The Future of Indian Districts

The Union Government’s
ambitious e-district project—earmarked as a State Mission
Mode
project (MMP) under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), is another
e-gov program that could impact the lives of millions of Indian
citizens across the country. 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.

With more than 70% of the
ambitious CSC project already under way, already 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 together—what
is
happening today as pilots in districts is obviously a precursor to
state-wide rollouts subsequently.

The pilot stage, currently
ongoing in the 37 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, DIT had however
undertaken an assessment of five designated districts (Gandhinagar,
Ahmedabad in Gujarat, Palakkad in Kerala, West Godavari in Andhra
Pradesh and Tiruvarur in Tamil Nadu) within the country, where
significantly visible e-gov initiatives have taken root. Palakkad and
Tiruvarur are among the 37 districts where the e-district project is
now underway.

While at best one can
express cautious optimism in terms 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
Collector’s office and the revenue court among others.

In the pilot phase,
however, currently undergoing in the 37 districts, the scheme
involves 6-10 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 14 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 Rachna or Bhrigu) or through the CSCs (suitable for Sebastian or
Baburajan). 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).

Budgetary
Allocation for 37 e-districts