IT For Local Self-Governance

 Information Kerala Mission

Information Kerala Mission (IKM) project aims at touching upon the lives of 30 million people in Kerala through a human-centred application of Information Communication Technologies. The project seeks fast and effective service delivery, transparency and empowerment of the citizen, efficient backend processing, improved and fair decision making, responsive administration and good governance, all leading to stronger and efficient local governments in the state, making decentralised planning and local democracy more meaningful.

The objective of the mission is to computerise 1,223 local self-governments (LSGs) in the state. This project aims at strengthening decentralised planning and local democracy through good governance, improved service delivery, sharing of best practices and building up community knowledge bases for decentralised planning and local area development. Participatory software development, developing learner-centred, locale-specific training and handholding strategies, and networking of local level small and medium enterprises for employment generation and sustenance are components of the project. IKM provides the much required database support for better decision making in development projects, offers improved public services and responsive local administration and imparts necessary skills to the community to use ICT for transparency, participation and judicious decision-making.

Process
Built with the help of MCS, it will be deployed across 1,223 locations. Importantly, the solution also provides location language support.  It is built on Windows 2003, SQL 2005 and leverages MS office capabilities deployed across 12,000 odd desktops. The Mission has developed an integrated micro-level resource based developmental information system, which facilitates meaningful decentralised planning at the local body level.

Impact
The project has been implemented in more than 700 locations and will soon cover all designated locations. It has served to increase the outreach of developmental services. It has also resulted in substantially increased earmarking of funds to the disadvantaged groups and in achieving greater equity through a series of locally appropriate affordable solutions for development problems. The opportunities have helped the poor in gaining confidence and moving into higher forms of direct social action like management of facilities and demand for services. The participation of people has also helped in improving accountability.

The project model is scalable and can be replicated elsewhere after adapting it to the relevant development context. This is possible since the methodology of the Participatory Technology Development and Adaptations (PTDA) attempted is generic. The mission has evolved protocols for handling variation in bookkeeping practices via extensive standardisation procedures.