Complete E-turn
| Kerala is all ready to use e-governance as a strategic tool to improve the quality of public services. |
CHIEF MINISTER OOMMEN CHANDY inaugurating the "Citizen Centric e-Government" workshop in Thiruvananthapuram on February 19.
KERALA has set an ambitious goal for itself: to be the first fully digital State in India by 2015 and to extend the fruits of e-governance to all its people. By shifting administrative operations to electronic platforms, the government also hopes to bring about a transformation in the way it works, ensuring accountability, transparency and the speedy delivery of services.
“Kerala already has the distinction of being the first State in India to achieve 100 per cent literacy. Our aim now is to go for 100 per cent digital literacy with strategic investment in technology and e-governance,” Chief Minister Oommen Chandy said recently. By the end of March, all the 14 districts in the State are expected to be declared “e-districts”, which should ensure electronic delivery of high-volume citizen-centric services at the district and sub-district levels through cost-effective, common service delivery outlets.
The Central government has set a target of 50 e-districts in the country, and these include the 14 districts of Kerala. With the implementation of the project across the State, people will be able to avail themselves of the services of any government department from their homes or from any part of the State, Oommen Chandy said at an e-governance leadership meeting in Thiruvananthapuram.
Pilot projects launched in Kannur and Palakkad districts as part of the national e-governance programme have been described by government sources as “a huge success”. They involved large-scale digitisation of records pertaining to various departments, back-end computerisation of the participating departments and necessary legal and procedural changes for facilities such as the provision of digital certificates to citizens. Services of various government departments were networked and integrated using information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to improve service delivery and enhance the relationship between the government and the public. It also meant a shift from a department-centric mode of working to a citizen-centric way of government functioning.
Kerala has set a target to achieve 100 per cent Aadhaar registration in the next few months to become the first State to provide the unique identity number to “its entire people” in a time-bound manner. Of the State’s 3.3 crore people, 2.2 crore have got their Aadhaar numbers and 2.9 crore were enrolled in either Aadhaar or the National Population Registry (NPR) by mid-February.
Efforts are also under way to make every person in the State e-literate and to start marketing the State as the most favourable destination for information technology and IT-enabled services (ITeS). At a workshop on the subject recently, P.K. Kunhalikutty, Minister for Industries and IT, said that Kerala was ahead of all other States in the use of technology to deliver speedy services to citizens. “Connectivity is very good in Kerala as compared to many other States. Mobile penetration is high. The access to technology for citizens is also very high. There are some lingering issues, such as better integration and coordination [among various agencies], but we are quite confident that e-governance will rise to its next stage in the State, and Kerala will become a totally e-literate State,” he said.
Kerala’s IT planners believe that the State has already to a large extent surged ahead in bridging the digital divide. The Community Service Centre model (“Akshaya”) adopted by Kerala, the first in the list of initiatives to take the benefits of ICT and IT to the masses, has proved popular and effective in spreading e-literacy. Today, as a result, Akshaya centres have spread to all parts of the State and are able to support a host of services, including payment of utility bills, railway ticketing, and cash transfer facilities.
Several other initiatives of the State IT Mission have similarly received recognition, including the popular single-window centres known by the acronym FRIENDS (Fast Reliable Instant Efficient Network for Disbursement of Services), where citizens can make government-related transactions “at ease and comfort, and at no extra cost”; “Sutharya Keralam”, an initiative to bring the grievances of citizens directly to the notice of the Chief Minister; IDEAS (Information and Data Exchange Advanced System), a system for State government offices through which files can be easily tracked by people, departments and officers from anywhere in the world; SPARK (Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala), a web-based payroll and accounts information system for all government employees; E-Krishi, a market-driven agricultural initiative through IT-enabled agro business centres for information flow and transaction management for farmers; a paperless file-flow system for government offices; and “Dr. SMS”, a novel project to enable people to use their mobile phones to receive information on health resources and to provide users with a comprehensive list of medical facilities available in a locality.
COMPUTER TRAINING is part of the State-sponsored e-literacy programme. Here, a training centre in Thiruvankulam, Ernakulam district.
A high percentage of the State’s population has access to personal computers and the Internet, and people from all sections of society are “IT-savvy”. Smartphone penetration is also high, and therefore, the government expects that by 2020 the majority of the State’s people will be “IT-enabled”, with many government services moving on to the mobile platform. Kerala is one of the first States to bring out a comprehensive mobile policy connecting departments and citizens through a single “Service Delivery Platform”.
The “Janasevanakendrams”, or modern computerised front offices, designed for local self-government institutions by the Information Kerala Mission (IKM) for improved service delivery, are, in fact, today the face of the government to a large number of people. The IKM is an ambitious e-governance project of the State government launched in 1999 with the mandate to strengthen local self-governance through ICT applications. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive local body computerisation projects in the country, which envisages computerising and networking the 1,223 local self-government institutions in Kerala. It focusses on capacity building and empowerment and addresses an entire range of issues concerning local body governance, decentralised planning, and local economic development.
Among the many services offered at the Janasevanakendrams, for example, are birth and death registration, marriage registration and common e-filing, Plan monitoring, property tax e-payment, social security pension, GIS maps, building permits, double entry accounting, file tracking, Provident Fund payment for local body employees, and “Electronic Legal Adviser”, a regularly updated online collection of Acts, rules, government circulars, gazette notifications, application forms and manuals.
The IKM, with the slogan “ICTs for transparency and efficiency”, has developed over 20 application software programmes for monitoring the functioning of local bodies, accounting and decentralised planning, civil registration, provision of certificates and licences, plinth-area-based assessment of property tax, payment of tax, and so on. For example, the State has achieved 85 per cent implementation of “Saankhya”, an electronic double entry accounting system through which each financial transaction of a local body gets recorded in real time. Thus, elected representatives and other decision-makers, employees and the common man all have easy access to the financial information of local self-government institutions.
The web portal ‘ www.lsgkerala.gov.in’, developed as part of the project, is today the biggest website in Malayalam, with more than one lakh pages. Moreover, most local self-government institutions today have independent websites, with local-level statistics, maps, and information on demography, administration and resource management. Several e-governance initiatives of various departments have thus become popular on their own, but the effort now is to make them more visible and citizen oriented through networking and integration. Very soon, government departments are expected to provide efficient and transparent delivery mechanisms, and live, updated information at all levels for proper monitoring and planning.
To make this possible, a core common network infrastructure for e-governance, the Kerala State Wide Area Network (KSWAN), has been established, with the State Information Infrastructure (SII), connecting Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode, acting as the backbone and with extensions in all 14 district and 152 block headquarters. Ultimately, the network is expected to connect all government offices. IT Department officials say that they expect Kerala to be fully wired by 2020.
According to Oommen Chandy, the State government is dedicated to bringing Kerala to the front lines of e-governance and has received wholehearted support from the Central government. Thus far, the Centre has sanctioned Rs.96 crore for the “e-Health” programme alone, for instance. By June this year, Kerala will accomplish total Aadhaar coverage, he said recently at a function, while releasing the first version of the State e-governance road map. He also said that today people were free to lodge their grievances through multiple channels, manually or online, or through call centres. “People are confident that they will be heard and they can even track the follow-up measures on their complaints. The State government has developed a sustainable model of e-governance, with accessibility and transparency being the keywords.
Very soon, monthly doles to over 3,00,000 unemployed youth in Kerala and welfare pensions for over 40 lakh citizens are expected to be disbursed directly to beneficiary accounts through electronic means, making use also of the Aadhaar system. The government has plans to provide an e-mail ID linked to the Aadhaar number of all citizens to communicate with government departments. All government transactions and applications could then be sent through e-mail, and pensions, scholarships, and so on, could be distributed electronically through banks. All files in the Secretariat are to move into digital mode by March 31. People will not have to depend on the Right to Information Act once the IDEAS file-tracking system becomes functional. All contracts above Rs.25 lakh in government departments and public sector undertakings will come under the e-tendering system. In the Public Works Department, estimates, administrative sanction, technical sanction, tenders, bills and payments should be on electronic mode by March 2014.
According to the Chief Minister, e-governance services have now reached 100 per cent of the people of the State. “The ambition now is to declare the State 100 per cent digital and promote the culture of open governance.”
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