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Citizen-centric IT projects in Kerala
We do a round-up of the best e-governance projects and services aimed at simplifying human life and bringing the govt closer to people
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Project Akshaya
The flagship citizen-centric initiative for Kerala currently is Project
Akshaya, around which many other projects and initiatives. Aimed at providing
one-stop utility bill payment and government-public interface system, all 14
districts of Kerala have 'Akshaya centers' – totaling up to 2200 centers, 80% of
which have been deliberately set up in rural areas, with the aim of rural Kerala
leveraging the most of IT. Currently, 15-20 services are being offered at these
centers, and the roadmap includes more B2C services. Each of these 2200 centers
is headed by an 'Entrepreneur' who, for all practical purposes is the
single-handed head for the particular center. It is his responsibility to try
and maximize the number of citizens in his locality who pay their bills in his
center. There are many e-governance projects planned by the state centered
around using Akshaya centers as nodal points.
Insight
The software app, developed in house using open source trains visually
special citizens. The idea is to arm Akshaya centers with the software to enable
visually special citizens within the purview of the center to get trained in
basic skills to be employable in jobs that do not mandate eyesight. Research
reveals that visually special are much better at several tasks that the IT
industry can use for many tasks. This project is not dependent on scale since
visually special citizens in an area covered by a particular center might be
very small in number but hopes to make a difference to their lives. The
application would impart training as well as feature a feature 'Swaram' which
provides audio content for better understanding of the content and also general
news.
Sevana
Another interesting initiative taken up by one of the Government's 'IT
solution providers' – Information Kerala Mission, is a project to automate birth
and death registration. From the hospital where childbirth has taken place, an
electronic kiosk allows a citizen to feed basic information of village, district
etc, which is viewable at the respective panchayats or district offices and the
birth certificate can be collected within 48 hours. This reduces discrepancies
and especially for 'cause of death' issues, ensures transparency to a great
extent. Sevana also facilitates marriage registrations, and pension procurement.
All panchayats in Kerala (999) have IT hardware ready for Sevana of which 647
panchayats have connectivity. Of these, 345 provide the Sevana service to its
citizens. By the end of the current financial year, Kerala will have Sevana
implemented at all panchayat offices.
| The Government of Kerala has
carved out an action plan where the three big addresses for IT in the State
– Technopark, Infopark and Cyberpark – shall act as independent bodies, and
monitor the functioning of auxiliary tech parks that are going to be set up
in smaller towns like Koratty that will have huge cost advantages for
investors. In order to become the preferred state for IT, we have to give
cost advantages by attracting quality but affordable labor. We are planning
to do this by taking IT offices to smaller towns, and while at it, giving a
boost to the local and regional economies.
Mervin Alexander, CEO, Technopark |
SPARK
In Kerala there are between 5 and 5.5 lac employees working as Government
servants. SPARK is an attempt to bring the payroll and finance related
activities of these employees within a single application. Besides efficient
dissemination of salary, loans, and other funds, SPARK also helps the Government
in training. On an average, training of some sort is administered to 50,000
employees every year, across 13,000 training programs. There was no mechanism to
monitor what training was given to which employee and what impact it finally
made. Currently, 9 departments are totally running all their HR on SPARK and
1,012 offices are using SPARK in some form or the other.
Vishnu Anand was hosted in Thiruvananthapuram by Govt of Kerala
| Dr. Ajay
Kumar, IAS, Secretary (IT), Govt of Kerala Speaks |
How Kerala is looking at IT
differently from others
Kerala seeks to be a model for other states by doing the same IT that it
expects its investors to do. It has begun efforts to convert as much 'work'
as possible to 'e-work'. Kerala also believes that 'Awareness' of
Information Technology should go hand in hand with 'Facilitation' of
processes. Service Delivery is the core of all IT that Kerala embarks on.
From an investors' point of view, Kerala's in-house IT is there for all to
see, and the Government's support can be experienced in more ways than one.
How Kerala positions itself as an ideal IT
destination
The social demographics of Kerala are very unique and different from the
rest of the country. Hundred percent of villages in Kerala have access to
broadband, and the three biggest components of social and economic
forwardness – health, education and telecommunications – are uniformly
spread across the length and breadth of Kerala. Mobile penetration is more
than 60% which is very high compared to the national average. What is unique
about Kerala is that unlike Karnataka, where socio-economic climate in
Bangalore differs vastly from a nearby district of Kolar, Kerala provides a
uniform ecosystem all along the state. Whether an investor plans to operate
from Kochi or Kozhikode, the availability of manpower, infrastructure and
overall climate for commerce is the same.
Projects to provide quality manpower for
IT
Highly qualified manpower is obviously the biggest prerequisite to climb
the IT value chain. An analysis that we did sometime back made us realize
that Kerala needed more BTech graduates to study further and get MTech
certifications and PhDs. Though there are a large number of jobs available
for BTech graduates in IT, the state realizes that in the long term, higher
qualification in IT education is extremely vital. For this, IT department of
Kerala embarked on a recession-proof project called Speed-IT – a special
postgraduate education scholarship program. At the cost of Rs 210 lacs, post
graduate students would be provided a e scholarship of Rs. 8000 a month and
PhD students would be provided a sum of Rs 14000-18000 a month.
On local language & IT
As part of Kerala's efforts to merge IT and the local spoken language,
we have started many Malayalam computing initiatives. As a starting point,
we have embarked on a mission to make all the websites of Government
departments to be bilingual. Currently, 12 Governments websites are already
bilingual. But the biggest proof of mass adoption of local language
computing can be evaluated through a project called 'Ende Gramam', which
translates to 'My village'. It is an online community portal in Malayalam
created and maintained by the citizens of each village. The Government
facilitated setting up of the portal and allows villagers to submit articles
which are edited by philanthropic editors who upload the articles on the
portal. Each village has its own space in the portal and the information
ranges from a catalog of 'useful services' from coconut tree climbers,
carpenters, and more along with their phone numbers and location where they
live. |
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