M-powering Citizens

e-Governance

M-powering Citizens Kerala is poised to be a forerunner in m-governance with the numerous services that the government is offering for citizens

ARCHANA SINGH maildqindia@cyermedia.co.in

T

he state of Kerala has been a forerunner in the utilization of the ICT technologies. There are a number of initiatives that have been taken by the state government to utilize the ubiquitous medium of communication mobile phones for its m-governance initiatives.

So while a fisherman in Kerala gets comfortable finding the price of his catch, and a farmer gets busy getting alerts for his paddy crops, the credit goes to the Kerala government for democratizing information through VAS and empowering the ‘aam aadmi’.

The state has truly embarked on a new journey by the exemplary way. It has been leveraging the VAS applications to make them available for the governance

76 | May 31, 2011

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purposes and has been setting benchmarks for the other states to follow.

VAS (primarily SMS) forms the basis of the mgovernance services via which the government is disseminating critical and often tedious information to citizens.

The m-governance projects have been deployed to give quick, relevant information to the citizens and also to bring more accountability and transparency to the various departments.

Departments from tourism, information and PR, health, district collectorate, education, agriculture have been utilizing the mobile and wireless technologies. The 3 channels of mobile communication (voice, signaling, and data) and a wide range of technologies (voice applications, applications using signaling channel, and data service based applications) are

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M-GOV SERVICES IN KERALA Department/MGov Services

Project Detail

Citizen Benefits

Tourism Department

Tourism is a 12,000 cr industry in Kerala. To keep in touch with the trade and various tour operators who are in Kerala and spread across India through SMS alerts which contains information from the department of tourism and new offers, tariffs, government promotional plans, etc, are used.

The citizens get information, guidance from the department of tourism about the new offers, tariffs, government promotional plans etc

Information and Public Relations Department

The information and public relations department has the daunting task of alerting journalists in about the various events, press conferences and schedules of the ministers on a daily basis. This cumbersome process, which took a long time, has now been simplified by bringing SMS services.

Over 160 registered journalists today receive regular alerts as SMS on their mobile phones and this is done over an online bulk SMS portal.

Health Department

Known as Dr SMS Project. Information about the health, medical facilities/doctors can be availed by sending a SMS: HEALTH <PIN CODE> <SPECIALISATION> ( Health 695001 Heart and send SMS to 9664460600)

The Dr SMS project enables people to use their mobile phones to get information on health resources and to provide the user with a comprehensive list of medical facilities available in that locality, like hospitals having expertise in various medical specialties

Availability of Hospital Pay wards

The Trivandrum Medical College has pay-wards in the hospital which can be booked in advance. Citizens earlier had to make multiple calls to the medical college to check whether the pay ward has been vacated

As soon as the pay-wards or hospital rooms are available, an SMS is send to the patients to inform them about the same.

District Collectorate Suite

DC suite deals with the office automation associated with district administration

DC suites have disjoint servers housed at district collectorates and have a unique mobile number attached to each servers positioned at respective districts for receiving the file status as SMS.

Motor Vehicle Department

Status of an application on sending the number available on the acknowledgment to get the details such as the ‘Tax paid upto”, “Insurance paid upto”, engine number,chassis number etc can be given as reply of a SMS sending the registration number of the vehicle

This service will be very useful for a person who wants to buy a second hand car.

Information regarding availability of a fancy number can be provided as a reply to a SMS sending the number required.

Election Queries

District Collectorate Kozhikode is providing answers to the election related queries through SMS

A SMS from the government is helping in making people more vigilant

Fishnet

As a part of the software developed by NIC for the State Fisheries Department, a module is there whereby a registered user can get details of registered vessel

Status of vessel registration application through SMS

Department of Education

The provision of providing results over SMS are now being extended to University of Kerala and the Common Entrance Examination (CEE).

The current system works over an SMS Short Code where students have to send their registration number to a 5-digit number and the results would be send back as SMS.

Kerala State Financial Enterprise

Chit Funds are a very popular system in Kerala, which are used by the average citizen as means of saving.

Regular Payment Reminders, which used to be send over post is now being send as SMS Alerts which are much faster and more timely.

Agriculture Advisory Services

KISSAN Kerala is an integrated, multi-modal delivery of agricultural information system, which provides several dynamic and useful information and advisory services for the farming community across Kerala.

The SMS based agri-advisory services, enable the farmers to get the information on very fast and it helps to provide location specific information and alert services.

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May 31, 2011 | 77

e-Governance Mobile Crime and Accident Reporting

The police control room vehicles in Cochin City are enabled with camera mobile phones which are used to record crime and accident scenes from a location and transfer it in near real time over GPRS to the central police control room.

Over 17 police patrols are enabled with this system and at the end of every day the summary of the total traffic accidents, traffic violations etc are send as SMS to the city police Commissioner.

Irrigation Department

The water availability, schedules of opening and closing of shutters, emergency alerts, warning notification etc, are provided for the paddy cultivated areas in Palakkad districts

During the summer months, releasing water is an important time-sensitive information which can help the farmers to plan their planting, tilling etc better.

Sabari Mala Alerts

Q status, parking status and help for pilgrims

Helps the citizens in easy accessibility at cluttered places

KSFDC

Movie ticket reservation through mobile

Saves a lot of time

THE STATE IS PROVIDING MOBILE BASED SERVICES TO ALL THE CITIZENS, ACROSS SERVICE PROVIDERS, ON A SUSTAINABLE BASIS AND AN AGGREGATION SYSTEM IS PLANNED FOR THE STATE GOVERNMENT being used for this purpose.

There are also some initiatives that have gained international reputation like Dr SMS Project which was initiated by KSITM on May 29, 2008. The sole idea of the project is to enable people to use their mobile phones to receive information on health resources and to provide the user with a comprehensive list of medical facilities available in that locality, like hospitals having expertise in various medical specialties. This project reportedly proved very beneficial to the citizens and resulted in reducing queues in the hospitals and also improving health facilities across the state.

Other pioneering projects based on the VAS applications are used by the tourism department to disseminate the related information.

These are used by the motor vehicle department in which PCR vehicles in Cochin city were enabled with camera mobile phones which are being used to record accident 78 | May 31, 2011

and atrocious activity scenes from a location and transfer it in real-time over GPRS to the central police rooms. They have helped the state machinery to reduce the crime scene in the state.

A study relating to fishermen in coastal Kerala—access of timely information by the fishermen about the market prices led to an overall increase in the efficiency of the markets. It also increased the welfare of the fishermen as well as the buyers of fish.

Ecstatic over the success, the government is planning more projects that are in the pilot phase.

The state is providing mobile based services to all the citizens, across service providers on a sustainable basis and an aggregation system is planned for the state government.

This would enable the government to charge for services provided on the mobile phones across all the telecom service providers.

To give a sneak into the reasons as to how the initiatives made by visit www.dqindia.com

the government, found an easy base and acceptability with the citizens are that the impressive teledensity levels in the state of Kerala is the main factor, that led to an early adoption and success of the m-governance projects in the state. Statistics have it that as many as 3,769,449 wireless subscribers and 53,134 wireline subscribers are there in the state with a total population of 33,387,677 (Census of India, 2011). Further, it has been estimated that Kerala will breach 100% teledensity by end of 2011.

Now, as 3G related VAS applications are rolling out more innovativeness on the part of the state machinery of Kerala and other states can be easily expected. Till now, most of the information was distributed through SMS. The focus till now was to build a centralized platform into which the services/solutions for each and every department can be integrated mainly via SMS. It is worth mentioning that if SMS was the key VAS service for 2G services, then video is supposed to be the key application for 3G. In the coming years, more mgovernance for better administration can be expected as citizens wait to see large variety of customized applications tapping into m-commerce, m-education, m-democracy, m-tourism, etc, related services. n | DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication