e-GRAM
Bridging the Digital Divide
Afew years ago, A K Gadhvi of Gandhinagar district's Sadhav village wouldn't have had it so easy. He recently bought a piece of land. Earlier he would have had to go to Gandhinagar to get the verification done. Today, thanks to the e-Gram project of the Gujarat government, he "could get the verification done at the Gram Panchayat itself and got the record of rights."
The e-Gram project has brought about a revolution in the rural areas of Gujarat. But what is the e-Gram project? Varesh Sinha, Principal Secretary, Panchayati Raj, Gujarat government explains: "The basic objective of e-Gram is total computerisation of the Gram Panchayats. This e-Governance application entails computerisation at the village level itself for instant processing of birth and death registration, and issuance of certificates such as agriculture, caste, income and electricity." The computerisation also includes tax collection and issuance of certain forms.
Encouraged by the successful implementation of a pilot project in the Valukad village of Bhavnagar, the State government has set a target of implementing this e-Gram concept across all villages of Gujarat. The Government aims to make these centres self-sustainable and therefore it has been decided to provide Technical and Training Support to the e-Gram Computer Centres.
TAs the first step, Sinha explains, a 'Village Computer
Entrepreneur' –a person who had basic knowledge of the computers–was appointed from outside. Team Skoch visited Sadhav village in Gandhinagar district to see the impact of the project. We met Satish Patel, one such Village Computer Entrepreneur. Satish says: "We issue 40 such certificates (birth, death, income, etc) that help our Garm Panchayat to earn Rs 700 per day."
Manubhai Ratilal Patel, the sarpanch of Sadhav Panchayat, is visibly proud of the spin-offs of this project. “We are using computer for keeping record of our expenditure and earnings. The data entry is done regularly and it can be seen by the officials at the district level," he says. Data on the villagers is collected through an exhaustive 40-point questionnaire, which includes questions about class, caste, occupation, date of birth, among others. To make the working more foolproof, a double accounting system has been introduced. "This can help in finding out if there's any embezzlement in any area," says Sinha.
The biggest reason for the success of e-Gram project is the fact that the whole system is in Gujarati. It was not easy and it took some time to build the whole platform in Gujarati. This huge task was done by DEV Information Technology Pvt Ltd. Pranev Pandya of Factfile
The e-Gram project is a cohesive programme for bringing together the governments, academia and research institutions, developers and industry associations on a common ground for backing local language computing. With the help of e-connectivity, village councils would be provided with facilities of Internet, video conferencing and multi-casting. All village bodies will be able to communicate with one another with the help of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Each of the 13,693 village panchayats in the state is now connected to the worldwide web at a speed of 256 kilobytes per second. This happened in two years at an expenditure of Rs1.5 billion for installing computers, tying up with Internet service providers and training villagers.
Objectives
- To infuse five Es in governance: ease, economy, efficiency, effectiveness and ethics
- To bridge the digital divide between the urban and the rural sectors
- To convert right to information into a reality through access to digital information
- To empower people through access to global communication and information
- To enable prompt issue of certificates, documents and application forms
- To dovetail e-Gram with the Jyoti Gram Project
- (3-Phase 24 hour power supply to villages)
- To ensure prompt redressal of grievances
| DEV explains: “After a couple of months we managed to incorporate a tool that converted non-unicode based document to Unicode-based documents, ” he says adding that the success of this tool was the main driving force behind developing this platform in Gujarati.Varesh Sinha puts it succinctly while explaining the success of the e-Gram system. “When you go with determination, you choose the best,” he says with a smile about the e-Gram dream that turned into a reality in Gujarat. No wonder, the the Centre is now seriously contemplating replicating the project in other states.
At the 'Annual Best Practices Summit" in New Delhi on March 19, the Gujarat government was given the prestigious SKOCH Challenger Award – 2008 for the project in the category of "Digital Inclusion".
The Gujarat government is not resting on its laurels. To ensure that government services are made available to the citizens in a hassle-free and 24x7 manner, it has undertaken two major programmes. Firstly, government has decided to provide "Broadband" connectivity to all Village Panchayats in the state through the e-Gram Vishwagram Society under the Panchayat and Rural Housing Department of the State government. Secondly, all Village Panchayats have been provided with the computers, printers and other necessary hardware so as to enable the village level computer operators to deliver government services to the people. In addition, out of every three Gram Panchayats, one will have a Common Services Centre (CSC) as contemplated under the National
e-Governance Plan (NeGP).
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