appendix-1: semi-structure interview questionnaire...
TRANSCRIPT
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APPENDIX-1: SEMI-STRUCTURE INTERVIEW
QUESTIONNAIRE
Appendix-1: Semi-Structure Interview Questionnaire
Government-to-Citizen (G2C)
Research Setting: Interoperability in Government-to-Citizen (G2C)
Research Method: Qualitative Method (Case Study Method)
Data Source: Semi-structured Interview; Records from various sources
Target Respondents: First level managers and above {project managers, group leader, pre-sales
and BU-head}
Please mention the projects considered to answer following questions: Please refer completed projects only. Please share details such as project name and description
and other relevant details. Project Name Brief Project Description Remarks
1.
2.
3.
I. Your Role:
II. How is government approaching E-Governance? What are its objectives?
Question Reply
What are the various models of operation (multi-
channel) when providing E-Governance?
i. Does government go alone?
ii. Does it collaborate with private partners
and with intermediaries?
iii. Partners with private partners without any
intermediaries
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Do citizens see the E-Governance by Government
collaborating with private partners as
privatization?
i. Does state’s political economy have
significance in deciding the outlook and
purpose of the E-Governance
What is the main objective of Government in E-
Governance?
i. Economic Growth by providing one-stop
services
ii. Social development
iii. Both
What is the target population with which E-
Governance starts?
i. Low income, middle income and High
income
What kind of entrepreneur’s partner and what is
their outlook and skill?
a. Rural, lower and middle income and not so
affluent socio-economic backgrounds
b. Rural, upper and middle income and
affluent socio-economic backgrounds
c. a and b with Computer Literate
d. In the case of urban, how does the outlook
change?
What kind of assistance does Government provide
to the entrepreneurs (or private partners)?
i. Develop the center, provide content and
connectivity and training needs
ii. Are any of the models such as BOO, BOT,
BOOT are being followed?
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What proportions of revenues are from
transactional services and informative services?
What options are considered as part of interactive
services?
i. Is gathering of citizen opinion and
involving in decision-making also
considered?
Apart from services, what other are considered as
part of G2C services for example, citizen
empowerment and greater engagement?
i. Is citizen engagement possible using G2C?
ii. What kind of social-media interactions
considered?
III. What is impact of PPP on interoperability and its effect on governance?
Question Reply
Where is the power vested (with Government
or entrepreneur) when citizens are offered
services (Rajiv Common Service Centers) by
PPP models?
To make the Partnership sustainable which
income group’s presence is required at higher
proportion?
India is a multi-class fragmented society,
disunited and engages in accommodative
politics with multiple interests. Therefore,
does it not demand that Government owns the
control?
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Entrepreneur plays a dormant role and
Government manages the users’ wants and
needs?
Do citizens utilize E-Governance because
backed by the credibility of Government?
When Intermediaries are involved how does
the information flow assist the inter-
organizational information flow?
i. Does Information system assist the
information flow?
Do Government officials use E-Governance to
enhance accountability? Can citizens perform
surveillance of government or E-Governance
used by Government officials to broadcast
selective information (control of information
flow) and watch citizen’s activities?
Do citizens approach centers that provide
electronic activities because of the efficiency
and market friendliness of private sector?
i. Does absence or presence of cost
benefit motivate or demotivate the
citizens. (for developing or least
developed countries cost saving may
not be a significant when compared to
developed countries)
Do the Government officials see the CSCs as
taking them away from the people?
i. Though the chances of corruption
reduce, the government officials fear
shift of power with CSC representative
communicating and felicitating
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between citizen and government
official.
ii. What other constraints such as
feudalism, caste and so forth come
into play to sustain E-Governance?
IV. Why the insights into the interoperability issues in G2C are important?
Question Reply
What are the attributes for service
development?
i. Citizen centric service delivery – one
stop shop e-services
ii. Community participation -
iii. Efficient allocation of resources
iv. Transparency
v. Reduce corruption
vi. Accountability
vii. Improve response times
When dealing with services that are specific
in nature (such as passport services) what is
the private agency’s involvement?
i. Is efficiency and market friendliness
the key drivers for such partnerships
ii. Where is the power vested in such
scenarios
Along with G2C services, are B2C services
provided at CSCs.
i. Do you feel this is a good move by
government?
Do you see any services that are specific to
location and provided to citizens thru CSCs?
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i. If yes, please list the services
Do you feel the services need to be
customized based on the location?
Apart from providing services to citizens,
what areas do you see private agencies can
participate in governance?
i. Can private agencies share
information and gather opinion?
ii. Can private agencies contribute in
rural areas by providing information
and assisting government in areas such
as insurance, crop details, loans,
details regarding education for rural
children and so forth?
Can private agencies assist government in
reducing digital-divide?
i. Citizens – Help deprived classes to
avail E-Governance benefits
ii. Government Offices – Assist
government offices in using ICT
enabled especially at rural centers. For
example, verification requires
capturing images and attaching these
to necessary artifacts. Is it possible?
What could be preventing government and
private from enabling private in assisting
government in governance activities using E-
Governance?
What changes do you see private agencies to
assist government in governance rather than
providing services to citizens?
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Can intermediaries take a bigger role rather
than providing just technical assistance
wherein Government defines the political
context, political arena for cooperation, legal
and organizational changes, selecting and
defining standards and evaluation and change
management?
Do the intermediaries play a significant role in
deciding what information flows to the
government from the private agency?
V. What are the drivers, during implementation, for standardization and centralization in
G2C scenario?
Question Reply
What methods are being attempted or used to
define the static elements (architecture, data
formats and so forth.) of standardization
i. How these methods implemented (to
achieve dynamic dimension) to effect
governance?
Are attributes in above point consistent across
all CSC centers?
i. If not, is there any criteria followed to
assess the importance of these
attributes as specific to a location.
What are the criteria followed for CSCs
(Common Service Centers) or Village Level
Entrepreneurs (VLEs)?
i. Number of citizens targeted
ii. Number of services offered
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How managed is the Service Center Agency
(SCA)?
i. Do they provide alone the necessary
infrastructure such as gateways
including payment gateway, data
centers, State Wide Area Network,
Call center and so forth?
ii. Is infrastructure alone centralized
iii. Apart from technology, what else
considered as part of SCA?
iv. How location specific issues identified
and considered as part of E-
Governance?
What are the plans to include latest and
emerging technologies into SCA fold?
What activities are standardized?
VI. What changes done to service development to support interoperable governance?
Question Reply
Problem perception: SOA application [scope
{application, workgroup, line-of-biz,
enterprise}, interface granularity {coarse or
fine}, interaction {one-way, synchronous,
asynchronous} and semantics]
Interoperability dimensions addressed by
method
Measuring achievements of method
application
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Government-to-Business/Government (G2B)
Research Setting: Interoperability in Government-to-Business/Government (G2B/G2G)
Research Method: Qualitative Method (Case Study Method)
Data Source: Semi-structured Interview; Records from various sources
Target Respondents: First level managers and above {project managers, group leader, pre-sales
and BU-head}
Please mention the projects considered to answer following questions:
Please refer completed projects only. Please share details such as project name and description
and other relevant details.
Project Name Brief Project Description Remarks
1.
2.
3.
I. Your Role:
II. How is government approaching E-Governance? What are its objectives?
Question Reply
What is the objective of public organizations to use
electronic governance? (from private org
perspective and from public org perspective)
What is the objective of private organizations?
from private org perspective and from public org
perspective)
Do public governments use eGovernance to
improve transactions, accountability and reduce
corruption?
i. Are “Real-life” contestations in form of
constraints?
Citizen-centric initiatives – How are taken forward?
Are there differences in the approaches followed
for following PPP types that are specific to G2B?
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i. Private sector develops software and
consumed internally by government or in
other words its employees.
ii. Private sector develops software and
consumed by both private & public. Private
and public jointly use the developed
software and transact business. For
example, procurement
III. Why the insights into the interoperability issues in G2B are important?
Question Reply
Requirements Gathering
i. Are requirements upfront decided?
ii. Continuously discuss with end-users and
evolve requirements?
Change Management
i. How accommodative of changes?
ii. Can change request raised for each
change?
iii. Are the users’/actors opinions on the
selection of technology, changes to
process re-engineering and adoption of
technology considered? {Social-shaping
of technology}
“Technology-based” approach
i. Do you see an inclusive approach? For
example, concerns of various
stakeholders being considered, for
example, security concerns?
PPP
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ii. Do governments have “vendor” or
“collaborator” mind-set”?
iii. Information asymmetry – How is it
taken care in PPP?
iv. Is Risk-sharing encouraged through the
contract? Risk-reward models?
a. What is approx. risk sharing
percentage between Govt. &
private?
Following questions are specific to situations
such as e-Procurement, Taxation and so forth.
where multiple stakeholders’ involvement is
necessary
i. What factors such as technological,
economic, social based on strategic,
economic and technical accounts
considered while developing and
implementing.
ii. How various stakeholders solicited for
opinion?
iii. How opinions of various stakeholders
deliberated and logically closed?
iv. How local level implementations
considered?
v. Were any of B2B approaches
considered?
IV. How did organization dynamically interoperate in G2B scenario?
Question Reply
What factors (purpose and role of government,
societal trends, changing technologies, human
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elements, information management and
interaction & complexity) specifically
considered to effect changes? {Socio-technical
systems} (Please refer end of document for
attributes of these six factors)
Apart from these six factors, are any other
factors considered?
Changes to Policies, underlying beliefs and
values and practices
i. Do negotiations happen constantly?
ii. Do you see changes in policy and
corresponding changes in action?
Information asymmetry exists and information
sharing.
i. People who own and have information
share it easily and when required
ii. Are conscious actions in place to reduce
information asymmetry? If yes, provide
examples.
Do key individuals drive activities and make
things happen?
Cultural changes required incrementally and by
moving the frontier. Do you agree?
i. Do you feel the changes that are
happening around are assisting in
moving the frontier?
Do negotiations around re-operationalization of
values happen?
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V. During implementation, what are the drivers for standardization and centralization in
G2B scenario?
Question Reply
Are centralized and standardized thought at project
initiation?
i. If yes, what prompted to select both or one
of these?
Centralization
i. Are there situations where centralization
was beneficial? Provide examples.
ii. Can power be de-centralized? What are the
limitations and benefits?
Standardization
i. When various government departments and
private enterprises come into play, is
standardization attempted?
ii. During standardization, are human aspects
also accounted?
iii. During development and during
implementation, is standardization
considered?
What choices are being considered while selecting
technology and thereby standardization?
i. Do social, economic and strategic criteria
play a role?
ii. Do you see scope for negotiations and
mediations while selecting standards?
Similarly, during implementation of technology do
you see scope for choices based on social,
economic and strategic accounts
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i. Can these choices be negotiated and
mediated.
Are there any other interactions social, economic
and so forth that you see during standardization?
Factors that demand E-Governance to be dynamic and open
i. Purpose and Role of Government: Fairness and equity, Transparency, Role of Private
Sector, Role of civil & NGOs, Efficiency & Effectiveness
ii. Societal Trends: Digital divide, demographics, sectarian conflicts, multi-culturalism,
economic development
iii. Human elements: Safety, Privacy, Confidentiality, Identity, Integrity of individual, Trust,
autonomy, access
iv. Changing Technologies: Security, Mobile & wireless, Virtualization, Visualization
v. Information Management: Information search & retrieval, digital (libraries, preservation
& archives), knowledge management
vi. Interaction & complexity: dynamics among subsystems, diverse stakeholders, governance
mechanisms, cooperation, collaboration and multi-channel access & delivery.
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APPENDIX-2: CASES WITH SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW
Appendix-2: Cases with semi-structured interview
Case studies selected to represent at least one transition trajectory. Certain cases represented
more than one transition trajectory. Cases sourced from CIPS (http://www.cips.org.in) and
eINDIA (http://eindia.eletsonline.com), an annual event. The two identified sources are one of the
avenues for Government of India to highlight leading government cases. Information sourced from
both eINDIA and CIPS are available online.
CATEGORY: G2C
Category: G2C
ICT based Citizen Services (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 1-8)
Table 27 Key Information - ICT based Citizen Services
Public Organization GoAP DeitY
Software
Development
Indian Company with Global
Presence
Maintenance &
Support
GoAP and a third party. 3rd party partnerships in various
forms
Respondents Officer GoAP
Director SeMT GoAP Sr. Manager from Indian
Company with Global Presence
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.meeseva.gov.in/Mees
eva/intro.html
{Mission Mode Project}
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Government of India started NeGP in 2005. After that, several states in India embarked on ICT
based citizen services using PPP. In this study, selected state of Andhra Pradesh7 citizen based
services. Andhra Pradesh started ICT based services in early 2000. Andhra Pradesh in 2000 started
with its capital Hyderabad and identified 23 centers as CSCs where citizens can avail G2C services.
These centers operated on PPP mode. Moreover, at that time idea of ICT based services had
novelty and contributed heavily to the initial feedback. These and along with other factors
prompted the private enterprise to scale the operations from 23 to 50 centers, but no change to the
amount8 paid per transaction to the private enterprise. Later, government expanded ICT based
services to other regions of state. CSCs initiated across the state under three categories 1) district
level government directly works with private entrepreneur, 2) an intermediary9 works with the
private entrepreneur, and, 3) an intermediary company works as liaison between Government of
Andhra Pradesh and private entrepreneur. All the three categories worked towards the business
goal of efficient and transparent government services with actual business models varying
considerably. Along with service efficiency, Government of Andhra Pradesh took pride in
improving the working environment. One of the government official quoted, “instead of working
in dingy office spaces government employees, private entrepreneurs and citizens transact in clean
and air-conditioned offices”.
After 2005, with roll out of NeGP by Government of India, Andhra Pradesh re-named its ICT
based citizen services in as Mee-Seva (http://www.aponline.gov.in or
7 In June 2014, Andhra Pradesh state has been bifurcated into Telangana and residual Andhra Pradesh
respectively. In this paper, Andhra Pradesh refers to both the states and data refers to both the states. 8 The amount arrived at by selecting the lowest bid. At the start of E-Seva, charged INR.3.90 per transaction
and paid to the participating private enterprise. 9 It can be a company, for example, APOnline, jointly formed between Tata Consultancy Services and
Government of Andhra Pradesh or a company with expertise in ICT acts as liaison between private
entrepreneur and state government.
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http://www.meeseva.gov.in). At the same time, other states also started ICT based services. CSCs
connected to centralized gateways and servers at service center agencies (SCA) and located in each
state. CSCs use gateways and servers of state E-Governance Service Delivery Gateways located
in SCA for payment and transaction services. Program reports indicate that centralization of
gateways and servers resulted in better and faster access. Standardized internet technology used
for better and seamless connectivity. At each CSC, VLEs identified to enhance the reach of the
CSCs and make their services available at citizen’s doorsteps. CSCs integrated with B2C services
also.
Various CSCs across the state offer around 250+services by standardizing and centralizing the
setup. Standardization consists of 1) Internet enabled service delivery integrating service providers
and service access providers 2) Taking advantage of the standardized internet technology and
provides mobile interfaces 3) Merger of all services at a single location (CSCs) with VLEs playing
the role of managing and running the CSC. Few key services are birth and death certificates,
scholarships for students, financial assistance to pregnant women from lesser economic status of
society. These transactions take 10-15 minutes to complete as compared to 10-15 days before
implementing ICT based services. Several of these services adopt the concept of central pooling
of data and digitally signing them with digital signatures certificates of authorized officers, storing
them in database and rendering them using web-services. A strong ICT based infrastructure helped
Government of India and its states to perform transactions at a faster pace and aim to increase it
further by including other service businesses. Citizens could avail both G2C and B2C from CSCs.
Table 28 provides the list of services available to citizens. One of the DeitY10 secretary
10 Department of Electronics & Information Technology, DeitY, of Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology, Government of India.
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commented, “electronic delivery of services (EDS) is growing at a fast clip at the national level
with transactions at 150Mn per month in 2013 and would like to increase it to 300Mn in 2014”.
Table 28 CSCs and list of services offered
Services Description
G2C Agriculture Certificates, crop assistance, farmer registration,
incentives
Government Cards /
Taxes / Certificates /
Pension
Ration card, birth/death certificates, Electoral roll,
Caste/Minority, Driving license, Income, Various Gov.
pension schemes, taxes
Poultry / Fisheries Avail subsidies, financial assistance, renewal of licenses
Bill Payment Electricity, Water, property taxes,
B2C Financial Services Bank account opening, Cash deposit & withdrawal,
Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and so forth.
Insurance Citizens can avail insurance policies offered by public
and private sector companies.
Education & learning Adult learning programs, e-learning, distance education
courses
Travel Bus, Train and Air ticket bookings
Entertainment DTH connections from private enterprises
Miscellaneous Media, research, data collection and so forth.
A high transaction oriented services did result in skew based on geography (urban and rural),
type of citizens targeted (low, middle and high-income groups), characteristics of private
entrepreneurs benefited (school dropout, school completed and university) and profitability of
private entrepreneurs. Private entrepreneurs operating in urban areas were profitable, whereas rural
areas were not and most of the private entrepreneurs not making profit were school dropout
(Kuriyan & Ray, 2009). To reduce the skew, the options of increasing the citizen reach found to
have benefits in not only increasing the entrepreneur’s profitability, but also making the ICT based
services resolve problems faced by citizens and contribute to growth (Naik et al. 2012). Location
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of CSCs largely addressed by the state considered in this study. For example, Andhra Pradesh has
7200 CSCs covering 23 districts (to compare, another state with twice the number of districts has
6000+ CSCs). However, influence of ICT based services on factors such as market generation and
embedded governance that contributes to growth of ICT has been limited or negligible.
During author’s semi-structured interview, respondents did admit that participating
organizations could assist government in embedded governance. These were, irrespective of
rural/urban, participating organizations to solicit and gather information, provide information on
areas that affect their lifestyle, bridge digital-divide and so forth. For participating organizations
to make a meaningful participation policy level changes are required, define the political context
and arena for cooperation, required organizational and legal changes, selecting standards for
evaluation that are mutually beneficial and a favorable environment for change management. Most
importantly, essential to tailor based on location. Therefore, for citizen-based services to look
beyond transactional services government along with participating organizations requires
developing a regime where adoption of recent ICT innovations help in developing organizational
capabilities and organizational activities for sustaining capabilities. While developing
organizational capabilities and activities affordances for societal evolution are very essential.
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Agriculture Mission Mode Project (AMMP)
As part of NeGP plan, a Mission Mode Project under Department of Agriculture and
Cooperation (http://www.dacnet.nic.in/) has been setup to provide required infrastructure and
enable states to use ICT and provide various services to farmers. Central government has
standardized data structures to ensure uniformity in data structures. Such a framework helps in
sharing of information across states. Best practices can be collected at state level, made available
for other states, and contribute to national repository. Collection of best practices focused on the
prioritized services. Central Government identified 18 of these. NeGP supports agriculture service
delivery through various centers such as CSC, private kiosk, departments, agri-clinics, agri biz
centers. States provided financial assistance to enhance the reach by using various service delivery
centers. Few modules managed by Central government are national level policies regarding
agriculture, plant protection and quarantine, maintain low and high prices for cereals and pulses,
seed certifications, development of insecticides, total sample preparation methods, tools and
procedures and so forth. Therefore, web-services application integrated with other applications for
seeds, agriculture market, insecticides and state portals. Modules such as registration, soil testing,
seed testing and certification, pesticide testing, grievance management, content and knowledge
management managed at both state and national level.
Focus areas of NeGP’s mission mode project are service delivery, capacity building, process
re-engineering, finance planning, technology enablement and monitoring & evaluation. Service
delivery and capacity building exclusively assigned to states and entrusted on state Agricultural
departments with infrastructure support provided by NeGP’s project. Financial planning,
technology enablement and monitoring & evaluation are NeGP’s focus areas and process re-
engineering a joint operation between state and center.
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ICT based services that provide services to citizens, both government and business, and
agriculture services to farmers share the same infrastructure. To enhance service delivery
mechanisms, states have improved request resolution mechanism by providing scientific expert
opinion.
e-KrishiKiran (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 35-41)
Table 29 Key Information - e-KrishiKiran
Public
Organization
Government of Gujarat Anand Agricultural University
Software
Development
National Informatics Center
(NIC)
Anand Agricultural University
(AAU) provides agriculture
technical expertise
Maintenance &
Support
Government of Gujarat
Respondents Director IT
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://shc.aau.in/
Farmers in India come in various proportions, where majority of them follow less scientific
methods. In the absence of scientific advice, there have been cases in India; bad decisions by
farmers coupled with natural calamities resulted in lesser productivity and returns. In certain
situations, when expenditure outweighs returns, farmers became debt ridden. Therefore, timely
scientific expert advice helps farmers to take well-informed decisions. Providing timely scientific
expert is the objective of Government of Gujarat. In this regard, developed an IT based solution
that links the four agricultural universities to the farmers. The IT solution is a web-based
application that can receive requests from farmers and forward it to the agricultural scientists. The
requests managed through a special center established at Anand Agricultural University. Apart
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from farmer’s specific requests, general information also provided at the web site. Web site has
FAQs section and covers agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries and horticulture questions.
General information starts by performing soil test details and calculating the fertility index. These
tests done for each village and for various crops that grown in the village. Farmers expected to
obtain these details from the government offices (panchayat) located at every village. Details
distributed in form of cards and contain apart from soil test details, weather information and crop
information such as fertilizers required, alternative crops tried for viable and better production,
action plans for crop production. So far, details performed for 18,600 villages across state of
Gujarat.
The finalized IT solution involved taking architectural decisions during initial development
phase. The design supports capture of request from the farmer and forwarding it to the scientists
at Agricultural Universities. Scientists objectives re-worked, and contains 30% of their time spent
towards addressing farmers’ requests. With increase in internet usage and adoption by the society,
farmers did not require additional incentives to adopt the ICT based system. However, IT experts
not familiar with agriculture jargon and concepts posted in the special center. This lack of domain
specific knowledge resulted in increase of clarifications from agricultural experts by IT experts.
When multiple domains inter-linked and interwoven into the operation of routines innovative
methods of issue resolution essential to sustain and for better results. Agricultural experts cannot
be posted at the special center to address 30% of their work (agreed as their objectives) in the
process they may sacrifice remaining 70%. During semi-structured interview, the official remarked
saying, “by uploading best practices on web site and uploading videos we plan to address these
issues to certain extent, however, a better solution is essential”.
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e-Sagu (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 83-87)
Table 30 Key Information - e-Sagu
Public Organization Government of Andhra Pradesh IIIT Hyderabad
Software Development IIIT & Acharya N G Ranga
University
Maintenance & Support IIIT & Acharya N G Ranga
University
Contractual agreement exists
Respondent Project Director
Project Manager
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
In the state of Andhra Pradesh, agricultural university and IIIT Hyderabad developed e-Sagu,
an ICT based system, to address farmers’ requests. With help of NeGP, GoAP developed this
application. The application requires a coordinator works closely with the farmer and is ICT
literate. Initially the coordinator had a digital camera to take pictures and attach these along with
the farmer’s request. Coordinator captures farmer’s request by means of a standardized template
that helps the farmer to articulate his/her problems to the agriculture experts. Later the digital
camera upgraded to mobile. Soil tests, crop pattern, fertility index computed before processing
farmer’s requests. Against these parameters, farmer’s request analyzed and information sent back
to the coordinator. Apart from farmer’s requests, crop monitoring and evaluation done at various
stages such as crop selection, pre-cultivation, cultivation, crop management, pre-harvest, harvest
and post-harvest. Schedule is prepared and sent to coordinator and contains the various tasks
required from the coordinator. For example, for commercial crops information is solicited every
week, and for non-commercial crops every 15 days. Coordinator instructed not to suggest solution
even though he is aware of it. During semi-structured interview the respondent replied saying
“patient cannot become a doctor”.
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Apart from providing information to farmer, information also posted on village centers where
people normally aggregate for example, milk collection centers. Information displayed on physical
boards and not on electronic boards, coordinated by the coordinator, and plays a critical role in
information dissemination. Coordinator’s monthly wages agreed before assigning five villages.
Apart from display in public boards, limited help coordinator could provide in information sharing
among farmers. Initially, face-to-face, noticed high issue resolution (60%), as trust developed
gradually, the issue resolution through computer mediated moderated by coordinator increased to
70%. In one of the respondent’s quantitative assessment consisting of ranking farmers, practices
into positive score (increase throughput and reduced cost) and negative score (decrease throughput
and increased cost). A positive correlation (r=0.57) noted between advice and throughput, but only
53% of farmers had a positive score indicating presence of other factors that contributed to
negative score. Slow trust development and negative scores indicate that other factors of societal
evolution such as hierarchical, social (caste and position in society), practices adoption influenced
by people at structurally higher village social levels and so forth could be playing a role. CSC route
not utilized as the project has no contractual agreements with CSC. During semi-structured
interview when request made to respondent to share the feedback of the farmers, respondent
replied saying, “farmers wanted inclusion of other parameters of farming like seeds, horticulture,
fisheries, protection to their produce, labor availability and so forth. In spite of all these limitations
after completion of the project farmers did request to continue the project after its completion”.
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Rice Knowledge Management Portal (RKMP) (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 228-234)
Table 31 Key Information - RKMP
Public Organization Directorate of Rice
Research
Along with various other centers
Software
Development
CDAC ICRISAT for Knowledge
Management models
Maintenance &
Support
Directorate of Rice
Research
CDAC
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
Respondents Sr. Scientist & Consortium Principal
Investigator
Scientist
URL http://www.rkmp.co.in/ {Mission Mode Project}
RKMP is the first step towards knowledge driven agriculture exclusively for cereal rice. It
harnessed ICT and knowledge management to manage voluminous knowledge in DRR. Along
with state departments, DRR harnesses existing knowledge with proper follow-up projects and
activities with continuous update of ICT and knowledge management strategies to enhance yield
in terms of productivity and production. This requires training at Level-I Kisan (farmer) call
centers and collaborating with participating organizations. Though the actions and strategies are
in line with transformational trajectory follow-up actions are very essential. Therefore, observed
trajectory selected as reconfiguration trajectory. RKMP is developed on Drupal (open source)
with plug-ins and add-on platforms (such as dot Net and Java).
Rice Knowledge Management Portal (RKMP) developed with the sole objective of knowledge
creation and dissemination of rice. Rice being a major cereal crop, DRR is the lead institute behind
this initiative, is of the opinion that vast amount of knowledge available across the country and
there is a strong need to share this knowledge for betterment of society. However, there are existing
mechanisms for knowledge creation and dissemination these are grossly inadequate to meet the
ever-increasing rice productivity demands (supply) to meet the ever-increasing consumption
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(demand) of rice. RKMP has been developed so that it benefits rice policy makers, rice research
and extension organizations, credit institutes like banks, farmers, input supply firms, rice
marketing firms, rice processing firms, consumers, and external organizations. The knowledge
created, gathered and stored aimed to benefit scientific, technology-related information and market
information. Thereby, explicit knowledge available in terms of artifacts when combined with tacit
knowledge, which is context specific personal knowledge embedded with individuals, can provide
meaning to the explicit knowledge and contribute to development of new knowledge.
RKMP contributes to domain of agriculture extension. Before discussing further on details of
RKMP, a digression on discussion of agriculture extension done. When asked about extension
services, one of the respondent remarked saying that “agriculture extension services are about
focusing on farmer’s needs and learning about what works and what does not and by the nature
of local circumstances and context”. {1}. In order for extension scientists to harness ICT and
develop extension services they need to understand knowledge acquisition followed by farmers
and extension workers. Most importantly, link to organizational knowledge flows to improve their
perception and trust about information. Therefore, extension scientists need to look from
infomediary’s role of gathering content from several sources and aggregating it to farmers and
extension workers. The respondent summarized saying “extensionists to focus on practical ways
of content development along with developing capacities of infomediary’s”. {2}. This requires
along with ICT field workers need to capture local communities key words, practices and
innovations need to be used to develop key learnings and develop videos. Respondent remarked,
“ICTs contributions are immense in repeating field demonstrations across several villages”. {6}.
Videos when shared with wider communities can obtain more insights into farmer’s innovations,
socio-cultural contexts and make further adjustments. In respondents’ words, it is “zoom-in and
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zoom-out”. {3}. Therefore, ICT interventions not to focus on managing ICT, but managing the
knowledge divide. Such an attempt helps in knowledge being available, accessible and applicable.
{7}. the first step in managing knowledge divide lies in validating and contextualizing the relevant
content. The next step is in moving from teaching mode to learning mode. {5}. by using latest
programming techniques, end-users can also share their experiences along with the locally
developed knowledge. For best results respondent feels that “managers managing several
agriculture initiatives need to be convinced in developing such platforms”. Appropriate platforms
and indicators possible only when every manager and its organization focus on causality link
between the ICT initiatives and the results. {9} & {10}. Along with access considering various
parameters is essential, therefore identifying enabling factors for extension workers towards ICT
enabled services or content. {8} Feasibility of integrating knowledge with time-critical services
across whole chain of ICT actors need to be tried out by extension centers. {8}. Respondent
believes that these {10} points are critical when ICT is used for agriculture extension services.
These points could contribute towards developing actions that help to devise actions suitable for
transformation trajectories.
All India Coordinated Rice Improvement program (AICRIP) is a leading program of DRR
involving various locations all over the country. The objective of AICRIP is to develop insect and
disease resistant superior genotypes suited for different agro-climatic conditions present in India.
During developing of genotypes, it is necessary to consider crop monitoring control and the related
areas such as seed dispatch, trials, technical program, cooperators and various other centers
including marketing. Crop monitoring and control consists of crop selection, pre-cultivation,
cultivation, crop management, pre-harvest, harvest and post-harvest. RKMP to contain datasets
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from AICRIP and other centers such as Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) located at various
rice cultivation regions in India.
The portal developed using the technical expertise of CDAC. Portal development consisted of
developing information architecture, platforms for content management systems, database types,
web servers, script handlers, content maps and user interfaces. The basic information unit for the
portal is RLO (Reusable Learning Object). The portal contains diverse tools, methods and
processes about rice cultivation to support multi-dimensional search by means of rich domain
ontology. DRR also prepared a compendium of rice vocabulary with about 2500 terms. These
again clubbed with other generic terms such as seasons, geographic locations, and user types.
Portal has well developed semantic interoperability and intelligent searches. However, lack of
proper incentives to share information is leading to apathy among stakeholders to share
information. These ontologies are used to develop various IS such as research information system,
extension information system, farming information system, service and general information
system. Apart from information storage, retrieval and display the portal is also enabling DRR
scientists to develop systems such as E-learning. Such systems help providing education to farmers
about the output of scientific research and new knowledge. Extension systems receive large
amount of support from international development agencies. Therefore, extension agencies can
hugely benefit by the rich database of innovative efforts to increase rice productivity. DRR is able
to develop training and e-learning programs on various rice production techniques that benefit
various state and non-state agricultural departments.
The portal provides functionalities for any rice stakeholder to upload information and supports
local languages of all rice-growing regions in India (Hindi, Punjabi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu,
Kannada and Marathi). Apart from information upload, stakeholders can also benefit by the tools
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and processes. Information is available in various categories such as research, extension, farmers
and service. Extension category consists of tools such as Ferti-meter (soil health and fertilize
recommendation system for farmers), Image Driven Diagnostic tool (diagnose various field level
problems at various stages of crop monitoring and control), weed management, market prices and
various other information required for stakeholders of RKMP. Package of Practices is also
available in extension category where local specific best practices that yielded good results are
available.
DRR along with its partners in consortium have taken the right step in developing a
comprehensive agricultural portal that contains 27,000 datasets from AICRIP centers, 10,000
pages of content, and 3,000 minutes of audio and 50 video clips. When improvements made to
increase voluntary knowledge sharing by stakeholders, without apathy it can trigger a whole range
of extension services that benefit not only profit and non-profit organizations, but also helps the
farmer to benefit. It can lead to improvements in socio-economic status of the rural India. Based
on RKMP, future programs identified by DRR are synergize RKMP with agriculture extension
systems, Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), national food security mission (NFSM), partnerships with
private organizations to assist 1MN farmers in next five years and various other programs to assist
conventional extension services and rice check programs. Rice check programs provide unique
localized solutions to farmers by considering biophysical, socioeconomic, organizational and
institutional parameters to increase productivity.
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Centralized On-line Real Time Electronic (CORE) Public Distribution System (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 115-118)
Table 32 Key Information - CORE
Public Organization Government of Chhattisgarh Food & Civil supplies
Department
Software Development Internal dept. of Govt. of
Chhattisgarh
NIC Technical partner
Maintenance & Support Internal dept. of Govt. of
Chhattisgarh
Respondent Director IT
Key Transitional Trajectory Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
Every state government in India provides subsidized commodities to citizens residing in the
state by PDS. These citizens classified into above and below the poverty line and commodities
provided based on their classification. Public Distribution Systems deliver commodities to
citizens’ doorstep by Fair-Price Shops (FPS). Commodities distributed to these fair-price shops
based on the demand and other aspects that government finds appropriate. Supply chain and
logistics plays a key role in movement of commodities and pilferage of commodities is a common
problem. Apart from pilferage during transit, it is also common to pilfer at FPS shops and diversion
of commodities for financial gains. Moreover, the record of citizens’ contained ghost beneficiaries
and wrong entries including exclusions and inclusion. Such problems challenge government from
effectively delivering the commodities to the citizens’ in need. To address these problems
Government of Chhattisgarh initiated electronic monitoring and distribution of PDS.
Government of Chhattisgarh issued around 300,000 smart cards. Smart cards contain relevant
citizen information required for PDS and include biometrics. To increase reach CORE-PDS
integrated to work with smart cards issued by Health department. Though the system can work
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with Aadhaar card, distribution of commodities not linked to Aadhaar card as Aadhaar card issued
to 40% of citizens’ in state of Chhattisgarh. At the point-of-sale (POS) in FPS, commodity is issued
to the citizen by verifying biometrics stored in the provided smart card with biometrics of the
person present for collecting the commodity. Around 560 FPS shops enabled to work with smart
cards, with 40 being in rural and rest in urban. Since the entire life cycle of commodity from
warehouse to FPS is electronic, amount of commodity, dispatched, sold at FPS monitored at real-
time. Government could also send text messages to citizens’ so that they could reduce their trips
to FPS. Citizens can obtain commodities from any FPS shop enabled to work with smart card.
Government plans to make all the FPS shops smart card enabled in next two years. However,
paucity of funds could delay the program.
Grievance redress system provided to citizens and could dial a toll-free number to raise a
compliant. Complaint addressed in 15 days. Government expects citizens to make necessary
judgments and avoid approaching fraudulent FPS shops. So far, 18 FPS shops have tendered
resignation, but the reasons are not due to fraudulent operations. In semi-structured interview
respondent remarked saying, “more than 60% of FPS in Chhattisgarh are good and share their
true feedback. Though, objective is not a citizen friendly system”. Verification of citizens’
complaints is essential before initiating action against FPS owners. Majority of the complaints
found to be not genuine.
CORE-PDS system has been mostly push based with little citizen engagement. In one of the
districts of Chhattisgarh, Dhamtari, a government official Alex Paul Menon helped a village,
Chindhbarri, to decide for themselves on what ingredients get into their food plate. This helped
the village to get out of hunger and poverty. For governments to replicate such actions at higher
level (Menon, 2014). ICT based delivery need to be pull based with higher citizen engagement.
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This requires transformations at social and cultural level. Citizen participation is essential and very
important for improving public service delivery. In the current form of CORE-PDS, has
“technology-based” solution enabled citizens’ the choice of selecting FPS and attempted to solicit
feedback from citizen. However, ingredients such as citizens’ deciding commodity, FPS also
breathes government objectives, considering human aspects during standardization, de-
centralization of power, more private-public partnerships, increasing rural reach all help in
developing a more citizen centric with greater citizen engagement and empowerment. Such a
system is essential to change the purpose and role of government to participatory with society
striving for collective actions (thereby, exhibiting a civil society) results in better coordination in
the triad of government-society-business. Improving triad leads to better E-Governance.
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CATEGORY: G2B
Category: G2B
E-PASS (Electronic Payment and Application System of Scholarships) (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 149-151)
Table 33 Key Information - E-PASS
Public Organization Government of Andhra Pradesh
GoAP
Social Welfare Department
Software Development CGG
Maintenance &
Support
CGG Managed by GoAP;
Respondent Project Director CGG
Project Manager CGG
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed) &
De-alignment & Re-alignment
(Observed)
URL http://epass.cgg.gov.in/
The southern state of Andhra Pradesh provides scholarships to financially and economically
challenged sections of students. These students are primarily, those who have completed their
school education and looking for admissions in various colleges and universities in Andhra
Pradesh. Scholarships support their college fees and their sustenance. Before developing an
electronic system students had to use paper based system, and time consuming, cumbersome,
corrupt, and required huge time and effort from the administrative staff. Social welfare department
of Andhra Pradesh decided to develop an application and entrusted it to a private organization.
The private organization developed the application with JavaScript. The application did not meet
its requirements and had serious integration and interoperability issues. Therefore, the job of
developing a web-services application (OS: Linux; Database: PostgreSQL) entrusted to Center for
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Good Governance (CGG). Apart from meeting requirements, it is essential to resolve integration
and interoperability issues. Application developed in five months and made operational in 2009.
CGG is a software development center managed by government officials. Government officials
perform requirements gathering and other upstream software development activities.
The developed application required applicants to upload necessary documents to support their
want for scholarships. Submission of application completed from the confines of their home.
Application integrated with other departments to verify the authenticity of the supporting
documents. Scholarships paid regularly and electronically to the scholarship granted applicants.
Scholarship payment linked to Unique Id card (Aadhaar) and deposited directly to the applicants
or the college/university bank accounts. Various reports and other dashboards developed for ease
of use, quick retrieval and display of information.
After success with Andhra Pradesh, CGG entrusted to develop similar applications for other
states across India. Application requires lot of customization and is a time-taking and error-prone
activity. In some states, most of the applicants’ information is not available from the school-
leaving certificate. This required integrations with other applications along with business process
re-engineering involving lot of deliberation and consensus building. In certain cases, application
had to re-written as the state decided not to use Unique Id. In one of the author’s discussions, the
officials admitted that managing it is beneficial to manage E-PASS as a product-line and remarked
saying, “This opens up developing knowledge and expertise in various areas other code-build-test.
Though steps have been initiated it remains to be seen how fast we get off the blocks”.
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Passport
Table 34 Key Information - Passport
Public Organization Ministry of External Affairs Central Govt.
Software
Development
Indian Company with Global Presence
Maintenance &
Support
Ministry of External Affairs & Indian
Company with Global Presence
Contractual agreement
exists
Respondent
Manager from Indian Company with
Global Presence
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration
(Observed)
URL https://portal2.passportindia.gov.in/App
OnlineProject/user/userLogin
{Mission Mode Project}
Remarks Though citizens provided with passport services, citizen’s interaction
is limited to submitting application and receiving passport. The
interoperation between public & private decides the efficiency and
effectiveness of services delivered to citizens. Hence, author placed
in G2B category.
Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India felt an increase in demand for passport and
related services. The existing manual system unable to meet demand, provide faster, transparent,
and hassle free services. Government of India along with a partnering organization wanted to
automate the entire workflow of passport and related services and project started in 2008 with pilot
in 2010 and countrywide rollout in 2011. This includes application for passport by citizen,
verification of documents, granting of passport, police verification and dispatch of passport. Using
internet or phone based text messages citizens can know the status of passport application. The
existing manual process had to be completely re-engineering where the participating organization
apart from development of software also performs regular server, database and systems
maintenance activities apart from document processing activities. Extensive usage of technology
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has enabled development of a system that significantly improved with citizens enjoying a timely,
transparent, more accessible & reliable in a comfortable environment possible by streamlined
process performed by trained and motivated workforce. Few key technological innovations are 1)
electronic queue management system 2) single point data capture that includes photograph,
documents and biometrics and 3) High availability and disaster recovery strategy. Apart from
technological innovations, citizens’ reachability enhanced by wide network of kiosks based on
population density. These kiosks reduce not only number of citizens’ visits, but also eliminate the
need to visit the regional passport offices. Government of India could deliver services with
efficiency of a private organization and credibility of a public organization.
Later, Passport actors introduced integrations and interoperability with various departments
such as police, India Security press (for printing passport booklet), India Postal service (for
dispatch of passport) and immigrations. However, noted limited integrations with regional and
local level systems that hold citizens’ demographic and location required for establishing identity.
Passport reach to citizens’ involved rollout spanning 37 passport offices across 23 states and 63
cities where 77 kiosks (Passport Seva Kendras, PSKs). Infrastructure established for portal and
call center setup that provides high availability and helps in adhering to 27 service agreements.
For all the uploaded records completed data migration. Training provided to 6000+ staff of PSK,
Passport office, Security Press and postal department. Department of External affairs with
technology achieve transactional effectiveness and efficiency and meet most of the citizen’s
expectations. Moreover, passport does not demand a close interacting and interoperation with
citizens’, unlike G2C services. However, passport services work well for typical cases and in case
of atypical cases citizens’ involvement increases. During semi-structured interview, the respondent
from participating organization remarked saying, “to address atypical cases deep technical
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integrations are required along with it a closer coordination with other departments is required,
currently we cannot participate in discussions that are beyond the boundary of our operations.
However, feedback solicited once a month and we do provide our feedback”.
Regulation of Corporations and work-flow Automation
Table 35 Key Information - Regulation of Corporations and workflow
Public Organization Ministry of Corporate Affairs
(MCA)
Central Govt.
Software
Development
Indian Company with Global
Presence
Maintenance &
Support
Indian Company with Global
Presence
Contract agreement exists
Respondent Sr. Manager Indian Company
with Global Presence
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
Ministry of Corporate Affairs, MCA, manages the administration of statues of regulations of
corporations including the Companies Act, 1956. After liberalization, economic and commercial
activity of India has seen a remarkable increase in corporation activities. Growth of corporations
enacted, 30,000 in 1956, 200,000 in 1995 and 900,000 in 2013. The huge increase required changes
to legal framework where being competitive international practices can be followed and at the
same time foster positive environment for growth and investment. Along with other changes,
Ministry of Corporate Affairs decided to automate the huge workload of document processing and
started MCA21, a mission mode project. In 2005, a leading Indian Software services provider
awarded the project under BOOT until 2103. After 2013, the project awarded to another leading
Indian Software Services provider. The first phase of project, 78 weeks, rolled-out solution
connecting 52 registrar front offices with 105 offices. The entire workflow digitized including
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signatures and legacy documents. Connected various external stakeholders from cost & works
accountancy such as ICAI, ICS, ICWAI and directors and authorized representatives of various
companies, investors, authorized signatories of banks and citizens. During semi-structure
interview, the private participating organization respondent remarked saying, “projects of this
complexity require not just solving technical issues, but requires extra-ordinary skills such as
stakeholder balancing, political skills, diplomatic skills and to push the project forward. Technical
solutions we could arrive at, but for other issues we could somehow pull it off because of few key
committed individuals at customer side”.
Along with ICT, initiated other changes such as IICA (Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs),
Limited Liability of partnership (LLP), Office of the Competition Commission of India (CCI),
Enhance Accounting Standards of Companies Act, 1956 and International Financial Reporting
Standard (IFRS). The landscape factors that cause opportunity, threat and can become favorable
or opposing are Political (from where can support be obtained), economic (inclusive growth),
Society (skilled, ethical and adaptive), Technical (dynamic changes), Environmental and Legal
(appropriate regulation; identify defaulters and rapid legal action). Ministry has also identified the
benefits, challenges and expectations from stakeholders such as organizations, professional bodies,
banks, investors, field level officers, state and other governments, MCA21 operator and R&D
institutes.
The socio-technical regime of MCA is on the well-established and mature corporate law,
regulations and policy. To augment this MCA supported by well-established professional
institutions. However, slow and cumbersome legal process, inoperative companies, poor ethics by
company professionals, inability to bring in rapid changes to Acts, international legal corporate
law and poor disciplinary mechanisms of professional bodies are challenging MCA’s progress.
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The ICT project enabled MCA by automating workflow operations related to filing, faster
retrieval, managing queues, improved information sharing, improved response times and
compliance monitoring and improved payment options. The type of operation requires secure
operation, PKI based infrastructure provided the required secure environment. From inception in
2002, transactional efficiency has been the significant focus and MCA recorded >250%
improvement in several transactions. MCA has detailed road map to expand their business
intelligence using XBRL. Individual investor is also part of their road map and plan to develop
functionalities to help investor’s to view status of their unpaid dividends and deposits.
Government of Delhi – Department of Excise, Entertainment and Luxury Tax
Table 36 Key Information - Department of Excise, Entertainment and Luxury Tax
Public Organization Government of Delhi Department of Revenue
Software
Development
Indian Company with Global
Presence
Maintenance &
Support
Government of Delhi Indian Company with Global
Presence for seven years
from go-live
Respondent Sr. Manager Indian Company with
Global Presence
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://excise.delhigovt.nic.in/ex3a.asp
Department of Excise, Entertainment and Luxury Tax is division of Revenue department and
a major contributor to government’s revenue. Department has compliance to statutory
requirements towards 1) Excise 2) Entertainment 3) Luxury Tax. Statutory duties include grant of
licenses related to alcohol, intoxicants and drugs. Licenses allow units to distill alcohol, store
alcohol, intoxicants and drugs at warehouses and sell at retail shops. Exercise statutory duties
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according to the Punjab Excise Act, 1914. Similarly, entertainment includes live performances,
cinema, theatre, fun-parks and so forth, according to Entertainment & Betting Act, 1996. Luxury
Tax related to Hotels and Guesthouses according to Luxuries Act, 1996. These Acts framed
keeping in view the socio-cultural situation present in India. Department need to ensure that people
are aware about spurious liquors with ensuring that distilling of liquors adheres to quality standards
to produce quality liquor. Regarding entertainment tax, department need to promote various arts
without affecting brand image of Delhi. Similarly, luxury tax does balance tax calculations and
keep the costs under check to promote tourism. Like any other government department Excise,
Entertainment & Luxury needs to interface with various departments and define policies, standards
and procedures.
Over the years, department has seen huge changes to scope of revenue collection. For instance,
between February and October 2013 department has regulated more than 17 MN cases and 348
MN bottles of alcohol, in the process generating 20 BN INR in revenue. Its limited workforce and
legacy systems resulted in leakage of revenue, difficulties in checking spurious liquor, and, thereby
ensuring consumer safety. Therefore, department felt the need to computerize the excise segment
of its revenue collection. The task of developing Excise Supply Chain Information Management
System (ECIMS) assigned to a leading organization with global presence in software design and
development. The participating organization developed web-based solution with scalable
architecture with 2D bar coding for tracking inventory. Business process re-engineering completed
with standardized look-and-feel and streamlined interfaces. Data maintained at a centralized server
with disaster recovery center. The application’s front-end had two versions one at warehouses a
desktop and handheld device to tag, upload, dispatch, receiving, storing, receiving and storing and
the other a POS application at retail sites. Appropriate front-end application used at various places
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that interact with Excise departments and are distilleries, hotels, clubs, restaurants, state run
corporations. Application gathers transaction data from various outlets to calculate real-time sales
data. Officers can use hand-held devices, perform monitoring, and control of stock information.
At the end of every day, actors performed revenue reconciliation. Reports module of the
application can generate dashboards and reports with various slice and dice options for officers.
Role based authentication could also be easily implemented resulting in changes to reports
granularity based on user roles. Officers can use the data to manage inventory, analyze sales
information, decision-making and policy decisions. Most importantly, officer can also make spot
checks using hand-held devices and ensure quality products distilled from distilleries reach
consumers. A grievance redress system has been set-up with toll free call center for aggrieved
persons to raise requests and track requests. Officers could issue authorizations, certificates, policy
changes and permits after requisite digital authorizations. Rules engine defined to accommodate
changes to excise calculations. The notifications that arise of out changes to excise calculations
sent immediately to concerned stakeholders. A unique blend of standardization and centralization
of data along with workflow and digitized discharge of role based responsibilities helped in
developing a secure, scalable, robust and user-friendly application.
Given the complexity of system for Excise segment of department, requirements gathering
involved a long drawn process. Based on the maturity of the participating organizations and
government, iterations required to decide the requirement. Interoperability required at technology
used to gather, analyze and prioritize requirements and the interactions that happen between
various levels of the both organizations. As requirements refinement is a continuous process, one
of the respondent in semi-structure interview replied saying, “Vendor mindset is more prevalent,
with private organizations having high focus on project completion on-time based on project
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situation innovative methods need to be employed to solicit information. Success of the project
based on these innovative methods. Any cultural transformations to overcome the mind-set will be
a huge bonus”. When complex requirements gathering is coupled with risk averse government
secretaries/directors (respondent felt that is normally the case with any government project) the
project becomes challenging requiring high amounts of motivation to keep the project-team going.
Respondent quoted saying, “though contracts mentions certain clauses, government officers
expect participating organization not to follow it and bear the entire risk”. As the project
progressed, to resolve these risks resolutions from other projects, of B2B type, though applicable
were not re-used. Largely implementation of the solution rests on the context, current situation of
the project, and the contractual clauses. Instead of contract negotiation, an atmosphere of
collaboration could have helped in easy and faster resolution of the issues.
Culturally participating and government organizations differ. Participating organization
emphasizes on change based on business agenda whereas government change agenda though has
the intent of citizen welfare, but in several instances, not translated into actions. However, business
driven change agenda helps in driving few government agendas. The respondent felt, “business
driven change agenda cannot sustain government actions for long, for few instances it may work,
but, not guaranteed, repeatability. To a large extent it is dependent on the maturity of the
organization”. To attenuate the problem information asymmetry exists. Technology related
information is available with participating organization whereas domain and other related
information are with government. A seamless interaction between the two organizations is required
at various stages of the development life cycle. During interactions along with technological and
domain based workflow modifications that happen policy, underlying beliefs, values and user-
preferences also need to change. E-Governance programs are change programs, but equally
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important is creating a platform that enables to create and sustain change. With the presence of
few key individual’s changes are initiated, but sustaining these changes when the key individuals
move or no longer holding the position is not possible. Respondent remarked saying, “re-
negotiation of values doesn’t really happen” is a testimony that change platform does not exist.
Apart from changes to organizational routines and artifacts with changes to employees’ beliefs
and values, changes required during software development are also essential. These changes arise
due to various reasons such as unclear requirements, additional requirements, and changes to
certain assumptions and so forth. These changes invariably bring changes to project schedule and
cost. Changes related to technology and process re-engineering though considered important and
taken forward, but it is not the case at all times. The context and likely changes that occur in the
future have a bearing on accepting/rejecting the change. The decision on change request is not
based on the impact of the change request alone, but on various contingent factors. However, the
respondent mentioned that various steps such as workshops, presentations, avoiding surprises,
clear status updates, frequent mail communication, meeting in-person done stakeholders, fail to
understand and appreciate the need for a change request. Influence of contingent factors playing a
role in decision-making is always present. Respondent felt a vendor mind-set is prevalent and not
of a collaborator.
To stay in tune with technological changes, improvements sought after by governments.
Though the intent of technological changes is for welfare and wellbeing of the citizens, other
changes essential to support or make the technological change happen are lacking. These changes
are required at social, economic, cultural and political level. Without these changes, actions to
manage and respond to socio-technical transitions are not possible.
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Cloud-IVR-Monitor (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 318-323)
Table 37 Key Information - Cloud-IVR-Monitor
Public Organization Government of Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Dept. Govt. of UP
Software Development Internal dept. of State Govt.;
NIC
NIC Technical partner
Maintenance &
Support
NIC; Internal dept. of State Contractual agreement exists;
Respondent Director, UP Midday meal
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
Based on various reasons that include social, economic and political considerations, several
states in India implement mid-day meal program in government run schools. Mid-day meal
program’s objective is to provide nutritious meal to students studying in the government run
schools. Meal is invariably prepared in school premises and in certain cases prepared little away
from school. Mid-meal program requires stocking the essential ingredients at school to prepare
meals. Government also manages supply chain and logistics. Records managed manually; this
resulted in huge delays in getting accurate and reliable information. This required Government of
Uttar Pradesh (UP) to initiate an electronic tracking and monitoring of mid-meal program. It also
wanted an easy-to-use electronic system with minimal involvement from teachers to manage mid-
day meal. After evaluating various options government decided on a cloud, web-based application.
Scaling of operations to meet demand possible as the application is Software-as-a-Service on
Platform-as-a-Service. Felt appropriate to capture data using mobile phone, moreover east for
teachers. Teachers to receive a call from Inter-Active Voice Response (IVR) system regarding
number of mid-day meals served and need to reply by entering the desired amount from their
mobile key pad. For example, zero denotes no meal. The information from IVR is processed and
the web-based cloud application generates reports and makes them available at www.upmdm.in.
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For help and other issues, a toll free number made available. Around 152,000 schools covered so
far where 22,500,000 students served meals. IVR system also raises alerts to officials at
appropriate time. The entire application developed by an internal department in 2-3 months. Given
the scope and risk, officials felt did not assign to private companies. Teachers counselled and
trained in using the system. After discussions with teachers, data collection modified so that
teacher does not incur any cost (in terms of call charges) to provide the required information.
Expanding to include inventory management, attendance and grievance redress reserved for future
expansions.
Teachers counselled and trained in using the system. Data collection, after discussions with
teachers, arrived at such that the provider does not incur any cost, in terms of call charges, to
provide the information. Expanding the idea to include inventory management, attendance and
grievance redress are the future topics. In semi-structured discussion, the official remarked saying,
“with full use of technology we could easily complete some routines that were earlier time
consuming, but we require lot of other changes to further move the E-Governance frontier
forward”.
Given the scope and the importance of timely gathering of data, Government of UP has
implemented an innovative solution with eclectic mix of technology and routines re-design. Such
an eclectic mix helped in developing a new system with easy data entry, data aggregation and
retrieval. Moreover, technology assisted in simplifying day-to-day operations. In doing so could
avoid exceptions based actions and punitive measures, most importantly involved end-users
(teachers), making it user-friendly, providing required infrastructure, and, followed up with regular
training. E-Governance projects are change programs; Government of UP has been successful in
taking requisite initial steps and enhancements are possible. These enhancements could be
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integrating with other systems, better manage of inventory and so forth. Change programs require
re-operationalization and this cannot happen before hand, but negotiated by means of practical
achievements.
e-Panjeeyan (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 129-134)
Table 38 Key Information - e-Panjeeyan
Public Organization Government of Assam Dept. of Revenue & Disaster
Mgmt.
Software Development National Informatics Center (NIC)
and Internal dept. of Assam
NIC Technical partner
Maintenance & Support NIC; Internal dept. of Assam Contractual agreement exists
Respondent Director IT
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://online.assam.gov.in/revenu
Revenue department along with its other responsibilities has land registration also under its
purview. During land transaction involving sale-purchase, the seller and purchaser prepare a
document and pay the necessary fees to the state government. The entire transaction need to happen
in the state government office called Sub-registrar Office. Both the seller and the purchaser need
to be present during the sale and provide various documents about their identity including
biometrics. The officer captures all the relevant details and confers a legal status to the document
and hands over the document to the purchaser. Thereby, provided a measure of security to the
transaction, thereby, minimizing scope for disputes at a later stage. Therefore, state governments
decided to integrate registration offices with land records management system. This helps in
verifying the authenticity of the property before sale transaction and determine the correct fee that
need to be paid. The various registration activities required are sale deed, mortgage, agreement,
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lease deed, power of attorney and so forth. Government of Assam decided to ICT enable the entire
registration process to reduce the time taken to complete registration and deliver the document to
purchaser. Automating the registration process helps in quick retrieval and storage along with
accomplishing various MIS reports and dashboards.
Various Acts such as registration Act - 1908, Indian Stamp Act - 1899, Hindu Marriages Act
– 1955, Indian Partnership Act – 1932 and so forth govern registration department. For
administrative purposes, the region divided into registrars and sub-registrars. Government of
Assam has divided Assam into 13 Registrars and 75 sub-registrars. Sub-registrars perform the land
registration, whereas, Companies and firms’ registration is performed by the Registrar. The scope
of work included all 13 registrar and 75 sub-registrar offices. Development of software assigned
to National Informatics Center (NIC), a public organization. NIC got involved from requirements
gathering, initially, developed the software for Registrar offices and later extended it to the 75 sub-
registrar offices. Software development completed and deployed in 2007. Process re-engineering
done to reduce manual intervention and eliminated maintenance of manual entries and registers.
The registered document handed over to the purchaser in the same day. The network connectivity
for the entire registrar and 75 sub-registrar offices completed with the help of a private agency.
Integration is not done with the land management system, “Dharitree”. During semi-structured
interview, the official remarked saying, “Not sure when it will be done, but such integrations
essential to provide better services to citizens”.
Automation of the entire registration process required training of the staff to use the developed
software. Since the existing staff re-trained to use the developed software, less resistance in use
the application. However, challenges faced in digitization of existing records. Existing records
digitized in a phased manner and with the help of taking additional personnel on temporary basis.
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Operations and maintenance of the application is managed by collecting a nominal fee for every
transaction. Linking the registration application with the land records management is very essential
to check irregularities. Land records management helps in keeping a check on land in both urban
and rural. Urban land development authorities allow private developers to develop the land. To
check irregularities urban authorities do monitor and check whether the development is done
according to the plan. Digitization included errors introduced before automation of registration.
The key challenge is continuously checking to prevent irregularities getting into the system and
weeding out existing irregularities. Therefore, for effective and complete realization of automation
of registration integration with land records management is essential, where land records
management can capture reality at the detailed level. This requires huge capital investments a
major issue for computerization in developing countries.
Kerala State Land Bank (KSLB) (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 168-174)
Table 39 Key Information - KSLB
Public Organization Government of Kerala Department of Revenue
Software Development Internal Dept. of Govt. of
Kerala
Maintenance Government of Kerala
Respondent Deputy Collector
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.kslb.kerala.gov.in/
Government of Kerala’s department of revenue like any other revenue department’s in other
states embarked on computerization. Prevention of land encroachment, especially government
lands, primary reasons for computerization. Historically, land under the jurisdiction of Kerala State
came under different provinces, for example, north part of the state under Madras Presidency and
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the South part of the state under Travancore where the central part with Cochin. Therefore,
integrated land survey not possible until the formation of Kerala state. Moreover, passing land acts
in Kerala Assembly essential for performing the survey. All these contributed to delay in land
survey of all types of lands in the entire state. Land survey requires using latest technology
requiring huge capital investments. In 1908, land survey is done for cultivable lands. In 1957, only
few some lands (800 villages) were surveyed.
Along with government land digitization, revenue department has also computerized land
transactions apart from property tax payments. The application has been developed in VB/SQL
server has access to the common database that stores land transactions in Kerala. Citizens can
perform various land transactions such as changes to land records, mutation, collection of taxes
and issue certificates. Citizens can perform all these transactions from CSC centers (or Akshaya)
or from the Sub-registrar offices.
Software developed internally using open source (UBUNTU & MySQL). The digitization of
records involved three steps 1) survey of all the government land using textual and spatial
coordinates 2) digitize all the existing records and issue a date from which all transactions are
electronic 3) surveillance and protection of the surveyed land using markings and Public Land
Protection Force (PLPF). Government lands leased out to private agencies. On certain lands, there
are resources such as trees. Private agencies lease managed electronically with alerts raised at
appropriate times. Amendments also introduced to Registry Act, 1908. These amendments bridge
the gap between the reality and policy.
CSC centers and the IT initiatives in Kerala helped them with on-the-job training to the
personnel of Revenue department working on Land applications. Project Champion plays a critical
role especially in the initial phases of the project. Champion need to understand transparency and
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be critical of when and how to share information. In one of author’s discussions with the
respondent, a project champion, remarked saying, “Complete transparency refers to sharing
selectively even with your supervisor”. Project champion selected the personnel to form the PLPF
team. PLPF team is used judiciously and covering them from political and other attacks. A good
rapport with the team is essential for them to perform evictions. A toll free citizen call center has
been set-up and acts as ears regarding any unlawful occupation of government lands. Identifying
landowners with more than 25 acres of land (Land reforms Act), is another significant development
of land bank. The identified land along with other government land identified for distributing to
landless citizens in Kerala. The revenue department has embarked on a zero landless (citizens) in
Kerala.
Land Bank project identified with a scope of surveying Government land and could leverage
on the existing IT infrastructure (Akshaya). The project’s significance lies in the project
champion’s sparing use of the allocated budget spent only 135 MN INR. Moreover, project
champion interacted with various personnel in revenue departments and leveraged interactions
with personnel outside revenue department. Such interactions bring to light the various social and
political factors that play a significant role in success of E-Governance projects. As projects
objectives change to meet the ever-changing citizens’ wants-and-needs, it requires innovative
ways of meeting and delivering projects by exceeding expectations. Change initiated by few key
individuals, to sustain it in their absence organizations need to inculcate a culture of responding to
change and sustaining change. In other words, a change platform is required.
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CATEGORY: G2G
Category: G2G
Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure DSSDI (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 280-284)
Table 40 Key Information - DSSDI
Public Organization Government of Delhi Geo-Spatial Delhi Ltd (GSDL)
Software Development Navayuga Technologies Ltd
Maintenance &
Support
GSDL Contract agreement exists
Respondent Director GSDL
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Reproduction (Observed) &
Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.gsdl.org.in/ http://www.navayugaspatial.com/
html/home.html
Government of Delhi started a company named Geo-Spatial Delhi Limited (GSDL), under
Company’s Act, 1956 in 2007. The objectives of GSDL is develop spatial database and enable
various departments in Govt. of Delhi to take well-informed decisions. This required integrating
spatial database with various Management Information Systems (MIS) of other departments. To
better meet their objectives GDSL felt that geomatics of entire Delhi area under Government of
Delhi is essential. Geomatics includes gathering, processing, storing and retrieval of geographic
information. This required GSDL to map entire city on a large-scale (1:2000) using aerial
photography to produce an accurate base map, capturing and overlay all over ground and
underground utilities, thereby creating a 3-D city model and undertake property survey of all
dwelling units. Thereby, a spatial database and infrastructure to not only create, but also achieve
continuously update of database. However, integrating spatial database with MIS of various other
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departments is essential for well-informed decision-making. This required getting to know 1) who
has what data 2) obtain details of accessing data 3) use it in conjunction with other data.
Standardization of data requires achieving these three aspects. However, standardization alone did
not solve the problem because it is important to address issues such as privacy, confidentiality,
security, safety, access and trust. To address few of these issues GSDL created Metadata (data
about data). Metadata contained descriptions about data, helped in performing retrieval, storage
and display of data, and accomplished discrete display of data. This required migrating existing
data to electronic mode. Decision-making based on both existing and new data; therefore, success
of the project also based on making both existing and new data electronic. This required ensuring
weeding out “bad” data from the records. Weeding out bad data is an exercise best done only
incrementally and is too costly and unviable to complete it in one pass. Navayuga Technologies
developed the first version, subsequent versions managed by GSDL.
The 30 departments expected to use spatial database are Public Words Dept. (PWD), Fire
Services, Delhi Police, Election Commission, Revenue, Health and Family welfare, Census,
Irrigation and Flood Control, Labor, Excise Entertainment and Luxury Tax, Trade and Taxes,
Forests, Power Generation and Distribution divisions in Delhi and Delhi development and
transport authorities of Delhi. Apart from government departments, illegal and unauthorized
constructions could be reconciled with property tax paid by citizens. To address such wide
stakeholders, the digitized map to contain information other than DOGSTAILS (Date, Orientation,
Grid, Scale, Title, Author, Index, Legend, Sources). Therefore, maps divided into general and
special purpose maps and special purpose maps. Special purpose maps expected to deliver various
requirements of stakeholders. Thematic maps both qualitative and quantitative maps developed to
address stakeholder’s requirements. With various thematic maps, GSDL could make the process
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of mapping easy. Along with digitized multiple maps various information management techniques
helped GSDL to achieve retrieval, storage and display. For traffic, Fire, police coordination and
arriving at shortest path made possible using geospatial database. For departments such as public
works, power generation and distribution that lay underground cables coordination, scheduling
and decision-making is made possible using Plan-Dig-Monitor (PDM) application. PDM
application provided graphical and accurate information and departments could login and provide
their requirements as requests. GSDL authorities can coordinate and provide the necessary
schedule to the requesting departments. Effective disaster and traffic management, security of
important buildings, detection of illegal buildings and monitoring changes made to land and
building demarcations in real time.
The entire application’s success is dependent on the success of implementing spatial data
infrastructure in compliance with National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) of Government of
India. Majority of the users of spatial data were not familiar with NSDI’s guidelines. Moreover,
not establishing a channel of communication between NSDI and spatial data users compounded
the problems. Spatial data users also need to establish Metadata and continuously improve it to
meet the stakeholder’s requirements. Users’ familiarity with metadata and generation of it with
compliance to NSDI is very essential for success of the project. During semi-structure interview,
respondent remarked saying, “Though end-user training provided to users, usage of geospatial
across various departments requires coordination among departments. With GSDL interacting
with lots of departments requires exploring novel methods of knowledge assimilation and
distribution”. Geospatial information requires expensive hardware and software; therefore,
budgetary issues do keep cropping up frequently.
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Home Department Integrated IT Solution HD-IITS
Table 41 Key Information – HD-IITS
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Home Ministry
Software
Development
Indian Company with Global
Presence
Maintenance &
Support
Government of Gujarat
Respondent Manager from Indian Company
with Global Presence
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Reproduction (Observed) &
Reconfiguration (Observed)
Home Ministry of Government of Gujarat has 19 departments. These departments manage
various functions such as Police activities (Police Station, Intelligence Bureau, CID Crime and
State Crime Bureau, Home guards and civil defense, Housing, Communications equipment),
Forensic Lab, Anti-Corruption Bureau, Prison, Prohibition & Excise, Traffic and Training. Apart
from a centralized repository that caters to functioning of the functions, Home Ministry also
wanted payroll, inventory and other administrative functions. All these functions have one of their
objective of providing user-friendly services citizen. Therefore, Government of Gujarat developed
a portal to help citizens to perform their transactions. The entire task of developing a software
assigned to leading organization with global presence in software design and development.
Innovativeness displayed in developing the software helped the organization’s business unit to
secure ‘Best Innovation Initiative Award’ issued internally in the organization.
The participating organization did involve from requirements gathering to acceptance testing
and deployment. Requirements gathering followed a hybrid model of deciding upfront certain set
of requirements and iteratively improving the requirements along the project duration. An iterative
and incremental development helped in better meeting Home Ministry’s requirements.
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Requirements of Home Ministry also evolved over a period with incremental improvements, rather
followed “after I see I know what further is required”. The participating organization also involved
the end-users periodically and could discuss the pros-and-cons before arriving at the decisions. A
mutual and consensus approach did occur at several levels of the Home Ministry and the
participating organization. The respondent remarked saying that, “Home Ministry no longer
considers as a vendor, but as a technology partner, contrary to other government projects”.
Moreover, risk sharing between the organizations did occur all along the project with participating
organization detailing out the approach right from beginning, Request-For-Proposal (RFP). The
RFP contained the technology stack, where the required changes both technical and non-technical
discussed and amicably agreed all along the project.
The functionalities, though, not as involved as in Procurement or Taxation domain, but with a
SOA coupled with iterative and incremental development met majority of the functionalities.
Home Ministry readily accepted the suggestion for a centralized repository with required security
and role level authentications. Standardization possible by following SOA coupled with
centralization did achieve re-operationalization of ICT routines. Moreover, the participating
organization had huge experience in completing such programs at several locations across the
world. Apart from software development, centralization and standardization of the communication
paths standardized between both the organizations. Centralization of certain program management
functions to share a holistic and complete picture to all the stakeholders. Project governance
spanning requirements base lining, design and implementation to training, usage, analytics
obtainable from system and the maintainability of the system all managed by standardizing and
centralizing certain information, routines and procedures. The respondent remarked saying that,
“For complex projects like HD-IITS standardization and centralization at appropriate levels not
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only enabled in achieving vision of the government, project was also successfully completed,
thereby meeting objectives of both the organizations”. Participating organization suggests the
government an economical technical solution from both licensing and support standpoint. End-
users understanding imbibing the technology helped in completing the training with ease.
Technology not only met the technical requirements of the functions economic and social needs
also met. Training program had train-the-trainers’ module and played a major role in convincing
the end-users to accept the system.
Change management when viewed from software development perspective, results in a change
request leading to change in either schedule or cost or both of the project. A mutual agreement
between the participating organizations is essential. The method followed be neither too rigid nor
flexible, but requires a right balance. In HD-IITS project given the high age of the staff, computer
literacy and acceptability of standard functionality both organizations could strike that balance.
The respondent attributes it to both the organizations and said, “changes could be incrementally
introduced that helped government to move their frontier of technology adoption”. A change
request requires governance activities to clarify and provide the right level of detailed information.
Program Director in the participating organization and the project sponsors from both the
organization could arrive at mutual consensus resulting in change requests bringing incremental
improvements and transforming the end-users to accept latest technologies.
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APPENDIX- 3: CASES – CIPS {CENTER FOR INNOVATION IN
PUBLIC SYSTEMS}
Appendix-3: Cases – CIPS {Center for Innovation in Public
Systems}
CATEGORY: G2C
Category: G2C
Sakala – Karnataka Guarantee of Services (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 77-82)
Table 42 Key Information - Sakala
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Dept. of Personnel
Administration
Software Development NIC Bangalore
Maintenance & Support Govt. of Karnataka & NIC
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.sakala.kar.nic.in/gsc_home.aspx
Government of Karnataka passed an Act in the legislature assembly in 2011. This Act called
as Guarantee of Services Act, 2011. In this act, certain identified departments assigned important
for citizen. It has also been stipulated in the Act that any requests raised by citizen need to be
addressed within a stipulated time. In case the citizen request is not resolved within the stipulated
time a compensatory amount, is paid to the citizen. Citizen can also appeal to higher authorities in
case issue unduly rejected or not resolved within stipulated time. The various departments included
are School Education Dharwad and Gulbarga, Agricultural marketing, Bangalore Development
Authority, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage
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Board, Bruhat Bangalore Nagara Pallike (BBNP), City Corporation (other than BBNP), Water
Resources, Various Universities in Karnataka, Women and Child Welfare, Commercial taxes
department, Forest, Excise & Control and so forth. Certain services identified in each department
for citizens to raise requests.
Against each request, required forms filled with necessary documents detailed in the web site.
On submission of the request, an acknowledgement issued to citizen with a unique identifier.
Citizen can track the status of his/her application with unique identifier. The application developed
is a web-based application using SOA. A report and dashboard feature provided to generate reports
with the required slice/dice of data. Using Sakala Government of Karnataka plans to bring in
accountability and responsibility in the workforce of the selected departments. Sakala started in
April 2012 and 25 months after its inception 53 MN beneficiaries served using Sakala. So far,
Sakala served 669 services of 50 departments registered in Sakala, where addressed 1500+
grievances. So far, Government of Karnataka opened 2500+ Sakala service centers. By providing
SLA based services for 50 departments using Sakala, Government of Karnataka plans to make
departments think ‘Citizens First’. In doing so, employees union had to be convinced that Sakala
is not detrimental to their job, but in fact increases their morale. Government of Karnataka also
plans to solicit feedback from citizens, based on the services delivered.
Sakala not based on services alone; Government has also plans to drive CSR across corporates.
Corporates that have more than net worth more than 5000 MN INR or turnover of 10 BN INR or
Net profit of 50 MN INR need to spend 2% of their three years average profit in CSR activities.
Government of Karnataka identified CSR activities such as women empowerment, poverty
eradication, rural development projects, Environment sustainability, Health improvement,
Vocational skill development and Educational promotion. CSR activities extended to include
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consultancy services apart from financial activities. Consultancy involved suggestion of
innovative workflows and sharing IT support, suggesting innovative methods to reduce red tape,
innovative advertisements for Sakala to make citizens aware of their rights under Sakala, volunteer
as ambassadors of Sakala (Sakala-Mitra). Towards financial assistance, kiosks/help-desks are set-
up at both rural and urban areas.
Government of Karnataka displayed participative governance, but limited it to corporates and
in business process re-engineering using IT. Largely Sakala oriented towards improving service
delivery efficiency in key departments that touch citizens’ lives very closely. Engaging and
empowerment of citizens not considered, essential to achieve participatory governance. However,
there has been a good rigor for corporates to generate innovative ideas and assist Government of
Karnataka through Sakala.
Crop Pest Surveillance (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 272-279)
Table 43 Key Information - Crop Pest Surveillance
Public Organization Government of Maharashtra Department of Agriculture
Software Development Department of Agriculture
Maintenance & Support Department of Agriculture
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
Government of Maharashtra’s department of Agriculture bestowed with a unique problem of
lack of information, limited workforce and lack of awareness about various pests that affect cotton,
pigeon pea, chicken pea and soybean crops. Lack of information is not limited to pesticides alone,
but also due to inability to identify pests, survival of the pests, weather conditions and so forth. To
address these issues, Department of Agriculture in April 2010 initiated Crop Pest Surveillance and
Advisory project. Crop pest surveillance and advisory project comprises two committees namely
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steering and surveillance. Steering committee maintains the information obtained from
surveillance committee in electronic form and provides advisory services to farmers. Advisory
services include extended services in the form of timely information by text messages, training,
providing trainers and training the trainers. Steering team comprises agricultural officers and
scientists. Steering committee team assigns one senior officer at district level to train the trainers
and farmers. State of Maharashtra employed 400 field staff across the entire state. The senior
officer also coordinates between the Department of Agriculture and the steering committee.
Surveillance committee consists of monitor with 10-15 scouts who assist the monitor on gathering
and communicating the data to the sub divisional agricultural office of the Department of
Agriculture. Each monitor has hand-held device to gather information about the pests. The hand-
held device while capturing information also captures GIS information, pictures and other relevant
information. The project was implemented in 78 sub-divisions of 29 districts of Maharashtra and
64 sub divisional agricultural offices, with 2.6MN, 4 MN, 1.4 MN and 1.3 MN hectares of soybean,
cotton, pigeon pea and chickpea managed by 82 monitors. Sub divisional agricultural offices host
the requisite hardware and software. Monitors with the help of data entry operators enter data at
the sub divisional agricultural offices. Surveillance committee in close collaboration with the
steering committee sends advisories to farmers. These advisories use various communication
mediums and one of them is text messages using mobile phone. Until 2013, 2,953,000 advisory
text messages sent to farmers.
This project started with an initial outlay of 250 MN INR for one year and based on the progress
extended for another two years until 2013. Recruited and trained a total of 780 scouts, 82 monitors
and 82 data entry operators. Given the vagaries agricultural produce is exposed to information
regarding weather, best practices from other areas and centers not limited to Maharashtra, superior
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genotypes, and integrating policy makers, research and extension organizations, credit institutes
like banks, input supply firms, marketing firms, processing firms and consumers and external
organizations with farmers is very essential. Such an integration helps in not only the throughput
of the produce, but also helps in increasing value all along the agriculture value chain. This requires
improving agricultural extensions services by moving from reconfiguration socio-technical
transition trajectory to transformation trajectory. Transformation trajectory requires huge capital
inflows and substantial knowledge management repository with rich domain ontology and
semantic searches. A daunting task for E-Governance programs with limited resources.
Intelligent Advisory System for Farmers (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 285-288)
Table 44 Key Information - Intelligent Advisory System for Farmers
Public Organization Government of Manipur &
Meghalaya
Department of Agriculture
Software Development CDAC
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Agriculture
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
The Northeast states of India have also started using ICT to assist farmers. Two states of
Northeast Manipur and Meghalaya in collaboration with Central Agricultural University of Imphal
wanted to assist 1800 farmers residing in nine and five districts of Manipur and Meghalaya
respectively. Central Agricultural University, Imphal is located in the capital of Manipur Imphal.
Department of Agriculture with funding from central ministry DeitY with CDAC as participating
organization initiated a project to develop a computerized solution. CDAC arrived at a web-based
SOA that can take inputs from text messages. The architecture supports fast indexed searches
based on the keywords in text message. Keywords used for indexing through the centralized
repository and identify the probable solutions. In case the search could not identify the solution
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from the repository, request forwarded to agricultural scientists and subject matter experts. Based
on suggested solution farmers can get further clarifications from the agricultural scientists. The
solutions conveyed through e-mail or as text messages. Framers who do not have access to e-mail
can obtain the solution through text messages. Farmers need to register with their mobile phone
numbers; suggested solutions were limited by the limitations imposed by text messages. In this
regard, farmers to augment the mobile text message solution may rely on peers leading to
incomplete and/or distortion of information. The areas covered are insect management, disease
management, weed management and fertilize management.
The suggested ICT based solution enables farmers to connect with experts using mobile phone.
However, the content delivered bound by the format and size possible through text message.
Timely information can reach farmers, but various other extension services of agricultural services
are not possible.
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CATEGORY: G2B
Category: G2B
E-Uparjan: Wheat procurement System (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 152-157)
Table 45 Key Information - E-Uparjan
Public Organization Government of Madhya Pradesh Dept. of Food and Civil
Supplies
Software Development NIC MPSC Bhopal SeMT Bhopal
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Food and Civil supplies
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
Government of Madhya Pradesh’s department of Food and Civil supplies procures wheat from
farmers. These farmers are located across all districts of Madhya Pradesh. Before E-Uparjan,
wheat procured by coordinating with district officials about storage status and initiate procurement
from farmers. This resulting in frequent delays in getting status resulting in postpone of
procurement of wheat from farmers. Farmers were paid amount by cheques, and had cheque
encashment delays. Wheat procured from farmers is stored in district level warehouses before
transporting it to the central warehouses. From central warehouses, wheat transported to various
distribution centers. A manual process followed for coordinating between procurement and
transportation with lot of coordination between several stakeholders. The arrived schedule required
frequent modifications due to reporting of old status. Therefore, Food and civil supplies
department decided to automate the procurement of wheat from farmers.
NIC Bhopal developed E-Uparjan software. E-Uparjan software installed at the 33 cooperative
societies that monitor and track all procurement centers at district level. The cooperative centers
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inter-connected by network connectivity with State eMission Team assisting the department with
procurement of computer hardware and network connectivity. Farmers register using the MP
online portal. Department had to educate farmers in getting themselves registered and the
advantageous. Farmers registered in two phases using MP online portal from CSC centers. Farmers
can register from procurement centers (or E-Uparjan Kendras). During registration, obtained all
relevant details such as name, bank account, phone numbers, address and so forth. Farmers
intimated about procurement four to five days in advance on their mobile phones by means of text
messages. Information from procurement centers to cooperative societies relayed every day. Relay
consists of transporting a physical record containing all the daily transactions. The contents are
farmer’s name, quantity and other relevant details. These values entered into the E-Uparjan
software by data operators. Around 1,562,000 farmers have registered where 1,350,000 text
messages sent. Government of MP procured around 8,500,000 metric tons of wheat. Hands-on
training provided to 3,500 persons.
On receipt of text messages farmers reach the procurement centers at appropriate date to sell
their produce. Amount credited directly into their accounts within 10 days of farmer making the
sale. From the cooperative societies, information transmitted to the banks with payment
instructions. Reports and dashboards generated from cooperative societies.
E-Uparjan software can connect cooperative societies with procurement centers and integrate
with supply chain logistics of Madhya Pradesh warehouse. Such integration can help in better
management and coordination along the entire supply chain from procurement from farmers to
sale at retailers. However, such a system requires huge capital investments towards IT connectivity
to the entire state. Government of MP to focus in not only training of vendors and other
participating agencies in using the software, but also focus on social aspects of virtual
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procurement. This requires taking a transformation socio-technical trajectory instead of a
technology substitution trajectory.
Mineral Administration Karnataka (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 123-128)
Table 46 Key Information - Mineral Administration Karnataka
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Dept. of Mines & Geology
Software Development nCode Solutions A division of GNFC Ltd.
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Mines & geology nCode Solutions
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://khanjia.kar.ncode.in
Government of India as part of their responsibility to safeguard natural resources in India has
issued Mineral Policy emphasizing the importance and urgency to regulate mining activities in
each state. In this regard, Government of Karnataka’s department of Mines & Geology has decided
to use ICT to strengthen and regulate mining activities. Government of India has set-up in 1974
Metal Scrap Trading Company (MSTC) to assist public sector organizations in e-auction and e-
tender of various metals and mineral-ore. Department of Mines & Geology decided to use the
services of MSTC. This ensures that the audit and surveillance activities incorporated in MSTC
are also applied to its tender/auction activities.
Auction and bidding happens at the MSTC web portal. Bidders who have been successful in
the e-auction make full payment electronically. On receipt of the amount portal, permits generated
at the web-portal developed by nCode Solutions. Permits approved electronically based on user
role authentication. On approval of permits, workflow mechanisms triggered based on the
respective ore mined and the transport mechanism used to take the ore to the buyer’s place. For
example, trip-sheets issued periodically based on the number of trips and frequency of the trips.
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On issue of the trips, based on the transport mechanism, information passed to weighbridge
operators, check-posts and other transit points that monitor movement of ore/metals. Rake permits
issued, in case the transport is by Indian Railways and managed multi-mode transportation
arrangements. Keeping the changing business dynamics and the new lease agreements,
customization of web-portal for new workflows is made possible.
ICT based services have made government officials more accountable resulting in increase in
revenue recognition of 33% in one year of the operation. Revenue recognized is seven BN INR.
The registered increase is despite temporary ban on iron-ore by Supreme Court of India.
Department of Mines & Geology had to educate weighbridge operators and owners, mineral
warehouses had to be convinced on the advantageous of ICT based operations. Remote mining
locations posed connectivity challenges. Leaseholders negotiated with telecom service providers
and installed wireless base station controllers. In case of small leaseholders, mobile-based permits
were issued. In certain cases, connectivity issues noted due to erratic power supply. The
leaseholders resolved the erratic supply issues on their own by installing power-generating units.
Around 9200 quarry leaseholders, 521 mining leaseholders issued permits. Thin clients installed
at 210 weigh bridge stations integrated operators with the online permit system. Stations at remote
locations required network connectivity. nCode Solutions did address these connectivity issues.
Overall 10,133 permits, 3,465,824 trip sheets, 4878 rake permits issued in one year of operation.
ICT based permit system required network connectivity and training of weighbridge, mineral
warehouse owners, and quarry and mining leaseholders on usage of ICT system. The routines
government officials use to issue permits have been made ICT enabled resulting in increase of
revenue recognition. The customization of application to meet the various ICT based workflow
arrangements. E-procurement challenges were addressed by utilizing MSTC e-procurement
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services. E-Procurement requires stakeholders to understand ICT routines and the social aspects
of virtual procurement. Moreover, E-Procurement is interdisciplinary involving IS, procurement,
supply chain, public administration and policy. Policies formulated for E-procurement by combing
these fields. Therefore, while policies put into practice get operationalized according to the
localized interpretations. Actors (both objects and humans) interactions influence interpretations.
MSTC being a seasoned player in context of minerals would have developed procurement
interoperations by interacting with various actors of private and public organizations. For example,
established audits and surveillance mechanisms that worked well with localized interpretations.
An established e-procurement system of MSTC could have contributed to the success of mineral
ore ICT permit system.
Mineral Administration and Governance Gujarat (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 267-271)
Table 47 Key Information - Mineral Administration and Governance Gujarat
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Commission for Geology &
Mining
Software Development nCode Solutions A division of GNFC Ltd.
Maintenance & Support Commissionerate of Geology &
Mining
nCode Solutions
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.cgm.ncode.in
Government of Gujarat has set-up a commission for Geology & Mines in Gujarat. Commission
has established 24 offices in 26 districts of Gujarat. Commission has 75 geologists and 12 scientists
who search and explore the mineral wealth in the state by using state-of-the-art technology. After
careful evaluation of the mineral deposits, the mines leased to agencies to excavate. The excavated
ore sold inside India. India’s ore policy prohibits sale of high-grade ore outside India. Geologists
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also certify the grade of the ore. After obtaining the lease of the mines, the leaseholder excavates
and moves the ore to mineral warehouses before it reaches its destination. The current manual
process is slow and lapses present in both the process and the persons who perform the operations.
These elapses resulted in leakage of revenue for the commission. Commission wanted to develop
a logistics software application that can not only improve the paper work associated with
movement of ore and improve the morale of the officers.
Commission selected nCode Solutions to develop the software. nCode developed software of
similar application and for Government of Karnataka. The leaseholder needs to obtain a royalty
pass, for which the necessary payment paid to the commission. On receiving the amount, royalty
passes issued from the software developed by nCode. Government of Karnataka registered around
7000 leaseholders in the entire state. Leaseholders trained by both hands-on and classroom training
sessions. Also prepared demo cases. The developed software is a web-based application using
three-tier architecture. The presentation layer is a thin client, captures and displays the information
required from and to the end-user. The middle layer contains the business logic and performs
authorization, authentication and workflow management. Business logic separated from
presentation layer so that a change to business logic does not affect presentation layer and vice-
versa. The third layer is the database. The business layer can interact with various other
applications such as payroll, human resources, inventory using XML based message exchange
using SOAP web-services. Architecture enables to generate various reports using third party report
generating tools.
Royalty pass has a unique barcode and contains mineral weight, duration of journey,
destination details and so forth. This information required at various points that check the
movement of mineral ore from mines to the destination point. Thereby, Government of Gujarat
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registered weighbridge operators and check-posts. Personnel trained from weighbridge and check-
post to use the software. It also registered around 1627 weighbridges and 4137 warehouses.
Handheld devices provided for ease of operation at the weighbridges and warehouses.
Computerized system could enable the commission to generate 88,087 transactions, 5,800,000
passes and 12,500 returns. Returns refer to ore returned back to the mines.
The workflow management has been ICT enabled and helped the commission to perform
operations 24x7 without much hassles. For benefit of commission, personnel trained to ensure
proper usage of ICT based routines. However, author noted no instances of other necessary aspects
of ICT driven procurement management system.
Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 289-291)
Table 48 Key Information - Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Gujarat Mineral Development
Corp
Software Development nCode Solutions A division of GNFC Ltd.
Maintenance &
Support
Commissionerate of Geology
& Mining
nCode Solutions
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.cgm.ncode.in
Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) wanted its operations ICT enabled, both
internal and with end-users. The operations include sales, dispatch, production, quality
management, material management, financial management, mines management and human
resource management. The application objective is assist GMDC stakeholders in obtaining
requisite information. Therefore, GMDC selected Oracle Business Suite.
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Oracle Business Suite helped them to eliminate manual intervention. The workflow automation
achieved in obtaining necessary approvals and acknowledgements. The existing information had
to be digitized requiring allocation of special resources. Training of personnel to perform ICT
enabled routines, done in batches, role based and in phases. This ensured that the personnel are
comfortable in using the application. Lignite production did increase due to computerization. It
reached 327,773 tons for the year 2011-12. Improving end-user satisfaction using CRM (customer
relationship management) module deserves special mention apart from increase in production.
Customer satisfaction improved due to faster and systematic decision-making and enhanced
employee morale. This is another case where actors followed technology substitution as transition
trajectory without deciding the sequence of subsequent trajectories.
Geo-Informatics for Forests Rights (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 42-49)
Table 49 Key Information - Geo-Informatics for Forest Rights
Public Organization Government of
Maharashtra
Revenue, Forest & Tribal
Departments
Software Development NIC & TRTI Pune NRSA for Satellite Image
Maintenance & Support TRTI Pune
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://trti.maharashtra.gov.in/frm_HomePage.php
Government of India in 2006 came up with Forest Rights Act exclusively for Scheduled Tribes
and other traditional forest dwellers of India. Primarily two types of forests one is “reserved forest”
and comes under Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. The other forest is the “village forest” or
“protected forest” and is under the purview of Indian Forests Act, 1927. Formal notification makes
these forests demarcated or not. Scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have
unexceptionally good understanding of forests flora and fauna are taking up farming and cattle
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ranching. These people are taking up these activities in forest areas and becoming a threat to forest
and their wildlife. Forest Rights Act, 2006 provides title, use, relief and development and forest
management rights to these persons if found their claim is found to be true and their cultivation
does not harm wildlife conservation.
Forest officers need to enquire into the claims of the people to land, minor forest produce and
if claims found to be true allow them to continue or re-settle them by paying compensation and
ensuring a livelihood. The claims processed by officials from Forest, Revenue and Tribal
departments. Government of India plans to provide legal ownership to 50 MN hectares of
forestland to 80MN tribal people. The Act has received both for and against criticism. Wildlife
conservationists argue that by giving away land for cultivation forest space lost leading to wildlife
conservation challenges. Supporters of the Act argue that it is not a land distribution act, but a
transparent method to prevent land grabbing and it is better than the existing Act.
The development of application assigned to a participating organization, NIC Pune. The
application works in three phases. In the first phase, the Forests Rights Committee (FRC) at village
level accepts the claims request and surveys the land using handheld GPS device. Compared to
plane table measurement GPS handheld device requires less resources, maps land contours well
and provides GPS-polygon. Polygon helps in displaying the land contour, which shown to claimant
for verification of the land. Government officials present during mapping. The device also enables
to enter date & time and other necessary information. In the second phase, the information from
GPS device downloaded to a computer in sub-divisional level committee (SDLC) to prepare a
GPX file. Computer has Mapssource software to convert data from GPS machine to GPX file. The
area of the land is measured and polygon checked for closed corners. Polygon with open corners
rejected and re-sent to FRC. GPX file then uploaded into TRTI web site and transferred to District
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Level Committee (DLC). In the third phase, at the district level committee the GPX file
downloaded and superimposed on Cartosat-1 satellite image provided by NRSA and Google-
Earth. Google-Earth satellite images were obtained on dates 13-Dec-2005 and 31-Dec-2007,
whereas Cartosat-1 images obtained in years 2005-06 and 2007-08. Both Google-Earth and
Cartosat-1 images are used to verify claim requests. Verification of claim was done by pairing the
field images with satellite images of Google-Earth & Cartosat-1. Claims are approved if cultivation
is also found in Cartosat-1 and Google Earth images, rejected if not found. The findings uploaded
into TRTI website for the District Collector to examine and take appropriate action. If the claim is
being approved the claimant is given a certificate of possession. The application provides user
based role authentication with required security. From the central server at TRTI, the entire process
monitored from SDLC to DLC.
TRTI entrusted the job of spreading the Act and making citizen is aware of it. TRTI used
various public media dissemination methods such as newspaper, radio, plays and so forth. TRTI
also created training and awareness sessions for personnel at FRC, SDLC and DLC. Organized
4,522 trainings, under which approximately 5,500 personnel trained from seven government
departments. Trainings offered to 95,321 GPS men and Forest Rights committees. TRTI performed
a survey on the claimants. Survey showed illiterate claimants of 56% and 82% is below the poverty
line. GPS being appropriate technology it could create the required impact. Several claimants were
happy with the GPS technology. The method followed directly involved the claimant, who could
guide them through the terrain. However, the stages two & three not properly covered during
training programs leading to dissatisfaction among certain claimants.
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Number of claims received at Forest Committee level: 339,005 and Claims recommended to
SDLC: 287,418; Claims recommended to DLC: 113,255. Number of claims approved for Title at
DLC: 105,489. Forestland approved for individual claims: 162,399 acres.
Technology used to implement land allocation is user-friendly. With no shortage of funds
coupled with good training to the personnel, technology able to sustain by allowing
implementation of required changes. Though a top-down approach followed, a sustainable
technology did help in getting required satisfaction from claimants. Technology also helped to
connect the three departments during capture of land and providing status at various stages of the
claim’s life cycle. However, improvements required on the method followed to develop policy
level changes by considering inputs from relevant stakeholders, if extension of the application is
required across India. As the topic that Forests Act addresses and the possible environmental
impacts, a more participatory approach in policy level changes may be helpful. The tussle between
improving socio-economic status (for example, agrarian, eco-friendly tourism and so forth) and
wildlife conservation is inevitable in land distributions, therefore, a participatory solution
involving all parties can only help in arriving at an amicable solution. Most of the claimants being
illiterate with no accessibility to web-site special attention are required to make web site accessible
to them. Improving accessibility can also enable in moving towards a participatory system.
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Land Records Goa - Dharnaksh (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 88-94)
Table 50 Key Information - Dharnaksh
Public Organization Government of Goa Department of Settlement and
Land Records
Software Development VisionLabs Hyderabad Goa Electronics Ltd
Maintenance & Support VisionLabs Hyderabad Dept. of Revenue
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.dharnaksh.com:80
80/gwg/
http://visionlabs-
india.com/index.html
Government of Goa’s department of settlement and land records wanted to computerize the
complete land operations related to survey and providing reliable information to citizens, other
departments and private agencies with quick and easy access for verification. Apart from revising
and updating land records due to partition, conversion, re-survey, re-fixation, demarcation and
amalgamation it also needs to provide copies of plans/maps to public, legal cases related to record
of rights. Department also need to defend government land before various courts of law apart from
land revenue calculations and assessments. To perform all functions government decided to engage
VisionLabs as participating organization for development of GPS based Geo-Spatial software that
can perform various desktop operations on maps. VisionLabs software has MapMaker software
developed as a product line. MapMaker software has all the features required for day-to-day
operations of department of settlement and land records. VisionLabs MapMaker software is
available on client-server mode and localized for various Indian languages. Client of MapMaker
is a thin client and fine-tuned to perform on various hand-held devices such as tablet-PC, pocket-
PC and so forth. The cadastral records generated using the MapMaker used for taxation purposes
and other land mutations that citizens would like to perform. Citizens who use land records not
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confined to Goa state, but there is a sizeable number residing outside India. Therefore, a client-
server software hosted on web with requisite data security became a key requirement from
government.
Government of Goa along with VisionLabs also engaged Goa Electronics to provide the
network connectivity, web infrastructure, IT infrastructure including set-up of state data center. In
other words, Goa Electronics Ltd provided the necessary infrastructural support where VisionLabs
provided the software. The entire computerization resulted in a cost of 20 MN INR for Government
of Goa. Apart from data security, VisionLabs also had to implement disaster recovery and back up
including retaining workflow traces (audit) and logs with encryption. Since the entire operations
computerized, the maps digitally signatures. Therefore, Government of Goa implemented PKI
with role-based authentication.
VisionLabs had to provide training to the entire team of drafters, surveyors, inspectors and
other staff of the survey department. Digitized 30-50 years old data, with revisions, and quite
challenging. This is another case where actors used ICT to enable transactional services in a
domain that requires integration of various departments, in other words a reconfiguration
trajectory.
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BHOOMI Government of Karnataka (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 8-13)
Table 51 Key Information - BHOOMI
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Department of Revenue
Software Development NIC & CDAC
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Revenue
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.bhoomi.karnataka
.gov.in/landrecordsonweb/
https://www.karnataka.gov.in/ka
rigr/#
In 1999, Government of Karnataka started Bhoomi project. In the last decade Bhoomi project
has increased its functionalities. In 1999, it started as an application for land records mutation and
dissemination of Record-of-Right (RoR). Government extended it all over Karnataka by 2002.
Over the years’ functionalities such as biometrics for user authentication, FIFO techniques for
approval, validating manual record, creating land data storage repository and dissemination of RoR
through web from kiosks spread across the state, providing PKI for land mutation authorization.
Bhoomi integrated with Land Acquisition. Land Acquisition Officer (LAO) can manage land
acquisition electronically. This involves series of steps starting from digitally signing notification
& de-notification according to various land acts, communicating land acquisition information to
various stakeholders, making necessary changes to Bhoomi database and so forth.
Department of Revenue is the principal revenue-generating department for any state.
Therefore, computerization assists in recognizing significant revenue with minimum leakages.
However, maintain an accurate land database is very essential. The extent of digitization that the
land records undergo varies from state to state. The land records workflow starts from survey of
the land to capturing and updating various mutations that happen with various combinations
involving individuals, organizations both public, private and intermediaries. Land records
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management software also need to manage the policy and legal aspects of land management.
Moreover, interactions between land officials and citizens are influenced by the societal evolution.
Land Management system implemented using KAVERI (Karnataka Valuation and Electronic
Registration). KAVERI is a web-based client-server application developed by CDAC. This
application helps in business process re-engineering of the registration process and speedy delivery
of registered documents. Land registration done from sub-registrar offices this required
computerizing the 201 sub-registrar offices spread across the state of Karnataka. Government of
Karnataka to expedite the computerization involved a private agency to complete installation of
computer software, network connectivity, computer hardware and other peripheral accessories that
are required during registration process. The partnership followed a BOT (Build-Own-Transfer)
process, where the private agency recovers the cost of hardware, network connectivity and
software installation by means of user-charges. The contract period is for five years. Software
required for installation provided by department of revenue. Apart from consumables, participating
private agency also provides labor to perform scanning, assisting citizens during registration,
verification of documents and operation of peripheral equipment during registration. Moreover,
all the transactions apart from land registration that happen in registrar office such as registration
of Hindu Marriages Act and special marriages act is also included into computerization.
Information at all stages of transactions shared with citizens by means of text messages. Citizens
need to register their mobile number at the beginning of initiation of land transaction until disposal
of mutation information shared by means of text messages. Value-added services such as citizens
registering their mobile number against a survey number, for a nominal amount, can receive text
messages on their phone whenever a transaction takes place against the survey number. Apart from
sub-registrar offices, kiosks opened by participating organizations where citizens can get status of
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land mutations and information about the land called as Pahani. Pahani contains details such as
survey number, owner details, total land under owner, revenue details, way the land has been
acquired, government rights on the land, classification of soil, number of trees, source of irrigation,
cultivator details and details of crops. Pahani is required during sale of land, change of ownership,
division of land within family, change in liabilities on the land, grant of land by government to
poor, conversion of land from agricultural to other purposes. Citizens need to pay Rs.15 for every
transaction involved to obtain Pahani. Government of Karnataka has made manual Pahani records
null and void making it mandatory for every citizen to get computerized Pahani from Bhoomi.
Land records computerized over a period. During transition from manual to computerized
errors that crept into the system during manual process have been retained in the Bhoomi system,
though creeping of errors with computerized process has been reduced from 60% to 2%. Revenue
Inspector’s role and the VA roles have not changed and therefore complete elimination of
corruption is not possible, nevertheless, greatly reduced. Certain mutations took more than
expected time. This suggests that along with ICT, societal evolution and social shaping of
technology are also important.
In this case, author noted that actors performed integration of departments by using latest and
scalable ICT technology and re-engineered certain routines. However, the domain requires re-
operationalization of values; this requires actors to consider societal evolution apart from ICT
enablement of routines.
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CATEGORY: G2G
Category: G2G
E-Court (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 50-58)
Table 52 Key Information - E-Court
Public Organization Judiciary Govt. of India Ministry of Law & Justice, Delhi
Software Development National Informatics Center
(NIC)
Comprehensive Case Information
System (CCIS)
Maintenance &
Support
NIC; CDAC Noida
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://ecourts.nic.in
Ministry of Law & Justice has embarked on computerization of court workflow for ensuring
speedy and accountable justice. The project started on 2001-03, after establishment of NeGP in
2005, this project was identified as Mission Mode Project (MMP). Thereby, for first phase of the
project allocated a budget of 93.5 MN INR. The objectives of the project re-worked after receiving
MMP status. The objectives are computerizing Supreme courts and High courts followed by
district and subordinate courts. Overall, 14,249 courts in 3069 court complexes are to be
computerized by 31 March 2014. By computerization, increase in cases disposal rates courts and
reduce the inventory of the pending cases. In addition, case disposal to happen without any
manipulations of records and/or evidence. Moreover, there is a visible increase in judicial
administration’s execution efficiency. Certain changes such presence of witnesses/convicts
virtually (on-line by video conference), Digitized copies of both documents and instruments (knife,
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gun, currencies, and other related documents), web-cast of the court proceedings require legal
enactment. The software development and related infrastructure assigned to NIC. Since the High
courts, district and subordinate courts are under the purview of the respective state governments
the central Ministry of Law & Justice need to work with respective state governments for
computerization of courts workflow. States start computerization in a phased manner with High
courts being the first for computerization followed by district and subordinate courts. Therefore,
monitoring and control of computerization of courts performed by respective states.
The computerized system had software developed with adequate security measures such as
data encryption and digital signatures using PKI. Also implemented role based authentication. The
system had videoconference facilities with police stations, jails and hospitals. The equipment
required to perform videoconference installed at select police stations, jails and hospitals. The case
details managed using Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS) developed by NIC for
Government of Gujarat’s Judiciary department. Few salient features of CCIS are the entire life-
cycle of case such as inquiry, interim order, pending, Judgment and disposed can be tracked,
generation of reports & dashboards, quick and fast update of case status through various devices,
advocate wise listing of cases & their status, transfer of judges, recruitment and so forth. CCTS
software required coordination to manage version management, product improvements involving
release, version and patch, maintenance and support.
The project that spans all over India planned in three phases spread over a period of five years
starting from 2007. In first phase, with an investment of 44.2 MN INR enabled setting up of
required infrastructure (network and data centers) from district level to high court, providing
equipment to judiciary officers and deployment of CCIS with regional languages support. In the
second phase, apart from documentation being computerized the proceedings of the court such as
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web-cast, videoconference with jails, police & hospitals, video recording of the court proceedings.
The third phase involves creating information gateways between various public agencies and
departments. An empowered committee at the three levels of strategic, tactical and operational
level has been set-up to oversee NIC’s implementation. However, the project is running behind
schedule and first phase not completed across India as of 31 March 2014. Funding requires certain
amount being borne by state and certain amount by the central government. Inadequate funding at
central and state levels is causing delays to the project. Videoconference equipment, installation
of stand-by power generating units to support data center and their maintenance is causing huge
financial strain on states and thereby to court complexes.
In this case, author noted that in domains such as land management requires integration of
various departments. Actors initiated E-Governance program only as technology-based solution.
However, due to budget and lack of prioritization from actors the project has missed its milestone
in its first phase. Moreover, author did not note a clear road map regarding subsequent transition
trajectories. These are clear indications for reverse-salient.
Interoperable Criminal Justice System iCJS (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 158-163)
Table 53 Key Information - iCJS
Public Organization Government of Himachal
Pradesh
State Judiciary
Software Development NIC
Maintenance & Support NIC
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://admis.hp.nic.in/cjs/WelcomeCJS.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fcjs%
2fAuthorisedMain.aspx
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Government of Himachal Pradesh wanted a Management Information System (MIS) that
connects court integrates with for day-to-day operations. These departments are prisons, police
stations and forensic. By integrating these departments, information made available easily leading
to quicker and better decision-making. These applications are web-based, thereby providing instant
and online access of information to relevant stakeholders. Government of Himachal Pradesh’s
state judiciary department along with NIC could computerize these departments. iCJS application
interacts with these applications by using web-services. iCJS is hosted on a central server at the
high court complex at Himachal Pradesh. The front-end is dot Net with MS-SQL as back-end and
runs on Windows operating system.
Police Station computerized using Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA). This
application not hosted on the web, but available in the intranet of the police department. iCJS
application could connect to the central database of the CIPA application. However, certain generic
information such as number of accidents, crime report, missing persons and location of police
stations across Himachal Pradesh displayed using a web portal. The court information systems
developed by NIC for Gujarat Government’s state judiciary. This application has various features
and functionalities to manage the case information system. The application developed for Gujarat
ported for Himachal Pradesh. Similarly, prisons and forensic departments’ applications connected
to iCJS using web-services. These applications help in providing videoconference facility from
jails, electronic record of visitor’s logbook and prisoner’s dossiers. Forensic application helps in
providing the forensic report and linking it to the respective case/FIR. iCJS application by
integrating all these applications provides functionalities such as access to crime-data/statistics,
availability of FIR copy, mobile based and online traffic challans and missing persons or vehicles
or bodies found to citizens. By information sharing to citizens and with other departments greatly
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reduced time required to perform the requisite transaction either for citizen or for department. State
Judiciary would like to enhance the image of police and judiciary by timely availability of
information.
During deployment of iCJS the respective department officials had security concerns regarding
information sharing. When applications are built, using state-of-the-art technology security
concerns limit only to training and making the personnel aware about the available security
features. Security concerns are alleviated by providing training to the personnel. However, the
large training requirements required huge coordination and scheduling.
In iCJS information sharing, provided in the form of transaction services. Citizens or the
respective departments can quickly access information specific to a particular case or instance.
Certain information was broadcast to the public using web portals. However, apart from providing
information based on transaction, ICT when used to engage and connect with people helps
governments to improve governance. This requires innovative ways of soliciting information,
mining the received information and obtaining the pulse of citizens. Developing such a system
requires evolutionary changes from both society and government. Such changes help governments
to get closer to Abraham Lincoln’s phrase “by the people, for the people and of the people”.
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Integrated Odisha Treasury Management System, Odisha (CIPS E-Governance Database pg. 297-300)
Table 54 Key Information - Integrated Odisha Treasury Management System
Public Organization Government of Odisha Department of Treasury &
Inspection
Software Development CMC Ltd
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Treasury & Inspection
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL https://www.odishatreasury.go
v.in/webportal/Home.do
Department of Treasuries and Inspection (DTI) is a department in Government of Odisha to
perform all financial transactions for State of Odisha. Department of Finance allocates budget to
different department when the annual financial budget approved in the State Assembly. Finance
department distributes budget to various departments. After the budget is distributed collection
management and expenditure of the budget is the responsibility of the treasury department.
Treasury department consists of Accountant Generals, Controlling Officers (CO), Drawing and
Disbursal Officers (DDO) who manage its 164 departments.
Government of Odisha wanted to ensure proper financial management and monitoring of
funds, audits and investments in equities and loans. Manual coordinating between 166 heads of
treasuries departments a daunting task leading to challenges in proper financial management and
monitoring of funds. Therefore, Government of Odisha decided to computerize the entire
operations and assigned it to a leading software design and development company having vast
experience in working with government and development of various software. The participating
organization has a framework that used to develop applications for financial management, law
enforcement, utilities, human resources, taxation and schemes management exclusively for
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government departments. The developed software captured the workflow between finance and
treasury departments and within departments. The entire paper-less operation saved around 20,000
reams of paper in a single year.
Computerization of treasury department required stringent security standards. The developed
software had the state-of-the-art technology and did meet security aspects. Moreover, the officials
and personnel who use the software were made familiar with the software’s security aspects. This
requires adaption along with societal evolution to understand and comprehend the security aspects.
The personnel’s hands-on and end-user trainings did help them to get comfortable with the day-
to-day working of the software. Data archival is setup to retain and not lose old records. Disaster
recovery and back-up management was also set-up. Auditing and logging of workflow is essential
and not available in the software.
This program requires ICT enabled policy decision-making and involve decision-makers from
legislature until its implementation. With the participating organization providing a tested
framework for integrating of various government departments, it was easy to achieve ICT
enablement of routines. However, when decision-making done without no or improper feedback
from reality, it results in policy-cycle approach. Instead, it requires actors to attempt practice-
oriented guide to policy. This requires developing socialization, mass collaboration and other
aspects of combinative capabilities. Author in the print media did note where law enactment is
done by soliciting opinion from the people (Nagar, 2014). Actors in Odisha Treasury Management
System can explore such avenues.
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APPENDIX-4: CASES: eINDIA
Appendix-4: Cases: eINDIA
CATEGORY: G2C
Category: G2C
E-Mithra: Rajasthan Government
Table 55 Key Information - E-Mithra
Public Organization Government of Rajasthan
Software Development
Maintenance & Support
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://doitc.rajasthan.gov.in/e_CSC.asp
Same as G2C services, discussed in APOnline. Please refer
citizen services section in semi-structured interviewed cases.
The project has been operational since 2005. Initially, through a client server based application
software developed by Department of IT&C. In 2010, the old client server application migrated to
Web-based on-line E-Mithra application across all the 33 districts. Recently, a new generic module
added to E-Mithra portal, which allows end-to-end application and delivery of Digitally Signed
Certificates (DSCs). DSC used for certificates such as caste and income, solvency and so forth.
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Financial Inclusion: AISECT
Table 56 Key Information - AISECT
Public Organization AISECT11 Government of Madhya Pradesh,
Punjab & Chhattisgarh
Software Development G2C network
Maintenance & Support Respective states &
AISECT
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.aisect.org
AISECT has a wide IT training and Educational services network in India. AISECT
collaborated with 12,000 training partners across India. It plans to reach remotest corner of India
and promote ICT based training and services. AISECT aims that by providing training can
empower people generate employment for youth and unfold entrepreneurship. To extend their
objective AISECT collaborated with State Bank of India (SBI) a leading public sector bank in
India. AISECT acts as Business Correspondent (BC) and Business Facilitator (BF) for SBI. Using
CSC centers as vehicle AISECT would like to reach out to citizens as SBI’s BC & BF. Therefore,
AISECT collaborated with Governments of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Punjab and opened
CSC centers 2926, 1487 and 585 respectively. Activities AISECT plans to perform as BC and BF
for New Account Opening, deposit/withdrawal from account, various loans (house repairs, self-
employment, diary units and 2/4 wheelers), deposits to National health and Kisan credit cards and
micro finance. These services provided by means of kiosks in CSC. In one year of its operation,
AISECT could open 431 rural/urban kiosks, two mobile vans with ATM and kiosk banking
11 AISECT is an organization that has ICT based initiatives to provide skill development, capacity building
and E-Governance activities for semi-urban and rural parts of India.
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mechanism. With kiosks and mobile vans, AISECT could add 226,616 new customers leading to
640 MN INR worth transactions. VLEs could earn eight MN INR as revenue. AISECT had to
spend time and effort in encouraging the existing VLEs to adopt kiosks and mobile vans. The
perennial question of supply and demand resulted in VLEs showing their reluctance.
With the kiosks positioned in CSCs, AISECT is able to get required internet connectivity,
geographical proximity, reduced costs and reach to financial services to citizens. The services
target the socially and economically marginalized sections of the society. With all these, AISECT
plans to achieve financial inclusion. However, the financial viability of CSCs at rural centers plays
a crucial role. Nevertheless, when bouquet of services offered from CSC, improving financial
viability of CSCs at rural centers is possible. Government of India from 2005 has shown
considerable interest in financial inclusion. Government of India has encouraged banks both
private and public to develop banking products that are “no frills”. Banks have come up with
banking products (including electronic benefit transfer, EBT) that require less than 50,000 INR
worth transactions per annum. These products also allow users to have zero or less bank balance
when compared to other bank accounts. Legal amendments made in 2006 permit banks to
collaborate with BCs and BFs. Recently, Government of India has renewed its interest in
expanding its financial inclusion. In August 2014 Prime Minister of India personally mailed CEO
of all banks asking them to take the initiative of enrolling 75 MN households. Prime Minister of
India has also declared opening of bank accounts as “national priority”.
In the year 2010, in the state of Andhra Pradesh there have been certain instances of borrowers
failing to re-pay their loans. Reports did mention that of few borrowers were indebted so much
that they went to the extent of killing themselves. Initially, though micro-finance companies started
as not-for-profit, but as their scale and scope of operations increased, it resulted in increase of their
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business further leading to increase in their human and other resources. All these lead to a change
from not-for-profit to for-profit. The borrowers work primarily in informal sectors where there are
no guarantees for their jobs with fewer incomes that are also not steady. However, they are
accustomed to not to pay. However, when failure to re-pay invokes political factors it can
complicate further. When borrowers killed themselves, few members of legislative assembly made
remarks questioning the need to re-pay the loans. In this context, borrowers feel legitimized in not
paying the loans. With re-payments impacted, businesses that financed micro-finances were
affected. This can spread to other states. This can result in collapse of micro-finance mechanisms
and attributing it to the borrowers as unintelligent, unreliable and unworthy of lending. This can
further lead to borrowers having fewer options to borrow money.
To prevent from such crises, India need to start something similar to MIX (www.themix.org),
a market for micro-finances set-up in other countries. MIX has developed FINclusionLab that
captures datasets, works with policy makers, financial service providers and other key
stakeholders, and provides information for effective financial inclusion decision-making.
Government of India has initiated steps in this direction. In June 25 2013, CRISIL along with
Finance Ministry of India developed Inclusix index that classifies based on regional, state and
district wise parameters and analyses financial parameters such as branch penetration, deposit
penetration and credit penetration into one unified metric. Governments in consultation with
financial institutions change policies to drive actions that help in improving the index. Unless the
financial inclusion decision-making is based on solid and sound financial engineering by including
various stakeholders similar to FINclusionLab, ICT based financial inclusion cannot achieve its
objectives.
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Department of Agriculture: Maharashtra
Table 57 Key Information - Department of Agriculture Maharashtra
Public Organization Government of
Maharashtra
Department of Agriculture
Software Development NIC eParwana
Maintenance & Support NIC
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation
(Desired)
Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://mahaagriiqc.gov.in
Department of Agriculture, Maharashtra with NIC as participating organization developed E-
Parwana. E-Parwana helps small and medium enterprises to apply for license of manufacture of
seeds, fertilizers and insecticides. Along with manufacture, apply for dealership. Each enterprise
needs to register on the web site before applying for dealership. Enterprise can also share their
product details on the web site. Before developing this application Department of Agriculture had
challenges in soliciting applications for dealership and manufacture. Moreover, methods to gather
product and/or number of type of dealers and manufacturers slow and time consuming. By
developing a web-portal, information could be centralized and easily accessible.
Department of Agriculture plays an active role in connecting farmers, enterprises and dealers.
Moreover, department has established agricultural assistant at village level with three-to-four
villages with limiting the number of farmers to 800 to 900. Agricultural assistant along with
agricultural officers undertakes soil conservation, horticulture and various extension schemes.
Innovative extension schemes are possible when the subject matter expertise at Agricultural
University coupled with digital knowledge repository. By making necessary changes, it is possible
to extend extension schemes to all stakeholders in supply chain. These changes can be developing
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rich domain ontology, similar to RKMP of DRR, requiring both semantic and organizational
interoperability.
Horticulture: Andhra Pradesh
Table 58 Key Information - Horticulture Andhra Pradesh
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Agriculture
Software Development NIC HORTNET
Maintenance & Support NIC
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://hortnet.ap.nic.in ; http://farmer.gov.in/
Department of Agriculture in India divided into three divisions 1) Department of Agriculture
& Cooperation (DAC), 2) Department of Agriculture Research and Education (DARE) and 3)
Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying (DAH&D). DAC has 24 sub-divisions and one of
the sub-divisions is National Horticulture Missions (NHM). National Horticulture Mission has
State Horticulture Missions set-up in each state. With a huge population of India dependent on
Agriculture as a means of living and with ever-increasing need for agricultural produce,
Government of India has started numerous projects under the 24 divisions of DAC. Farmers who
are involved in Horticulture face numerous hardships in accessing the welfare schemes. Moreover,
each welfare scheme requires interdepartmental coordination. This is resulting in under-utilization
of several welfare schemes. NHM along with its SHM decided to develop a portal that assists
farmers with various activities related to Horticulture. NIC included as participating organization
and developed a web-based application with SOA. The various services available for farmer from
the web-portal are insurance, storage, seeds, pesticide, farm machinery, fertilizer, advisory, and
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credit and extension activities. This portal acts a market place for various organizations and
farmers. Organizations and farmers register on this portal and the services provided to farmer
according to schemes laid out by Government of India. NHM feels that 60% of the population in
the country is dependent on agriculture and allied services. Therefore, the objective is to provide
an online workflow automation system for the benefit of, especially, the farmers. Workflow
automation ensures an end-to-end holistic approach covering production, post-harvest
management, processing and marketing to assure appropriate returns to both growers and
producers. Interface provided from traditional desktop and mobile interfaces. Farmers can access
the web-portal from various internet cafes and community internet centers located across the
country.
Apart from providing services, NHM also gathered data from farmers. With currently 600,000
villages and 600 districts, but with access to all 35 state and union territories in India the count of
villages and districts are only increasing. Therefore, steps are in place to register farmers to
generate identity card. Information regarding land type, crops, soil test, diseases, pesticide used
gathered for every registered farmer. This enables NHM to weed-out duplicate beneficiaries and
help monitor and track their welfare schemes. NHM’s current mechanism uses latest technology
for identification using GIS and mobile technology GPRS based to verify and authenticate claims
and restrict/detect fraudulent claims.
NHM’s objective of farmer’s welfare by providing integrated services as “one stop shop” is
laudable, especially in country like India where huge population is dependent on agriculture.
However, the size and variety of schemes and the diversity of agriculture produce across
states/districts/sub-districts makes the task very challenging. Apart from ICT enabling there are
various other interactions starting from creating awareness among farmers, making them ICT
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literate, restricting or utilizing peer pressures while farming, social structure that exists in farming
practices. Moreover, during cultivation a close coordinated tracking and monitoring mechanism is
required and need to be backed-up with availability of subject-matter experts to resolve issues
faced during cultivation. Rather than developing these on their own, it may be worthwhile to
leverage on the existing solutions that are currently available. These solutions also vary across
India and are not consistent. Another key important and most beneficial area extended services.
For effective delivery of extended services, a close cooperation required between DARE & DAC.
Extended services include not only online training programs, but also sharing latest germ resistant
seeds with farmers and the special precaution required while using such seeds. Therefore, in order
for NHM to achieve their objective ICT alone is not sufficient, but need to couple ICT with
activities that can leverage ICT and provide benefits to farmers.
Public Distribution System: Andhra Pradesh
Table 59 Key Information - Public Distribution System Andhra Pradesh
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Civil Supplies
Software Development Dept. of civil supplies
Maintenance & Support Dept. of civil supplies
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.apscsc.gov.in/
Same as Chhattisgarh PDS systems, but with Aadhaar based authentication. Please refer
semi-structured case in Appendix-2.
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Citizen Friendly Transport Services: Andhra Pradesh
Table 60 Key Information - Citizen Friendly Transport Service
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Transport
Software Development BitraNet Pvt Ltd.
Maintenance & Support Department of Transport BitraNet Pvt Ltd.
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.aptransport.org
Department of Transport provides various transport related services to citizens. These services
are driving license and learner’s license, collection of vehicle taxes, issue of fitness certificates,
and registration of transport and non-transport vehicles and issue of permits. The state has 140
registrar offices located across 23 districts with 1400 dealers who sell new vehicles resulting in
45,000 transactions per day. SOA replaced numerous local servers linked to central server. For
better, faster and real-time availability of data and due to establishment of good network
connectivity Department of transport could centralize data and business logic at a central location
with the 140 registrar offices connected to this server. With the help of the ICT technology, a
centralized system helped in standardizing work procedures and methods. Moreover, with
advances in ICT technology security features could be built-in into their system enabling citizens
to pay fees, taxes and other payments online. Earlier citizens preferred approaching through
intermediaries to complete their tasks, but with ICT enabled routines, greatly reduced the interface
with intermediaries. Operations and maintenance of the ICT infrastructure managed by means of
the user-charges collected from citizens.
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Department of Transport with centralization and standardization could streamline their internal
routines. However, equally important is integration with other departments such as Police, Urban
development and Public works (Roads and Bridges). This requires actors taking actions for
reconfiguration trajectory. However, author feels that existing actions done using latest
technologies these are in line for actions required for reconfiguration trajectory.
Child Rights Cell: Andhra Pradesh
Table 61 Key Information - Child Rights Cell
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Women, Child &
Disabled persons (WCDSC)
Software Development
Maintenance & Support WCDSC
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://wcdsc.ap.nic.in/
Government of Andhra Pradesh’s WCDSC established exclusively for women, child, disabled
and senior citizens. WCDSC has initiated various welfare programs for children. Similarly,
Ministry of Rural development has established District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) in
1989 and reports to both state and central level Ministries of Rural Development. Since 1989,
GoAP initiated various programs and welfare schemes. The tasks of DRDA are in identifying the
needs of rural people and ensure that the schemes reach the needy. Backward Regions Grant Fund
(BRGF) established by the Government of India. It covers 250 districts in 27 states. The fund
designed to address the regional imbalances in development using existing developmental inflows
into the backward districts. BRGF primarily provides financial assistance with focus on backward
districts.
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Andhra Pradesh recently has emerged as an important IT hub and increase investment in health
sector with increase in corporate hospitals, UNICEF has expressed concerns. The concerns are in
reducing income poverty in rural areas, access to and quality of basic services such as health,
nutrition, education and sanitation remain poor especially for disadvantaged social groups. To
support UNICEF’s concerns data gathered regarding certain key areas that are of importance.
Identified areas12 are childbirth, infant mortality, maternity mortality rates, and immunization and
sanitation facilities. There are numerous crimes and abuse on children, skewed sex ratio, large-
scale distress migration, early marriage, female feticide and infanticide with coastal areas being
vulnerable to disasters (flood/cyclone) where protection to address infrastructural and emotional
issues.
According to UNICEF, Andhra Pradesh social development programs besieged with numerous
actions required in multiple areas. Areas identified by UNICEF are
advocacy and partnerships (strong partnerships with legislative assembly, media, civil
society and children)
social policy planning monitoring and evaluation (SPPME) (integrate children’s
developmental issues with poverty reduction and women empowerment with emphasis
on data, evidence and critical policy engagements)
Reproductive & child health (devise numerous interventions with public-private
partnerships)
12 Childbirth (one third still happening at home (31%)), Infant Mortality (IMR), Maternal Mortality rates
(IMR) (high around 195 per 100,000 live births), immunization (drop in immunization rate to 46%
compared to 10 years back value (59%)), sanitation facilities (though in households and schools has
increased to 48% and 46% respectively in disadvantaged social groups it is only at 15%).
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Behavioral change and communication (capacity building, social mobilization and
knowledge management).
UNICEF highlighted key areas that help in making social developmental programs successful.
WCDSC though may be aware of all the issues and might have initiated actions towards this.
However, the ICT related development initiated by WCDSC has received attention in eINDIA
events. WCDSC has developed a web-application that can track complaints regarding child rights.
It uses both web and mobile technology. Complaint raised using the web application regarding
child marriages, lack of school infrastructure, quality of mid-day meals and child labor issues. On
successful submission of the complaint, officer at grass root level receives an alert on the mobile
phone as a text message. Intervention of departmental officers on complaints not addressed by
grass root officers made possible. Moreover, the application helps in generation of reports,
centralized database, frequent monitoring and control. In the presence of actions suggested by
UNICEF, such ab web application can definitely add value to the actions suggested by UNICEF.
Public Service Commission: Rajasthan
Table 62 Key Information - Public Service Commission
Public Organization Government of Rajasthan Public Service Commission
Software Development Government of Rajasthan.
Uses e-Mithra (G2C) initiative
Maintenance & Support Government of Rajasthan
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://rpsconline.rajasthan.gov.in
Public Service Commission tests are used by Government of Rajasthan to recruit its officers.
These tests managed manually from advertisement, filing of applications, issue of examination
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admit cards, conducting examinations, evaluation of answer sheets and display of results.
Government of Rajasthan decided to ICT enable all activities in the workflow except conducting
examinations and evaluation of answer sheets. Participants who take public service commission
spread all over Rajasthan. There can be certain participants who are outside Rajasthan for a short
period. Government wanted information flow to all participants residing in and outside Rajasthan.
Therefore, a web-based application with centralized database with security measures found to be
appropriate. Security measures related only to controlling the incoming and outgoing network
traffic based on applied rule-set. Security measure prevents unauthorized access to and from
private network. Application developed internally. Participants need not make several visits to the
Public Service Commission office, but can visit any of the CSC centers located in urban and rural
areas. Participants along with online submission of the application can also pay the necessary fees
at the CSC counters. Admit cards for examination issued by the CSC centers. The online
application is very user-friendly; users who are not acquaint with computers are also comfortable
in filing the application. The statuses of application, examination, admit card and result are
obtained by both e-mail and text messages. Application fees can be paid by three modes 1) through
internet banking at http://rpsconline.rajasthan.gov.in, 2) through e-Mithra (CSC center) portal
http://emitra.gov.in and 3) from CSC centers. Application fees payment facility by using secure
payment gateways.
With web-based application and integrating it with CSC network, public service commission
examination services made available to citizens. Government of Rajasthan could conduct 22 exams
in one month with 70 for every year. Over 1.75 MN applications processed in the first year. For
ease of use, details of each step uploaded in the CSC and Public Service Commission web sites.
Government of Rajasthan plans to make the public service commission application submission
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possible through mobile. Government of Rajasthan focused only on transactional effectiveness and
ensured that information is readily available at various stages. Government of Rajasthan could
make it successful with CSC centers established all over Rajasthan.
Public Grievances: Government of Karnataka
Table 63 Key Information - Public Grievances
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Directorate of Municipal
Administration
Software Development E-Governments Foundation
Maintenance & Support E-Governments Foundation Directorate of Municipal
Administration
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.mrc.gov.in
Department of Municipal Administration aims to improve citizens’ opinion and outlook about
the Government. Though several transactions have been ICT enabled, citizens do visit Government
offices for various transactions. Department of Municipal Administration feels that citizens’ leave
the Government office with bad experiences due to lack of cooperation from employees, long
queues, attitude and behavior of employees, lack of inter-departmental coordination and so forth.
Department feels that if citizens provided with a grievance redress system they could share their
experiences. These experiences forms the basis for the areas where department could focus.
Department is also looking at enabling citizens to participate by providing opinions and ideas
regarding governance of ULB. Department could secure funds from Asian development bank in
the first phase and could cover 55 urban bodies and in the second phase with funding from World
Bank could cover remaining 158 urban bodies.
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An ICT enabled system, Public Grievance Redress System (PGRS), helped Department of
Municipal administration to standardize the complaint registering mechanism. PGRS developed
in close collaboration with Survey of India (for GIS mapping), E-Governments Foundation (for
application support & maintenance), Karnataka Urban Infrastructure (for funding) and Software
Technology Parks (for data center). Centralized data with web-based application change
management and customizing for different urban bodies made possible. The initial set-up time
streamlined complaint registration where citizens and employees became familiar with the ICT
enabled routines. In municipal administration, the problems vary from location to location
requiring local level initiatives. The field officers who are directly in contact with the citizens drive
these local level initiatives. Empowering local level officers with guidelines from higher officials
is essential for effective resolution of problems. By engaging the local level officers with citizens’
an empowered officer can better discharge his/her responsibility. When the procedures and
routines are standardized, it provides little room for the field level officers to customize to provide
solutions that resolve location specific issues. However, standardization of routines across urban
bodies helps in common measurements, comparisons between urban bodies where replication of
best practices made possible. Therefore, a right balance between policy, location specific
requirements considering both social and cultural needs, innovative problem resolutions,
customization of routines and partnerships required for better and effective delivery. It requires a
distinction between data centralization and customization of routines. This requires defining meta-
data (data about data) and customizing ICT systems and organizational routines. In the current set-
up of PGRS, with centralized ICT system there are no or less local level initiatives by municipal
system. The consequences of such an action only unfold when local level issues become very
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acute. Along with ICT systems routines customization with scope for innovation & partnerships
are essential to engage and empower citizens.
Chief Minister’s Office: Gujarat
Table 64 Key Information - Chief Minister's Office
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Chief Minister’s Office (CMO)
Software Development >1 Organization
Maintenance & Support >1 Organization
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.gujaratindia.com/
Government of Gujarat has laid huge emphasis on ICT enablement of their routines. ICT
initiatives are done with both public and private organizations as participating organizations. CMO
plays a pivotal role in coordination among various departments. CMO also gathers various
feedback especially from the citizens. Therefore, felt prudent to ICT enable CMO. CMO office
focused on Smart, reliable, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent (SMART). Computerization
of the entire CMO operations labelled as SMART. The citizen feedback system named as
SWAGAT (State Wide Attention on Public Grievances by Application of Technology). SWAGAT
application accessed by 8496 offices and contained 23,017 officers as registered users. The
application also enabled video conferencing facility and could connect 26 departments, 26 districts
and 239 sub-districts. SWAGAT application while interfacing with citizens could also connect
government departments. Citizens could approach Chief Ministers with their grievances
electronically. Electronic means available to citizens are videoconference, e-mail and text
messages. Selected messages from citizens passed to Chief Minister. On an average sent 500-700
messages. Concerned department is looped while forwarding messages to Chief Minister. Few
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messages are also towards better governance. The ideas brainstormed internally before passing to
Chief Minister. Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter used extensively to reach
out to the citizens.
CMO office did make efforts to achieve e-Accessibility. E-Accessibility is essential to achieve
E-Participation. CMO does claim that E-Participation became possible by using SWAGAT.
Nevertheless, participation refers to deliberation leading to shared decision-making. Therefore,
CMO could achieve E-Accessibility to a certain extent. E-Accessibility is the first step to E-
Participation. CMO used ICT quite effectively to reach to citizens and solicit their opinions.
However, CMO could have used their SMART application to funnel citizens’ grievances to
improve other departments functioning. Citizens do come forward with their grievances where
most of their grievances could be with other departments such as Revenue, Municipalities,
Agriculture, Social Justice and so forth. Therefore, apart from increasing E-Accessibility CMO
office could have improved interactions with other departments using SMART application.
Instead reports from CMO office emphasized on SWAGAT, awards received and Chief Minister’s
web-portal. However, CMO could have attempted a more comprehensive outlook of connecting
public grievances by tangible improvements in operations of related departments.
Property Tax: Bihar
Table 65 Key Information - Property Tax Bihar
Public Organization Government of Bihar Department of Revenue
Software Development Internal IT Dept.
Maintenance & Support Internal IT Dept.
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://ptax.nagarseva.in/
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Government of Bihar’s Department of Revenue earlier collected property tax manually and
based on demand notice. Instead, they wanted property tax to be self-assessment. With self-
assessment based, the onus is on the citizen to pay the property tax. Department of Revenue feels
that by making the citizens voluntarily to pay tax can minimize revenue leakages. However,
guidelines issued to arrive at property tax. Government officials check for compliance to these
guidelines. By doing so, Government of Bihar feels citizens can become more responsive and start
demanding for their rights rather than being passive or get subdued due to certain social structure
that exists in rural and other areas. Apart from computerizing the property tax payment,
Government of Bihar had also created awareness among citizens regarding the changes in payment
of property policy. They had issued 250,000 notices and delivered these across the state of city of
Patna. Posters affixed on prominent centers highlighting the necessary steps required to calculate
their property tax. Property tax paid from home or from empaneled cyber cafes. For registering
property tax details citizen requires a visit to civic center with registered sale-deed and a photo id.
After necessary checks, entry for property tax made in the system and a property tax number
generated for the property in the citizen’s name. However, after paying the property tax, whether
it is first time or regular annual payment, citizen submits hard-copy of the payment receipt to the
nearest civic center.
Government of Bihar’s step towards making citizens more responsible and change their
opinion and mind-set towards Government is novel and laudable. However, the efforts to percolate
further and focus on participatory form of governance.
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CATEGORY: G2B
Category: G2B
Purchase Automation System
Table 66 Key Information - Purchase Automation System
Public Organization National Power Corporation
India Limited NPCIL
NPCIL
Software Development Nextenders TenderTiger
Maintenance & Support Nextenders TenderTiger
Year - eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL https://npcil.abcprocure.com https://npcil.etenders.in
National Power Corporation India Limited (NPCIL) manages various atomic power stations
located in India. The site locations are Tarapur Maharashtra, Rawatbhata Rajasthan, Madras
Atomic Power Station Tamil Nadu, Narora Atomic Power Station Uttar Pradesh, Kakrapar
Gujarat, Kaiga Generating Station Karnataka, and Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project Tamil
Nadu. Directorate of Contracts and Materials management at headquarters Mumbai manages
material procurement for these sites by soliciting material requirements from these sites. Given the
scale (type and volume of materials) and the scope (atomic power plant) directorate of Contracts
and Materials management decided to use ICT enabled procurement, auction and tender.
Therefore, NPCIL engaged a participating organization that has experience in managing tenders,
communication with vendors, post-tender allocation activities. Most importantly, the Directorate
also wanted the participating organization to set-up, establish and operate the portal. The required
IT infrastructure such as network, servers, firewalls and other related equipment are provided by
another participating organization.
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Salient points are
Technically latest and innovative practices are followed {128-bit encryption, PKI, fire-wall
and intrusion detection, secure socket layer (SSL), non-repudiation}
Tenders those are public and limited. Public tender’s results can be seen, but limited
tender’s results are not visible
Bidders can upload various documents to support their credentials
Published corrigenda. Bidders can click on corrigenda and view the details. E-Accessibility
is provided, but not participation
Integration with bidders, but not with their ERP systems
Global and local bidders. {while registering global bidders are also accepted}
o Foreign nationals can also participate by getting their details attested by Indian
Embassy in their country.
Minutes of pre-bid meeting
Business Intelligence on tendering authorities’ parameters, decisions and other details
Sub-contracting after winning the tender
By using ICT, NPCIL could achieve the required changes in procurement, auction and tender
functions. The changes aimed at harvest savings through strategic souring initiatives while
maintain equitable access to government businesses. NPCIL enhance procurement, auction and
tender functions by enhancing professionalism of activities, skills of procurement officers,
processes, systems and streamlining policy with the help of a participating organization. Around
8000 vendors’ managed and the late bidding issues eliminated by ICT. All payments made through
secure payment gateways. E-procurement is an interdisciplinary of IS, procurement, supply-chain,
public administration and policy. The portal serves as a marketplace and enables the buyer and the
sellers to make transactions. The associated logistics need to be borne by the vendor. E-
procurement system offers no integrations with vendors’ information systems. Policy formulations
modified to include ICT enabled transactions. Human and technical systems interactions with the
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associated ICT did provide scope for translation of events. Translation refers to assembling and
aligning interests of multiple actors’. Translation results in stabilizing the network by wider
audience acceptance the technology or solution, but temporarily. However, for durability of these
alliances inscription of practices and actions is essential. However, these inscriptions happen at
local and contingent level with or without interpretations of the social structures, material relations
and power systems that exist (Hardy & Williams, 2008). Further exploration is required on
NPCIL’s innovation of ICT based transactions, involving the plurality of meanings and translation
of actions. The size and scale of NPCIL procurement operations did influence translation. A
flexible, creative and responsive policy networks and maintainability of equity, accountability and
democratic legitimacy requires further analysis.
E-Procurement: Indian Oil Corporation
Table 67 Key Information - E-Procurement Indian Oil Corporation
Public Organization Indian Oil Corporation (IOC)
Software Development National Informatics Center
(NIC)
Maintenance & Support NIC & IOC
Year - eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL https://iocl.etenders.in/iocl/index.asp
Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) started using electronic medium from 2000. Initially used for
information broadcast. In year 2007 when Finance Ministry emphasized the need to expand the
usage electronic medium, IOC started implementing e-procurement. IOC collaborated with NIC.
NIC mandated to adhere to CVC (Central Vigilance Commission), DeitY and Finance Ministry
guidelines. Initially the Divisional Head Offices covered under e-procurement. By April2012, the
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e-procurement system stabilized and extended to regional and state level offices. The total number
of offices covered is 56 and spread all over India. Procurements of value above One MN INR can
be procured using e-procurement system. In one year of expanding e-procurement across all
offices 70 tenders of value 3.45 BN INR in April 2012 increased to 5000 tenders of value 120 BN
INR in May2013. Using electronic procurement IOC could also expand their procurements
operations across the globe and not limited to national boundaries besides reducing procurement
cycle time.
IOC followed a technical innovation approach with the help of NIC. With a vendor base of
80,000 registered users, 5000 departmental users and 11,000 bidders across the globe a technical
innovation approach did make it possible. However, several vendors were skeptical about security,
functionality and performance. IOC efforts confined to providing vendors training at specific IOC
centers and providing user-friendly user-manuals. In performing the e-procurement transactions,
persons interact with systems and develop to bring certain practices into effect. These practices
shaped by both technical innovations and the background knowledge actors developed by
performing procurement transactions. Practices adhere to policies. Policies indeed are guidelines,
adherence required while performing public and limited tenders. Translations are required from
human actors and to the system functionalities in performing the required actions. Societal
evolution shapes and reinforces few of these translations. IOC with technical innovation and their
sheer size and volume of tenders could align interests of various agencies. However, deep
integrations with their existing systems are essential towards developing e-procurement system
that integrates IS, supply chain management, public administration and policy. When e-
procurement system integrates actors both technical systems and humans, an interoperating
systems achieves plurality of meanings. To consider plurality of meanings it is essential to create
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a flexible, creative and responsive policy network that enables technical innovation throughout the
network. Similar to NPCIL, author feels it is essential to investigate these to obtain detailed
insights into interoperability in ICT enabled procurement systems.
Madhya Pradesh Warehouse & Logistics Corporation
Table 68 Key Information - Madhya Pradesh Warehouse & Logistics Corporation (MPWLC)
Public Organization Government of Madhya
Pradesh
MPWLC
Software Development MP Online
Maintenance & Support MP Online
Year - eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Technology Substitution (Observed)
URL http://www.mpwarehousing.com/;
https://www.mponline.gov.in/Portal/Services/Warehousing/frmHom
ePage.aspx
Madhya Pradesh Warehousing and Logistics Corporation (MPWLC) established with a share
capital of INR 10 MN INR from Government of Madhya Pradesh and INR 5 MN from Central
Warehousing Corporation. The total capital of MPWLC is 20 MN INR. MPWLC stores
agricultural and minor forest produces in warehouses. Produce supplied to citizens through public
distribution system. MPWLC objective is provide warehouses to Government of Madhya Pradesh
and meet governments storage needs. MPWLC obtains revenue based on the produces stored in
warehouses. MPWLC stores both inputs (seeds, fertilizers and manures) and outputs (food grains)
of agriculture. Economic criteria alone don’t decide the items that need to be shared, but to also
look into social and political factors Along with warehouses provides the necessary logistics such
as transport vehicles to move the items from warehouses to public distribution systems and to
warehouses from farmers and other stakeholders. Therefore, to meet the ever-increasing storage
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demands of government MPWLC decided to utilize private warehouses to augment their storage
needs. MPWLC decided to use ICT to improve their transaction efficiency and transparency.
Therefore, decided to utilize MP Online (G2C service provider in Madhya Pradesh) as the medium
for private vendors to register and apply for managing private warehouses. Private vendor enters
into an agreement with MPWLC to manage the warehouse. The agreement decides the ratio for
sharing of profits. Private vendor bound by the Warehousing Corporation’s act, Rules, and
principles that benefit citizens of Madhya Pradesh. Comptroller and Auditor General of India
statutory auditors require auditing MPWLC accounts before placing in the legislative assembly.
MPWLC could enhance their storage capacity from 7.9 MN metric tons to 15.2 MN metric
tons in the last five years. Profits have also increased from 27% to 104%. Government of Madhya
Pradesh had developed e-Uparjan application to procure agricultural produce from farmers. An
integrated system that encompasses procurement from farmers, storage and distribution to farmers
with managing the associated logistics helps Government of Madhya Pradesh to improve not only
earnings, but also in better serving of its citizens. This requires huge capital investments and is a
challenge for developing countries, more so, for states who are economically lagging behind when
compared to other states.
Singareni Collieries
Table 69 Key Information - Singareni Collieries Company Ltd. (SCCL)
Public Organization SCCL SCCL
Software Development ERP & E-Auction
Maintenance & Support SCCL & Service provider
Year - eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.scclmines.com
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Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) deals with coal mines located in Kothagudem
of Andhra Pradesh. Singareni excavates the coal from the coalmines and sells the coal to various
users. To enable easy transport and load/unload of coal from coalmines rail and road load and
unload are possible right from the coalmines. Singareni Collieries has huge employees around
70,000. A significant part of the employees operates in the coalmines. Their salary disbursements
are an operational and administratively demanding for SCCL. Apart from salary, coal dispatch
requires checks at various checkpoints starting from loading, weighing at weighbridges, at
checkpoints and so forth. Payment for purchase of coal integrated resulting in fast receivables.
SCCL also wanted to integrate auction along with dispatch. Therefore, SCCL felt it is prudent to
ICT enable their operations (productions), marketing and personnel departments.
SCCL decided to use SAP software to achieve automation of workflow. To the existing SAP
software, various modules developed internally by their IT department. Modules developed in
various mobile platforms that can seamlessly integrate with mobile devices and enterprise
applications. At the end of the month when employees’ salaries credited into their bank account
text messages sent to the registered mobile number regarding the credit of salary. Modules
developed to integrate weighbridges with SAP, require no manual intervention. The weighbridges
weigh the trucks and compare with the permitted value obtained from SAP. Similarly, certain
critical inventory items that can stop the production or critically hamper the operations tracked
electronically. When the inventory reaches a threshold level, trigger raised so that necessary
procurements initiated before the stock reaches alarming levels.
ICT enabling of auction mechanism and few policy decisions and their effects discussed in this
section. Vendors need to register in the SCCL portal and deposit a non-interest bearing amount
called Earnest Money Deposit (EMD). SCCL policy prohibits vendors from exporting the coal and
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restricts them to using it internally. So, vendors located outside India prohibited from participating
in e-auction. SCCL uses services of service provider (MSTC or Coal-Junction) to manage the E-
Auction. Service provider coordinates between the vendor and SCCL and performs various tasks.
Performs tasks such as receive EMD from the vendor, informs the vendor on award of auction,
refund EMD amount to all other vendors who did not win the auction and so forth. Service provider
also communicates the policy decisions regarding the coal grades their price bands, E-Auction
mechanism, limits for dispatch by rail mode. Service provider ensures that non-end users of coal
and are not permitted to download the coal within 60kms radius of SCCL coalmine. Similarly, for
dispatch by rail it is the vendor’s responsibility to unload and transfer to their destination from the
rail destination. Indian Railways used to transport coal by rail, so Indian Railways prevalent
railway rules govern the rail transport rules. However, SCCL follows the state-of-the-art coal
grading process and communicates to vendors through the service provider, bidder expected to
verify the grade of the coal before proceeding further with E-Auction. Bidder based on the EMD
amount decides bid quantity and bid increments. Bid also has a reserve price below which bidders
not allowed to bid. E-Auction apart from registering to the bid and paying the EMD deposit, the
real-time bidding process displayed on the screen. Electronically monitored bidding process starts
from the highest bid as long as the bid quantity is available for allocation. In case if bidders bid
the same price preference given to bidder who requests higher quantity, in case of same quantity
bidder who submitted his/her bid first in the system given preference. Post E-Auction service
provider coordinates with the bidder to receive the payment value for the bid coal. There are
timelines within the bidder honors the bid, else, bidder needs to pay penalty and beyond a certain
limit forfeits EMD.
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SCCL with ICT enabling of their pay roll, operations, and production and marketing functions
could improve their working efficiency. Moreover, it resulted in transparency in weighing of coal
and dispatch by trucks. Dispatch mechanism integrated with their E-Auction mechanism.
However, E-Auction confined only to registration and selection of the bidder. E-Auction does not
integrate with bidder’s ERP systems and does not consider the public administration and supply
chain management required pre and post auction. These along with flexible, responsive and
creative policy are essential when SCCL plans to expand their E-Auction to include E-
Procurement. E-Procurement is the integration of IS, supply chain, public administration and
policy.
Coal India E-Tendering and Reverse auctioning
Table 70 Key Information - Coal India E-Tendering and Reverse auctioning
Public Organization Coal India Limited (CIL)
Software Development MSTC or Coal-Junction
Maintenance &
Support
CIL MSTC or Coal-
Junction
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://www.coalindia.in
Coal India Limited (CIL) is the largest producer of coal in India. Supply of coal has a
significant presence in power generation for India. Several states in India rely on coal based
thermal plants for economic reasons. CIL with 81 mining areas and seven wholly owned coal-
producing subsidiaries plays a significant role in supply of coal to various states. CIL’s users are
varied and range from captive and independent power stations, defense, Railways, fertilizer, steel,
cement and aluminum companies, PSUs, Traders and so forth. Purchase of coal strictly monitored
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by Ministry of Coal. Ministry of coal distributes coal through Fuel Supply Agreements (FSA).
Companies that need coal on continuous basis get FSA’s issued to them by Ministry of Coal. CIL
based on the amount mentioned in FSA supplies coal. Ministry of Coal has decided to supply 10%
of coal produced to be available through E-Auction. Ministry of Coal wants traders and other
companies that require coal in small quantities (<4200 Metric tons per annum) and continuously
need not approach Ministry of Coal, but can approach CIL. Therefore, felt a need for transparent,
equal treatment of all categories of users, buyers from anywhere in India can procure coal, users
who need coal beyond their FSA requirements, reduce diversion of coal at a premium in secondary
market, and an efficient auction system. Therefore, initiated ICT based auction of coal. It has
primarily two primary features forward E-Auction and spot-auction. Forward E-Auction helps in
booking coal for a long period, say 12 months. On the other hand, spot-auction is for short-term
coal demands. E-Auction is done by MSTC (www.mstcindia.com) and/or Coal-Junction
(www.coaljunction.com).
Forward e-auction and spot-auction have different guidelines. However, both forward and spot
e-auctions necessitate that the vendor be located in India and use it only for domestic purposes.
For forward e-auction Ministry of Coal has stipulated submission of certain documents. These
documents are related to tax, industrial registration certificates, recommendation letters from
Ministry of Coal regarding end use of coal in the unit, pollution certificates, certificate from
magistrate certifying that the coal is used for own consumption apart from ownership and related
documents regarding proper functioning of the enterprise. For spot auction vendor to provide
documents such as tax returns, trade license if applicable, reasons for procuring coal and so forth.
For both forward and spot e-auctions vendor need to register with the service provider by providing
the necessary documents.
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When tenders raised, registered vendors need to submit their bids mentioning the quantity.
Tenders displayed on the CIL web site. Usage of web site has reduced spending a considerable
amount on newspaper advertisements and other public media communications. Since the timelines
for forward and spot auction, auctioning for forward and spot are also different. For forward,
performed auctions every quarter and informed one month in advance. Vendors need to book coal
for next four quarters from the auctioning quarter. For spot auction, at least two auctions scheduled
per month. For both spot and forward vendor has to deposit an interest free Earnest Monthly
deposit for submitting of bids. Though CIL has the state-of-the-art technology to assess the grade
of coal, it is the vendor’s responsibility to ensure the quality of coal. Rail and road modes of
transport auctioned separately though the tender is the same. There are restrictions on the amount
of coal transported through rail/road in forward and spot auctions. Transport by rail follows the
Indian Railways rules.
Bidder based on the EMD decides amount bid quantity and bid increments. Bid also has a
reserve price below which bidders allowed to bid. E-Auction apart from registering to the bid and
paying the EMD deposit, the real-time bidding process displayed on the screen. Electronically
monitored bidding process starts from the highest bid as long as the bid quantity is available for
allocation. In case of bidders had bid the same price preference given to bidder who requests higher
quantity, in case of same bidder who first submitted his/her bid in the system given preference.
Post E-Auction service provider coordinates with the bidder to receive the payment value for the
bid coal. There are timelines within the bidder honors the bid else, bidder needs to pay penalty and
beyond a certain limit forfeits EMD. Bids that require rail delivery adhere to Indian Railways rules.
Vendor to arrange transport of coal from Indian railways destination point to the destination point
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required for the vendor. If any of the Indian Railways, rules or rail rake limits or destination points
not suitable for vendor it results in forfeiture of EMD.
CIL’s e-auction user base ranges from minor users to large users who would like to procure
beyond the FSA limit. CIL’s e-auction system integrated with their internal ERP systems. On
successful award of the bid, the operations are instructed electronically on the dispatch size, mode
and frequency. However, their e-auction not integrated with the vendor’s ERP systems. Moreover,
the supply chain of the coal distribution stops when the coal leaves CIL premises. Given the CIL’s
role in power requirements of India and its states, a more intense ICT enabling of routines is
essential to improve working efficiency and effectiveness. This requires integrating not only the
information systems, but also the supply chain until the last delivery point, public administration
and policy related changes. Though CIL wants to reduce the sale of the coal at a premium in the
secondary market, the policies and lack of deep integrations with various disciplines of
procurement can result in pilferage and sale of coal in secondary markets. Forming of cartels is
possible.
E-Procurement: Indian Railways
Table 71 Key Information - E-Procurement Indian Railways
Public Organization Indian Railways
Software Development HCL (Hindustan
Computers Ltd)
Maintenance & Support HCL Contract agreement exists
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional Trajectory Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL https://www.ireps.gov.in/
Large public sector organizations such as Indian Railways (IR) and Indian Oil Corporation
have wide extensive network in terms of organizational set-up and the volume of traffic material
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supply. Indian Railways organization is broadly classified into Board, Zone and Divisions. Indian
Railways covers the entire length and breadth of the country by 24 zones. Each zone sub-divided
into divisions. Zones report to board and board reports into Ministry of Railways. Board comprises
six members Staff, Traffic, Engineering, Electrical, Mechanical and Financial Commissioner. The
procurement organization of IR consists of Controller of Stores (COS), stocking depots and local
procurement. Items procured classified into stock and non-stock units. Stock items need to be
replenished periodically and required by zones and manufacturing units. For sake of procurement,
manufacturing units, total eight, considered as a separate entity. Local procurement confines to
procuring low value items of both stock and non-stock. All other items procured by COS where
stocking depots raise indents. Procurement rate determined by the consumption rate through the
RDBMS based online material management system maintained by COS. IR has identified
approved vendors to ensure reliability, availability and safety. Vendors are categorized into Part-
1 and Part-2 and based on their performance are moved from one part to another. First time vendor
after registration placed in Part-2 category. COS department based on indents raised by stocking
units and the consumption rate electronically raise tenders after obtaining necessary budget
approvals. The purchase and sale are performed electronically by COS functions such as e-
Tenders (National and Global), e-Reverse Auction (procurement of goods from electronically
qualified vendors), e-Forward Auction (sale of scrap/disposal materials) and e-Payment. The e-
procurement solution has a web-server architecture and state of the art security features. Contract
management is done with integrations to legacy systems (financial and material management
information Systems). Objectives of the e-procurement solution are transparency, efficiency,
stimulate competition, reduce procurement cost (reduce time), larger vendor/bidder community
and improve tracking and monitoring.
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E-Procurement solution with the internet enabled web-service architecture did integrate the 24
zonal offices. Internet based web technology required codification of goods/items to eliminate
redundancy, consistency and re-use of data. Other artifacts such as schemas, forms and reports
derived from data also standardized such as forms, reports and dashboards. With the
improvements in reporting tools an integrated and quick retrieval of data and reports possible. The
private enterprise a leading global software developer enterprise and could support the developed
solution with stringent timelines on maintenance support issues ranging from helpdesk support to
code corrections.
One of the objectives of ICT enabled procurement system is transparency. Irregularities noted
in IR “The major irregularities detected and punishments awarded in the IR in recent years relate
to: (a) Award of contracts at exorbitant rates (b) Acceptance of substandard supplies (c) Failure to
carry out quality checks (d) Manipulation at tender processing stage to eliminate eligible bidders
to favor a particular bidder.” (Nag 2012, pg. 15), ICT based procurement cannot mitigate these
irregularities. Therefore, extent of transparency in ICT based systems is a complex socio-technical
process. To complicate, in India legal frameworks of The Indian Contract Act, 1890 and The Sale
of Goods Act, 1930 are used and no specific public procurement frameworks exist. To address
procurement oversight, IR has built-in internal (vigilance and accounts departments) and external
(Central Vigilance Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation, Comptroller and Auditor
General and Parliament) agencies to assist in maintaining the required transparency. IR has
employed 30,000 employees in procurement department where <10,000 employees of external
vigilance agencies supervise their actions. The success of IR procurement system attributed to the
organization structure, strict adherence to guidelines, contracts formulated by Railway Board, clear
demarcated line of command, interlocking matrix structure and vigilance mechanisms (Nag,
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2012). With e-procurement solution ICT enabled, the existing routines (niche-innovation) required
private enterprise to spend time and effort on techno/functional trainings. The significance of
adopting niche-innovation into the socio-technical regime of IR highlights the success and
sustenance of IR’s procurement system. However, noted a very limited vendor involvement in
adoption of niche-innovation into the socio-technical regime or considering vendor’s inputs in
improving the regime. Alternatively, vendors and the managers of IR have formed a loose
conglomerate with a common denominator (similar to keiretsu of Japanese manufacturing).
Forests Produce Tracking: Karnataka
Table 72 Key Information - Forests Produce Tracking
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Department of Forests
Software Development NIC & NRSA Forest Produce Tracking System
(FPTS)
Maintenance & Support NIC & Dept. of Forests
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL www.aranya.gov.in ;
http://164.100.80.10/forest_epermit/(S(c3hmqu2ibvkbjd55su4vdr
qf))/default.aspx
Karnataka Forest Department (KFD) manages forest produce. Forest produce consists of
timber, pulp for paper and other minor forest produce. KFD also manages the movement of mineral
ore excavated from forest area. Forest officer inspects the load and issues transit pass. It is
mandatory to show transit pass on-demand at various places such as check-post until its
consumption. Few forest areas of Karnataka have rich iron-ore. The mines in the forest area leased
to leaseholders. Leaseholders need to mine the mineral-ore against the issued transit passes.
Royalty paid to Government of Karnataka against these transit passes. These transit passes issued
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manually. Users exploited lacunae in issue of manual transit passes. This resulted in loss of
thousands of millions to the Government of Karnataka exchequer. In the background of such huge
loss Department of Forest decided to ICT enable, transit passes. Apart from transit passes, the
leaseholders require to obtain permits for mining. A very time consuming manual process could
not meet the spurt in mining activities. A marked increase in iron-ore mining activities is due to
huge demand of iron-ore in the global market.
Forest Produce Tracking Software (FPTS) is software developed by NIC along with NRSA.
NRSA provided the geo-spatial image of the forest area. NRSA has developed “Bhuvan” that can
provide detailed location and satellite images of any area under Government of Karnataka. The
product is similar to “Google Earth”. When applications for issue of transit passes and permits are
received these can be reconciled with NRSA’s images. While issuing transit passes reconciled with
the region of the issued permit. Transit passes can also decide the route for transport of mineral
ore and inform check-posts accordingly. Using ICT, Government of Karnataka enhanced decision-
making. Wherever applicable for sake of simplicity, it utilized text messages from phone. Until
2012, 951,660 online passes issued for transporting 21 MN tons of ore transported.
The field officers and staff of forest department trained in phases. This helped them to
internalize the technology and overcome indifference and resistance to change. Gradually,
government performed ICT enablement of routines. The entire application is a case of process
automation using ICT. Author feels that forest produce tracking includes procurement and
integration of departments and routines require process re-engineering that follow reconfiguration
trajectory.
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Municipal Administration and Urban Development: Andhra Pradesh
Table 73 Key Information - Municipal Administration and Urban Development
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Commissioner & Director for
Municipal Administration
(C&DMA)
Software Development CGG
Maintenance & Support CGG & C&DMA
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://cdma.gov.in
Commissioner and Director for Municipal Administration (C&DMA) provide basic civic
services to the citizens. They received constitutional status by 74th Constitutional amendment in
1992 and named as Urban Local Bodies, ULB. Apart from providing civic services ULBs also
collect taxes, fees, charges and receive grants from state and central governments. In the year 2001,
Supreme Court directed Municipal Corporation of Delhi to maintain accounts according to
mercantile system. In 2003, Government of India has come up with National Municipal Accounts
Manual (NMAM) and made available to states across the country. Like several other states Andhra
Pradesh’s ULBs excluding Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad followed single entry
bookkeeping. With introduction of NMAM, several ULBs had to move to double entry system of
accounting. To adhere to NMAM norms Government of Andhra Pradesh has come up with Andhra
Pradesh Modified Accounts Manual (APMAM) with modified accrual based double entry system
of accounting. With these changes, Government of Andhra Pradesh felt the need to computerize
the accounting system. Computerization helps ULBs to maintain accounts that adhere to
accounting and audit standards. Therefore, CGG as participating agency agreed to develop
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software for the ULBs. The developed software used by all ULBs except Municipal Corporation
of Hyderabad.
Software developed by CGG certified by third party agencies and deployed in 15 ULB
clusters. For monitoring and sustenance of the accounts and audits established Monitoring
Accounts and Audit Reforms Cell (MAARC) and Monitoring Accounts and Audit Coordination
Committee (MAACC). Representatives from various departments such as municipal, state, audit,
finance and domain experts became part of the committees. With the help of these committees and
ICT based accounting and audit software, a sound accounting system helps realize accountability,
efficiency and transparency. Another significant characteristic of this project is along with audits
and accounts; policy related (legal framework) changes were also integrated during software
development. These three aspects considered by the committees MAARC and MAACC help
improve decision-making during software development. In the absence of committees, decision-
making managed by bureaucratic communication maze between various departments. CGG being
an organization established by Government of Andhra Pradesh with senior CGG officers having
worked earlier in various state departments could also intervene to expedite decision-making.
CGG, keeping in mind the IT-savviness of the ULB staff, had to develop a user-friendly and
easy to use application. Along with that, training for end-users and auditors carried out. Role and
end-user training were done in phases. Training supported by external Chartered Accountant firms.
These firms clarified certain legal and statutory requirements required while following mercantile
system. Clear demarcation of roles helped in faster adoption of the application. ICT enabled
routines required support and back-up from the committees MAACC and MAARC. These
committees made recommendations to the government, where government formalized these by
issuing orders. Committees also reviewed ICT routines after passing the order and suggested
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necessary amendments. The necessary institutional arrangements helped in faster adoption of ICT
enabled accounting and auditing system. Institutional arrangements also provided the required
confidence that sustenance of the ICT enabled system is possible. ICT enabled financial system
also integrations with ERP packages of municipal administration. Such integrations automatically
streamline data and remove manual interventions, making system more reliable. However, these
marked as future work. CGG may have to look the ICT enabled financial system as a product line.
This requires considering various aspects apart from “code-build-test-train”. These factors can be
non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability, non-repudiation and so forth.
Committees assisted in implementing replication of collaborative and incremental decision-
making and essential for non-functional requirements. Going forward, committees need to extend
it to several and different stakeholders.
Commercial Tax Department: Gujarat
Table 74 Key Information - Commercial Tax Department
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Department of Commercial Tax
Software Development An Indian Multi-national
company with global
presence
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Commercial Tax;
Indian multi-national
company
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://commercialtax.gujarat.gov.in/vatwebsite/
Commercial Tax department of Gujarat wants to ICT enable its transactions. Currently CST,
1956 laws are applicable across India. However, Government of India has been considering
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implementation of Goods and Service Tax (GST). GST is a value added taxation system. Several
countries across the world have implemented GST because it integrates state economies and boosts
overall growth. However, GST brings change in tax structure that can have huge impact on the
supply chain. Currently supply chain in India is sub-optimal and structured to avoid taxes. With
GST, current taxation structure to change. Currently, traders with turnover <One MN INR
exempted from registering and paying taxes, and compounding of tax is not done for traders with
<Five MN INR. Continuing with this policy may not benefit traders who pay tax and trade with
traders with turnover <One MN INR or <Five MN INR. Therefore, GST though overall boosts the
economy there are lot of policy, supply chain and public administration changes required to make
it effective. In spite of all these ambiguities, Commercial Tax department currently plans to
develop software to enable them implement GST.
Commercial tax department, to ICT enable their operations decided to engage a participating
organization that has software development experience in developing software for several
customers and with a global presence. The developed software uses DSCs. It is not mandatory for
taxpayers to obtain DSC; nevertheless, encouraged to obtain one. Various organizations that
qualify the tax bracket need to pay various taxes to Government of Gujarat. These taxes are VAT,
CESS, Profession and Entry taxes. Few transactions such as inter-state purchase, purchases in the
course of export and branch transfer or consignment transfer or State transfer are exempt from tax
or pay taxes at discounted rates. Preparation of forms and submission of taxes ICT enabled, by
developing a web-services based application. Organizations need not spend huge time and effort
in obtaining latest applications and physically submitting forms. Tax payment and tax returns done
electronically. The developed application has all the security features to make a secure transaction.
The web application helps in tracking the status of the permits and passes as they pass through
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various transit points. A web-based application with SOA helped the participating organization to
integrate with latest report generating tools. These report-generating tools help Commercial tax
department to generate various reports and dashboards. These reports and dashboards influence
decision-making.
The web-based application with state-of-the-art technology helped Commercial tax department
in change management regarding forms, easy, fast tax submission, processing of tax submissions
and faster returns, assist organizations with various taxation activities and help them to tune their
supply chain. However, for GST implementation apart from ICT enabling of tax routines require
deep integrations with supply chain and public administrations. Moreover, requires a consensus
based policymaking. A consensus based policymaking helps in making the policy adhere close to
practice. In other words, minimize reality deviating from policy. A practice-oriented guide to
policy making requires social-construction that considers both official and unofficial participants.
This requires moving away from “policy-cycle”, where feedback from policy considered after
reality (based on official and unofficial actors’ interpretation of policy and interaction in the
network) deviated from policy. Such an approach helps to better approach the taxation systems
that are an inter-disciplinary consisting of IS, taxation, supply-chain, public administration and
policymaking.
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Integrated Child Development: Andhra Pradesh
Table 75 Key Information - Integrated Child Development
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Women, Child &
Disabled persons
Software Development Dept. of Women, Child &
Disabled persons
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Women, Child &
Disabled persons
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://wcdsc.ap.nic.in
Government of Andhra Pradesh has established a separate department for the welfare of the
women, child and disabled persons. This department focuses mainly on persons who are social
and economic deprived and lives below the poverty line. Government works with the help of
Anganwadi (AWW) centers. Anganwadi means “courtyard shelter” in Indian languages. AWW
focuses on providing basic health care in Indian villages. Basic health care includes contraceptive
counseling and supply, nutrition education and supplementation and pre-school activities. These
centers used as oral rehydration salts, basic medicines and contraceptives. These centers operate
closely with public health systems to provide health check-up, immunization and health education.
Personnel in AWW centers consist of officers and their helpers who are typically women from
poor families. AWW centers are besieged by reports of corruption and crimes against women.
There are also legal and societal issues when AWW serviced children fall sick or die.
WCDSC decided to improve information availability to AWW centers. AWW workers have
limited knowledge on computers and work with paper-based registers. Therefore, most of their
time and effort spent on going through the registers and identifying women/children who needs
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services. WCDSC decided to computerize data capture, storage and reporting. Thereby, in AWW
centers officers can spend time in organizing, planning and coordinating their work instead of
identifying capturing data from their helpers. AWW officers and helpers are conversant with local
language (Telugu), so data capture consists of predominantly of entering numbers and clicking on
radio buttons. Thereby, great computer skills not required to perform their daily routines. However,
WSDSC department officials can get information quickly and suggest action plans to AWW
centers. Review meetings between AWW centers and WSDSC officials became more productive,
for example, in a specific locality vaccination not done during nutritional health days. Availability
of information helped WSDSC officials to point out to AWW centers and get it corrected
immediately.
WCDSC is a case where ICT enabling expedites collect, storage and retrieves day-to-day
operations. However, social development objectives in India require beyond transactional
effectiveness. The areas identified by UNICEF are a case in point.
Sugar Commission: Maharashtra
Table 76 Key Information - Sugar Commission
Public Organization Government of Maharashtra Sugar Commission
Software Development Government of Maharashtra
Maintenance & Support Sugar Commission
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.mahasugarcom.gov.in
Sugar commission of Maharashtra manages the sugar companies that are located in the state.
Sugar commission has serious challenges in gathering information from the sugar factories.
Information is required regarding certain important parameters such as daily production rate,
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inventory regarding input and output, dispatch of finished items and so forth. Several sugar mills
had poor computerization and connectivity. Therefore, sugar commission decided to receive
information on required parameters by means of text messages sent from mobile phones.
Standardized the format used for sending information. Sugar companies requested to register their
mobile phones with the commission. Commission on receipt of the text message parses the
information. The information managed by a three-tier application that has various report
generating capabilities.
Sugar commission with their unique methodology could solicit information from sugar
companies. However, the methodology requires sugar mills to be forthcoming with the correct
information. Sugar commission with trainings to the sugar mills personnel could reduce the errors
during data entry into the text message. However, on sugar mills that are frequent defaulters in
sending data, Sugar Commission methodology had limited avenues to take corrective action.
Maharashtra being the leading producer of sugar in India with societies having various classes of
membership, an ICT enabled system that helps Maharashtra to improve its position when ICT used
to innovate, knowledge sharing and financial assistance.
Agricultural Land Management: Andhra Pradesh
Table 77 Key Information - Agricultural Land Management
Public Organization GoAP Department of Revenue
Software Development NIC
Maintenance & Support NIC
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Transformation (Desired) Reconfiguration (Observed)
URL http://webland.ap.gov.in; http://www.ccla.ap.gov.in;
http://apland.ap.nic.in/cclaweb/BhubharatiWebsite/vision.html
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Agricultural land management system is part of ‘Bhu Bharati’ initiated by Government of
Andhra Pradesh’s Department of Revenue. Department of Revenue consists of various sub-
divisions and one of them is Land Administration. Citizens’ perform land transactions at the sub-
registrar offices by paying the necessary fees. Location and type of land determine the fees. Given
the value appreciation that is possible with land transactions frequency is not predicable and in
certain cases, same land sold to multiple persons resulting in disputes. Governments would
definitely like to definitely eliminate errors in land transactions and maintain traceability from
survey to various mutations. The objective to computerize land management is common across
several states in India and Andhra Pradesh is no different. The challenges in computerization of
land management require ICT enabling from survey to land mutations. Apart from identifying the
costly land survey capturing various land contours requires number of iterations. Moreover, action
plan required to manage errors (before ICT) during land transaction. Post ICT, roles of inspectors
and accountants who continue to maintain land records requires re-operationalization. Inclusion of
various other private and urban bodies, associated discrepancies and integrating land records with
other departments such as forest, urban and municipal land bodies are few challenges.
Revenue Department of Andhra Pradesh started “Bhu Bharati” to computerize the land records
of Andhra Pradesh. ‘Bhu Bharati’ captures the non-government and non-agricultural land. The
agricultural and governmental lands maintained by ‘webland’ and ‘Sarkaar Bhoomi’ land
management records respectively. These land record management systems are developed using
SOA, open data exchange standards, effectively leverage GIS based systems and have meta-data
standards for effective sharing of data. Other than registration of sale document with conferring a
legal status to it all other transactions citizens can perform from the CSC centers. Land records
management plans to manage the maintenance and operations of the land management system
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from the revenue received from user-charges. Services available to citizens are information and
document issue services (title, transaction history, transaction, map & document search, building
& layout plan, crop information and market value), transaction services (transfer of title,
registration of will, creation/release of charge, layout approval) and other services (complaints and
grievances).
The existing land records comprising of 42.5 MN agricultural land records of 15 MN
landowners entered into webland. These records verified and signed by officers. In one year of its
operation, transactions performed around 1.75 MN land titles, 90,000 Record-of-Rights and
350,000 land mutations. Training to the sub-registrar offices and accountants had done in phases.
Text displayed in Telugu language. Unicode codeset used to store Telugu language so that the
fonts are web-compatible. A distributed database selected for faster data retrieval and reduced
network traffic. Like any other land management system, technological solution is state-of-the-art,
but various coordinative capabilities required in any other state government are also applicable for
Government of Andhra Pradesh.
Land Registration (Judicial Stamp Paper): Bihar
Table 78 Key Information - Land Registration
Public Organization Government of Bihar Department of Revenue
Software Development Judicial Stamp Franking M/C NIC & Forbes Technosys Ltd
Maintenance & Support National Informatics Center
(NIC) & Forbes Technosys Ltd
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://registration.bih.nic.in/; http://www.forbestechnosys.com/
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Department of Revenue during land registration levies fees. Fees based on the percentage of
the land transaction value. Some percentage of the fees paid at the time of registration and
remaining in the form of stamps on judicial paper. The land transaction details printed on the
judicial paper and submitted to the registrar at the time of registration. Registrar after the necessary
checks confers legal status to the document. Department of revenue did notice long queues at the
POS of judiciary papers, the High court and district courts. Judiciary paper is available in two
forms 1) paper has a printed top portion that displays the value and Government of India symbol,
and, 2) judiciary stamps in various denominations can be affixed on normal paper to convert it into
a judiciary paper of required value. To reduce citizens waiting time and also reduce the circulation
of counterfeit judiciary papers, department of revenue decided to get the entire process of selling
judiciary stamps electronic and reduce the circulation of judiciary papers. Department of Revenue
with participating organizations as NIC and Forbes Technosys Ltd decided to computerize the
judicial stamp vending process. The scope of the project is 56 district & subordinate courts covered
by 116 franking machines. A committee constituted to consider the merits and demerits of various
franking machines available with participating organizations. After careful consideration, the
committee decided Forbes Technosys Ltd.
The franking machines hardware provided by Forbes Technosys Ltd and the software with
necessary security features and validations provided by NIC. The software installed in the franking
machine had encryption features, each transaction based on PIN mailers and unique digital printing
technology through thermal transfers and UV protection making is foolproof, safe and reliable.
The print used applicable for forensic evidences. The franking machine operates by operator
crediting an amount in a bank account specified by the Government. The operator can frank stamps
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until there is balance in the bank account. The machine keeps a log of the transactions for audit
trails and syncs with franking server.
Department of revenue had to deal with the intermediaries who vehemently opposed
implementation of the franking machine. Several of them felt, they would be out-of-business.
Reduced resistance by using a combination of High court directive, public demand and few
intermediaries accepted to operating the franking machines. The participating organization had to
reduce the power consumption of the franking machine; thereby operating the franking machines
not a hindrance in rural areas. Legal amendments required to make the franking machine legally
acceptable. The amendment permitted paying court fees in various modes apart from stamp fees.
The success of franking machine attributed to the directive from the High court. Though other
reasons could have also contributed, directive from High court ensured overwhelmed the resistance
is completely. Franking machine’s reach extended by integrating it with CSC centers that provide
various G2C services.
Land Registration: Bihar
Table 79 Key Information - Land Registration
Public Organization Government of Bihar Department of Revenue
Software Development National Informatics Center
(NIC)
Minimum Valuation Registration
(MVR)
Maintenance & Support NIC
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://registration.bih.nic.in/
Government of Bihar’s Department of Revenue decided to improve the current land
registration. Like any other registration process in India Bihar also follows the practice of paying
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a registration fees with submission of document transferring the property title from seller to buyer.
The registrar confers legal status to the document. However, during registration valuation
intentionally done less than the market value, but higher than Government value. In certain cases,
land is also shown in areas where the government value is less. These practices are resulting in
lesser revenue realization for the Government of Bihar. Therefore, ICT enabling of the registration
process helps in reducing leakage. In this regard, Government of Bihar decided to assign software
design and development to participating organization, NIC. NIC designed and developed a web-
based application with SOA. The application based on the geographical coordinates (GIS) obtained
from land survey arrives at the minimum value of registration (Government value). These values
uploaded in the Department of Revenue portal. Citizens expected to check the minimum
registration value and decide their registration amount. Though citizens can check based on the
survey numbers officers in registrar offices have a visual display. The visual display derived from
the GIS based survey mechanism. Color codes, peaks, and troughs used to differentiate variation
in minimum valuation of registration. At the time of registration, registrar can visually view the
location of the registering land based on the survey number mentioned in document. Identified and
corrected any anomalies. Government of Bihar expects annual increase in revenue of 20 MN INR.
In this case, ICT enablement of routine performed to arrive at minimum value of registration.
However, when ICT enabling requires extension to other land management systems the challenges
faced by other states are applicable for Government of Bihar.
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Loan Disbursement Housing Corporation: Andhra Pradesh
Table 80 Key Information - Loan Disbursement Housing Corporation
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh Housing
Corporation
Software Development CGG
Maintenance & Support CGG & AP Housing Corp.
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.housing.cgg.gov.in
Andhra Pradesh Housing Corporation finances houses for socially and economically under-
privileged sections of the society. Socially and economically, under-privileged sections of the
society are termed as beneficiaries in Andhra Pradesh Housing Corporation’s parlance.
Beneficiaries are allotted house sites for construction based on various parameters. Beneficiary
expresses interest in constructing the house, based on the progress made allotted funds. Andhra
Pradesh Housing Corporation wanted to ICT enabled monitoring and tracking of house
construction. An ICT enabled system helps the housing corporation to achieve transparency.
Transparency is essential to ensure that amount is disbursed directly to beneficiary’s bank account
based on progress, photograph of the house under construction attached to verify and validate,
easy monitoring, tracking and report generation. CGG, an organization managed by Government
officers taken as participating organization to design and develop the ICT based application.
Given the nature of work the field officers are required to perform, CGG decided to develop a
web-based application with mobile connectivity. Mobile connectivity developed using open
source J2ME. J2ME application helps in transfer of information from mobile devices to centralized
servers. Application works in both limited and full configuration of the mobile device. Using J2ME
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updates to the mobile device application done remotely and with minimum manual intervention.
The various real-time activities possible are communication from mobile device to enterprise
management systems control monitoring and data acquisition, diagnostics and preventive
maintenance and dynamic downloading of applications and remote service updates. On photo
capture, geographic coordinates latitudes and longitudes captured by the mobile device before
sending it to the web-application. The web-application developed with SOA. This helps in
integrating with third party report generators. Reports are available for public view to ensure
transparency. Application supports 1500 concurrent users.
Field officers provided with laptops and mobile devices for ease of data capture. Field officer
uploads house construction progress, when the necessary requirements met; web-application sends
instructions to transfers funds to the beneficiary’s bank account.
Scholarship: Maharashtra
Table 81 Key Information - Scholarship Maharashtra
Public Organization Government of Maharashtra Department of Social Justice &
Empowerment
Software Development Mastek Pvt. Ltd.
Maintenance & Support Dept. of Social Justice
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://socialjustice.nic.in/scholarships.php;
http://escholarship.maharashtra.gov.in/LandingPageE.html
National eGovernance Plan has mandated all states to provide scholarships to students
electronically. The primary objectives of providing electronic scholarships is towards ensuring
transparency, only the desired get the scholarship and ease in monitoring and tracking.
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Scholarships are provided for socially and economically under-privileged sections and accessible
across all the 35 districts of Maharashtra. Department of Social Justice and Empowerment selected
a leading IT software development company with a global presence. The leading software
company had developed enterprise solutions for various domains with significant domains being
insurance, financial services and government. The solution developed by the IT Company is a
web-based application using SOA.
Application classifies applicants into pre-matric (before completing secondary school) and
post-matric (after completing secondary school). Similar to scholarship applications in other states,
application required linking with the school leaving certificate number. Applicants desiring for
post-matric scholarship need to provide the school-leaving certificate for the application to retrieve
all the relevant information. Using web-services call the application accesses the records of the
Department of Education to retrieve all relevant information. Pre-matric scholarships restricted to
select sections of society who in Government’s point-of-view are very under-privileged. The
sections of society covered are children of parents who do manual scavenging, tanners and flayers.
Pre-matric scholarships provided until the student reaches highest class of secondary school (class
X). In an academic year, scholarship provided only for 10 months. The business process layer
captured the rules for calculation of scholarship. Application localized to work in local language
Marathi. Application configured to work with Aadhaar Unique Id number also.
The participating organization had to work closely with the staff of the department spread
across 35 districts to make them adopt the ICT enabled business process. Implemented certain
changes suggested by the end-users. However, a considerable time and effort spent in making the
staff adopt the ICT enabled system. Department also assisted the participating organization and
developed Computer Based Training (CBT), movie clips apart from classroom trainings. Though
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the department could manage training of the department personnel, training students and other
stakeholders required special efforts. Department personnel toured the entire state to create
awareness among stakeholders and the advantageous of ICT based scholarship disbursement.
Government of Maharashtra did not consider managing release and increment changes to the
product. However, did consider maintenance and support activities. Managing scholarship
applications as a product-line is helpful in reducing the time required to customize it for other
states and better management of release and increments. Whether the department can manage
products as product-lines, using participating organizations requires a different study.
Online Scholarship Management: Andhra Pradesh
Table 82 Key Information - Online Scholarship Management
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
AP State Minorities Finance
Corporation
Software Development National Informatics Center
(NIC)
Maintenance & Support NIC
Year – eINDIA 2011
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired) Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://www.apsmfc.in
Government of Andhra Pradesh has established Andhra Pradesh State Minorities Finance
Corporation Ltd (APSMFC) under Companies, Act 1956 in the year 1985. The objective of
establishing APSMFC is assist minority communities such as Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Parsis
& Jains citizens living in Andhra Pradesh. APSMFC expected to work for the socio-economic
improvement of minority communities. In this regard, they work with various financial institutions
and banks to provide financial assistance for socially and economically under-privileged sections
of the minority communities. Apart from financial assistance, APSMFC also does capability
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development activities for the minority youth. Capability development activities are towards
making them develop skills that assist them in their employment. Training is provided in the areas
such as drafter, Hotel management, Multimedia, Interior decoration, Air Ticketing and Heavy
Motor Driving and only at Hyderabad. APSFMC felt that ICT enabling of the scholarships
disbursement is essential to maintain transparency and ensure that it reaches the appropriate
persons. Therefore, APSFMC engaged a participating organization NIC to develop an ICT enabled
system. Given the reach of 23 districts of Andhra Pradesh, NIC decided to develop a web-based
application with SOA.
The web-application provides two types of scholarships pre-matric (applicants who have not
completed secondary school) and post-matric (applicants who have completed secondary school
and interested in pursuing their education). Apart from scholarships, APSFMC also provides
financial assistance for small or promising entrepreneurs who meet the eligibility criteria. Fee
reimbursement provided to the eligible applicants. Applicants submit online application by logging
into the portal http://www.apsfmc.in. The hard copy of the online application submitted to the
university/college/school. The concerned authorities of the university/college/school require
attesting the application and forward it to APSFMC. APSFMC after necessary checks instructs for
electronic transfer of funds to college and the applicant. Audit and logs maintained for the funds
transferred electronically. Around 500,000 applicants every year avail scholarships. APSFMC did
spend a good amount of time and effort in socializing the ICT based discharge of scholarships and
its benefits. For year 2012-13 around 4186 MN INR (450 MN INR is from central government),
spent towards minority communities where 3016 MN towards scholarships and other financial
assistance to minorities. In year, 2013-14, until Dec2014 around 1255 MN INR spent for assisting
minority communities. Given the amount and number of financial transactions done per year ICT
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enabling scholarship disbursement looks prudent. However, equally important is increasing the
number of applicants each year and striving for improvement in other activities such as women
development, child welfare, training and employability. Using ICT if APSFMC could bring a
difference in these areas its objectives would have largely met.
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CATEGORY: G2G
Category: G2G
Forests Government of Karnataka
Table 83 Key Information - Forests Government of Karnataka
Public Organization Government of Karnataka Department of Forests
Software Development National Informatics Center
(NIC)
HULI
Maintenance &
Support
NIC
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://aranya.gov.in; http://www.huli.in
There has been a new inclusion of Tiger reserve in the name of Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple
(BRT) to Department of Forests of Government of Karnataka. The Forest officials manage the
entire forest area with the help of patrol teams. Government formed eight patrol teams. These
patrol teams’ schedules decided by Forest Officers. Patrol teams need to patrol the assigned area
by the specified time. As they patrol they need to capture information regarding the flora and fauna.
Patrolling forms an important component of wildlife conservation. Patrol teams bring the ground
data. Reliable and accurate ground level information helps forest officials in not only directing the
patrol teams, but also helps in their decision-making. Decision-making are regarding conservation
of forests (wildlife habitat). In case of any conflicts between man and animals, decision-making to
explore options to reduce the conflict.
Given the importance of information captured by patrol teams, Department of Forests decided
to develop a hand-held based GPS based data capture method. The captured data uploaded to a
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web-based application with SOA. Officers can login to the web-based application and analyze the
data. Patrol teams provided with camp stations with facilities such as internet connectivity, mobile-
phone connectivity, and battery backup for six hours, charging mechanisms for hand-held GPS
device and so forth. Patrol teams along with their sightings capture geographical information such
as latitude and longitudes in their GPS hand-held device. When they return to the camp station
after a 12-hour trek covering eight kilometers, they connect the hand-held device to the laptop.
The sightings captured in their hand-held device and uploaded to the laptop along with their
observations. The user-interface is very friendly and helps the patrol team to upload information
with minimum computer knowledge. The information uploaded into the laptop syncs with the web-
server. Information stored in the web-server is available for other forest officials and stakeholders.
Apart from the information gathering by patrol team, Department of Forests developed
application to record incidents of man-animal conflict. The requester can raise details regarding
the conflict. The details to be entered apart from Forest Range officer’s circle, division and Tiger
Reserve name and the requester’s name, district, village and the photograph of the incident, nature
of complaint and damage are survey number of his/her land and also the bank account details.
Forest Range officer on receipt of the complaint makes necessary verifications such as authenticity
of the claim and extent of damage. Forest Range officer with integration to land record
management system can also check for encroachments.
Forest department by ICT enabling their routine monitoring and controlling operations could
obtain relevant information to help them in taking well-informed decision. However, Government
of India in 2006 has come up with Forest Rights Act. This a new paradigm of forest governance
from colonized of forestland and people to democratic governance with the law conceding the
rights to forest dwellers. To implement Forest Rights Act, government needs to integrate with
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various stakeholders with an integrated approach with all relevant information and take well-
informed decisions. In other words, for implementing Forest Rights Act government requires to
look beyond technology substitution and use reconfiguration of their routines.
Border Area Development Program
Table 84 Key Information - Border Area Development Program
Public Organization Government of Jammu &
Kashmir
Border Area Development
Program BADP
Software Development Internal IT
Maintenance & Support Internal IT
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://jkpulse.gov.in;
http://jandkplanning.com/index.php?option=com_content&vie
w=article&id=4&Itemid=2&lang=en
Planning and Development of Government of Jammu & Kashmir works on planning and
implementation of projects. Border Area Development Program (BADP), a sub-division of
Planning & Development, started with central government funding with objective of sensitive
development of border areas to develop security among local residents. The projects are invariably
inter-disciplinary, inter-region and inter-district. The State Government is also interested in
decentralizing decision-making. In this regard quick, correct and reliable information assists
during monitoring and control, especially for BADP. BADP has under its purview 44 blocks that
are in the border areas with China and Pakistan. Planning and Development decided to computerize
their operations during officers make field visit. Their internal department designed and developed
a web-based application that can capture information using a hand-held device. The hand-held
device is a mobile device that can capture geographical coordinates and time.
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During deployment of the web-based application the field officers, other personnel of Planning
and Development along with Public Words Department (PWD), Public Health Engineering (PHE)
and Power Development Department (PDD) provided training. Initially the application introduced
in two districts, plans to extend it across all the 44 blocks exist. With a top-down approach
(Government issued an order), the ICT enabled routines made mandatory for the personnel. Since
BADP works in close collaboration with other departments ICT enabling routines of other
departments with voluntary adoption of ICT enabled routines is essential.
Gujarat State Land Development
Table 85 Key Information - Gujarat State Land Development
Public Organization Government of Gujarat Gujarat State Land Development
Corporation
Software Development Gujarat Info Petro Ltd.
Maintenance & Support Gujarat Info Petro Ltd.
Year – eINDIA 2013
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Technology Substitution
(Observed)
URL http://gsldc.org/AboutUs.aspx; http://www.gipl.in
Gujarat State Land Development Corporation (GSLDC) formed by Gujarat Government with
100% equity capital. Shareholders of the corporation are Governor of Gujarat and other
representatives from various state departments. GSLDC’s main objective is land development and
executes various watershed programs. GSLDC has a fleet of 63 bulldozers to perform various
excavation, filling and leveling activities. The majority of GSLDC activities are related to storage
of water in ponds, lakes and other tanks (tanks are called talavadis in local Gujarati language). The
tanks constructed at places at appropriate places to store run-off water. Water storage constructions
are done to assist Agricultural department including Horticulture, Forest Department and farmers.
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The completion of the construction activities and the progress of the storage activities are required
not only for internal monitoring and for tracking, but also for sharing the progress details with
other departments. Therefore, necessity for an ICT based solution felt for better monitoring and
tracking. GSLDC with a participating organization developed a hand-held based device for
gathering information. The hand-held device can gather information such as photographs and the
geographical coordinates. The gathered information uploaded into a web-based application with
SOA. Officials of GSLDC and other department officials can login and check the status and
progress of the various construction activities. The application called as sim-talavadi in local
parlance.
With the use of latest technology, GSLDC could improve its data gathering and display of
information with reduced cycle-time. The technology required minimum technology adoption
from the field officers. Officers who wish to check the progress need to be aware about various
reporting options.
Missing and Found Persons: Andhra Pradesh
Table 86 Key Information - Missing and Found Persons
Public Organization Government of Andhra
Pradesh
Department of Women, Children &
Disabled persons & Police
Department
Software Development Internal IT dept.
Maintenance & Support Internal IT dept.
Year – eINDIA 2012
Key Transitional
Trajectory
Reconfiguration (Desired)
& Reproduction (Desired)
Reproduction (Observed)
URL http://www.wcdsc.ap.nic.in; http://missingperson.ap.nic.in/
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Department of Women, children & disabled persons (WCDSC) along with Police department
wanted to track and monitor missing persons. Every year numerous persons reported as missing.
Perpetuators were left unpunished, due to the labyrinth of bureaucratic maze between governments
departments, missing person’s reports are lost or when found authorities not informed at the
appropriate time or after found and reported necessary actions not taken in some cases. These
procedural lapses resulted in ineffective search operations with loss of trust on the government by
the citizens. An ICT enabled search operation could bring the required operational efficiency into
the system. Moreover, both the police and WCDSC departments have ICT enabled their
operations. Therefore, using internal IT department both departments developed a web-based
application with SOA. Using web-services appropriate department notified when detecting a
trigger. Citizens from anywhere in Andhra Pradesh can also report missing persons or inform the
authorities if they found anyone.
Total number of missing persons as on date and their classifications based are displayed don
the portal. As on date 33% are children, women are 29% and men are 25%. An increase of 4% can
be included to these values, as 11% of the cases did not specify gender.