.
Public awareness was another catalyst for success as the district administration
conducted eight online public grievance redressal camps. Over 3,055 citizens got
sanction orders for various requirements online during these camps. Training too
was provided to 560 village administrative officers (VAO), over 150 revenue
officials of various categories, sixty survey officials, and 150 officials from
the rural development department on an ongoing basis at the district
collectorate.

Gandhinagar is the smallest district in Gujarat where the e-district project
was launched by the then district collector, Sonal Mishra. The Jan Sewa Kendras
or CSCs have been leveraged to offer ninety-five types of services to citizens
with around 400 cases/transactions processed per day. The taluk level centers
use the same software and connect to the central database through GSWAN. This
has facilitated centralized monitoring, and has helped create a central data
record for the entire district.

Use of SMS for automatic alerts and on demand information, IVRS for 24x7
status information, barcodes and smart electronic trackers for tracking,
registry and error-free data entry have been some critical tools for
Gandhinagars success. The website for status tracking and form information as
well as fingerprint biometrics for recognition too have offered convenience,
speed and transparency to citizens.

The concept of customer ID (citizen ID) has helped minimize the paperwork as
well as data entry work in case of entering the application information.
Citizens re-use previously-submitted documents in new applications to the Jan
Sewa Kendra. In fact, Nandan Nilekani and his team would do well to replicate
this Gandhinagar model for the national UID project.

States and Districts on Top

In Uttar Pradesh, according to 3i Infotech, seven services are live in
Gorakhpur while four services are live in Sultanpur. Earlier, Ghaziabad became
the first e-district in UP with the inauguration of the Jan Suwidha Kendra. 3i
Infotech is to provide a compiled list of customization required in the
e-district application so that it can be discussed with NIC; they are also to
table a consolidated requirement of fund transfer from NIC to the UP Government,
which could be sent by the competent authority in UP. In Assam, the e-District
pilot project in Goalpara district has gone live with fourteen services on
November 12, 2009, while for Sonitpur the go-live date is yet to be finalized.

Haryana might select NIC as the application developer for this project at
Rohtak district; discussion is under progress with NIC for the same. However,
the application development agency is not yet selected and also the BPR and GAP
analysis is not yet approved by the state. In Uttarakhand, the PwC consulting
team has completed the study of additional services as suggested by the chief
secretary and final report with all the deliverables was submitted to Pauri
district collector on October 14, 2009. All the improvements suggested by the
district collector have been incorporated and approval of the final reports is
pending. The core team of PwC has already visited Pauri and had detailed
discussion with the district magistrate regarding the progress of the project
and subsequently submitted the draft RFP to the state.

For the selection of the application development agency in Maharashtra, a
limited tender was sent to Accenture, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, and HP and a pre-bid
meeting was called on August 17, 2009. The technical evaluation for the bids has
been completed and discussed with the director IT and now change management
plans and RFP for data digitization is under progress. In West Bengal and
Jharkhand, TCS has been selected as the application development agency but the
contracts have not been signed yet. As the election code of conduct is
applicable in Jharkhand, the IT secretary has written to the Election Commission
to seek permission for signing the contract. However, its request for an
additional fund requirement of Rs 90 lakh has been rejected by the DIT.

In Punjab, the RFP for selection of IT vendor is yet to be released and
therefore the intervention of the chief secretary has been sought. In Madhya
Pradesh, the application development is completed for thirty-nine services and
the first level testing too has been completed for all. Currently, hardware
procurement is in progress in the state. In Bihar, according to 3i Infotech and
IL&FS, hardware has been installed and tested in existing data centers. In fact,
70% of the hardware has already been deployed in Aurangabad, Madhubani and
Nalanda. Software too is almost ready for all services and the system could go
live for five services in another two to three months.

In Tamil Nadu, NIC has developed application for BC/MBC department and
provided a demo to the BC/MBC commissioner for approval; the application
development for social welfare and the Revenue Department too has been
completed. Digitization of data outside the family card database is to be done
by ELCOT operator on as-and-when-required basis on the rate contract finalized
for family cards. Hardware procurement and networking has been completed in all
the districts except Ariyalur. In Kerala, a consultant informed the meeting that
the NIC is currently developing the SRS of the application in coordination with
nodal officers of different departments. A BPR Cell has been formed to drive the
e-District project and all relevant data of e-District application has already
been digitized; data conversion (non-UNICODE to UNICODE) activity is under
progress by IKM & C-DIT.

Mizoram has selected Teledata as the implementation partner and the LOI has
been released in September, 2009. However, the work order is yet to be released
as both the IT minister and the IT secretary are in discussion with the SDA for
closing the cost rationalization issue with Teledata. In Orissa, however SRIT
was selected as the system integrator and work order was issued too. However, an
agreement is yet to be signed because of the mismatch between the funds approved
by the DIT and the bid price of the L1 bidder (SRIT) leading to shortage of
funds. Training and change management report though have been finalized for
Ganjam district.

Rajneesh De

rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in