event
egov india 2010
Urban e-Governance
City bodies need geo apps Given the complexities of modern urban development projects, tools like GIS can ease the planning and decision making processes
(L-R) Prakash Rane Managing, Director, ABM Knowlegeware; Ashis Sanyal, Sr Director, DIT, Ministry of Communications & IT, GoI; Rajendra Erande, Director IT, Pune Municipal Corporation (Chair); Sanjay Sharma, GM, IT HUDA, Haryana; Rajesh Mathur, Vice Chairman, NIIT Technologies Ltd; Srikanth Shitole, Vice President - Transformation, Business & Managed Services, Cisco India & SAARC
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n today’s world, management of urban development and governance demands integration and collaboration cutting across different government departments for efficient delivery of services to citizens. The session on Urban e-Governance, which was moderated by Rajendra Erande, Director of Information Technology, Pune Municipal Cooperation, focused on the strategies for leveraging e-Governance in dealing with emerging challenges in the urban governance domain. Prakash Rane, Managing Director, ABM Knowlegeware, described administration reforms as a must for time-bound service delivery in urban local bodies (ULBs). He professed that unless a department went for business process re-engineering (BPR), it was not practical for it to offer effective citizen services. He also led stress on standardisation in accepting citizen data for various services.
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Ashish Sanyal, Senior Director, Department of IT, Government of India pointed out the significance of GIS in governance. GIS enables representation of information in the form of visuals and graphics, which comes as an easy tool for decision making. He threw light on the application of GIS in sales, marketing, distribution, sales profiling, utilities, transportation, demographic trends and types of soil. Talking about the ICT experience at Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA), its General Manager–IT, Sanjay Gupta pointed out that the authority with 18 state head offices and 37 divisional offices, and over 300 visitors per day had no mechanism to verify what an official wrote on the given land file. He further informed, “A 24x7 data centre was established. Post the deployment, services like online tracking of applications were offered to citizens. While the number of delivery channels was reduced to five from more than 10 earlier. The deployment enhanced revenue generation by 20-30 percent.” In his presentation on ‘Roadmap for using GIS in e-Governance,’ Rajesh C Mathur, Vice Chairman, NIIT GIS said, “GIS brings ease in the planning process, makes it more transparent and acts like a powerful tool in decision making.” He stressed that GIS served as a platform for collaboration among government departments, “It’s a platform for integration of
Much process simplification can be achieved by standardising citizen data formats across various services This could be achieved by standardising the formats of application forms. An e-Governance project starts after the IT project ends, Rane noted. The IT implementation is about just 40 percent of the project. The rest 60 percent of the project comprises data management, cleaning of data and excessive public scrutiny of projects. The major part of the project is the institutionalisation of IT into the department. Importantly, BPR should have the broad perspective in view that not technology but good governance is the ultimate objective.
information collected from various sources.” Srikanth Shitole, Vice President—Transformation, Business and Managed Services, Cisco India & Saarc, said, “By 2025, 70 percent of the population will be living in urban areas rather than in the country side. This shift will put huge pressure on ULBs in managing the cities.” He advocated change in the role of an ULB as an urban service provider. He proposed an ICT solution that would integrate all other departments with a single network and data centre.