[INDIA] Panchmahals e-governance project wins national award

["Ashish Kotamkar" <ashish@mithi.com>]

Panchmahals e-governance project wins national award
08 October 2002, Ahmedabad, India
Times of India

If you tell a villager in the tribal district of the Panchmahals that 
the Internet can open up a whole new world for him, he is unlikely to 
understand. However, if you tell him he does not have to go all the 
way to Godhra to get an application form to apply for a ration card, 
but can get it from the local STD-PCO booth in his own village, he 
will immediately understand.  

A project that does just that in the Panchmahals district has won a 
national award of the Computer Society of India. Called the Mahiti 
Shakti project it has made life easier for thousands of villagers in 
the region.  

The project has been successful as it uses already available 
infrastructure in the towns and villages. To start with, a network of 
dairies having working computers and a large number of STD/PCO booths 
have been roped in. These are regularly frequented by the people. 
They have been provided computers with Internet connectivity.  

Called the Mahiti Shakti kendras, these have trained operators to 
help villagers and townsfolk access the information they require. 
"The kiosks or kendras supply print-outs of almost all types of forms 
required to be submitted to Government departments," says schools 
commissioner Jayanthi Ravi, who was the Panchmahals collector when 
the scheme was implemented. "A maximum ceiling of Rs 10 per form has 
been fixed. To avoid photo-copying, kiosk owners will put a special 
rubber stamp on every form."  

Gujarat IT secretary Rajesh Kishore added now that the project has 
received the stamp of approval, they are planning to replicate it in 
other districts as well. "A plan is being worked out to see how this 
success story can be repeated in the entire state," he said.  

In the process, the Mahiti Shakti kendra becomes a single-window 
clearance for forms and other information that people in small towns 
and villages may require. All forms of various district level offices 
with a checklist giving details of required documents at the time of 
submission are provided.  

As many as 200 forms have been made available on-line. Information 
pertaining to ongoing schemes like those under the District Rural 
Development Agency and District Planning Board have also been made 
available. The web-enabled version of the Gujarat Geographic 
Information System (GGIS) giving details of the resource availability 
in terms of 95 parameters of every village of the district is 
available on a query-based system.  

"We have over 13,000 people from across the district using the 
service," says Panchmahals deputy collector B N Damor. "More people 
are being added to the list of users every day. The Mahiti Shakti 
programme was developed in association with the Commonwealth Centre 
for Electronic Governance and the IIM-Ahmedabad and the impeding 
desire was to apply information technology at the grassroots. While 
the project is time and effort intensive, the resources required are 
minimal and support from all Government agencies at the collectorate 
level is essential.  

To identify the needs of the people of the region, eight NGOs 
gathered information from 13 villages of the district. The survey 
revealed that the major areas of information required by citizens 
were land records (maps, record of rights), forms of various 
Government schemes, agriculture-related and panchayati raj 
information, legal aid, health information and scheme details.  

Source: Propoor.org 
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Warm regards, 
Ashish Kotamkar (ashish@mithi.com)