India elects : August 2010

BALLOT BOX 444 Nominations 121,577 Votes 27 Jury Members ASIA’S FIRST MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON E-GOVERNMENT

AUGUST 2010 > Rs 75/VOLUME 06  ISSUE 08  ISSN 0973-161X www.egovonline.net

I N N OVAT I O N I SS U E

INDIA

ELECTS Best run projects in eGov, eHealth, Digital Learning, eAgriculture, Municipal IT & Telecentre

EDITORIAL

India innovates, India elects

ndia is world’s largest democracy and democracy entails that it is the people eople who have the governing power. However, it is not only democracy but also all socioeconomic programmes and projects that require public participation. Recently, there has been a lot of emphasis on public participation since nce a lack of it has been identified as one of the reasons for the failure of many development evelopment programmes across the globe. The last decade saw a promotion of people’s participation cipation in development programmes. Today, ICT is playing a major role in development. Numerous development programmes in the fields of governance, education and health, where ICTs have added value, have been initiated by the Government of India, the state governments, civil society and the he corporate bodies. Such innovative initiatives are imperative for India’s growth. There is also a political will to this effect, with both the President and the Prime me Minister of India focusing on innovations. However, there is a need of growth based innovations ations that are sustainable, scalable and affordable. In a recent interaction, Sam Pitroda, the keyy architect of India’s telecommunication revolution, had rightly pointed out that innovations should affect people who are at the “bottom of the pyramid” in a way that it should be able to change their lives. To take this mission forward, the eGov and its publisher Elets Technomedia have take taken en en the responsibility to showcase innovative ICT programmes and projects at the eINDIA 2010 conference and exhibition. Taking it a step further, we have also initiated the he eINDIA Awards to acknowledge and felicitate unique and innovative initiatives in use off ICT in the development space. The eINDIA Awards process too is innovative in the true sense—it has the right ght mix of public voting and jury evaluation. That it is you, the citizens, who have voted to elect the winners, speaks volumes about the growing awareness and pro-activeness of thee people. The fact that public voting this year has touched 121,577, up from 16,000 last year, shows astounding response to the evaluation process. It also testifies the global popularity ity of eINDIA Awards as well as the eINDIA event, that will see the participation of thought leaders, policy makers, planners, implementers from government, private sector, academia and civil society. No wonder then, we dedicate this issue to everyone who have made a difference in people’s live.

RAVI GUPTA You can reach me at Ravi.Gupta@egovonline.net

Happy reading!

From the history Email at astha@elets.in to get previous issues

May 2010

June 2010

July 2010

August 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

GRID NAME

AUGUST 2010

SECOND GRID

INDEX ISSUE 08  VOLUME 06

President Dr. M P Narayanan Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Ravi Gupta Managing Editor: Shubhendu Parth VP - Strategy: Pravin Prashant Product Manager: Dipanjan Banerjee EDITORIAL TEAM Dr. Prachi Shirur, Dr. Rajeshree Dutta Kumar, Shipra Sharma, Divya Chawla, Sheena Joseph, Yukti

G-H

A Academic Institute Management System 20

Pahwa, Sangita Ghosh De, Subir Dey

Anywhere Anytime Advance Reservation 14

Pratap Vikram Singh, Gayatri Maheshwary

Apollo eHIS Med Mantra

Atrium SALES & MARKETING TEAM Debabrata Ray (+91-9899650692),

Arpan Dasgupta, Fahimul Haque,

Bharat Kumar Jaiswal, Anuj Agarwal,

Backbone HIS

Vishal Kumar, Rakesh Ranjan

Benefit Disbursement System

(sales@elets.in) SUBSCRIPTION & CIRCULATION Priya Saxena, Manoj Kumar, Gunjan Singh (subscription@elets.in) GRAPHIC DESIGN TEAM

57 18

C Chief Minister Kalaignar Insurance Scheme

Computerisation of Wellness Centres

Computerji Jode Duniya se

Grameenphone Mobile Ticketing Service 15 Health Risk Assessment Index of India

Health Services Management System

Healthcare Management Information System 48 HelloDoctor24x7

HIS for Hospitals of Malaysia

HMIS Project

I-J ICT for Livestock Productivity

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited

Issuance of Birth and Death Certificates 22 Jawahar Knowledge Center Initiative

Bishwajeet Kumar Singh, Om Prakash Thakur, Shyam Kishore

K-L

WEB DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Destination Success

Zia Salahuddin, Amit Pal, Sandhya Giri, Anil Kumar

Digital Class Room Windows

IT TEAM

Digital Local Language Content Competition

Digital MIDC Single Window Clearance

Dr SMS and Health Information Portal

Mukesh Sharma, Devendra Singh EVENTS Vicky Kalra

Knowledge Sharing Cente

Learning Management System & Computer Based Tutorials 38 Live Webcast Courses CDEEP IIT Bombay

Malaysia Government SMS Gateway

EDITORIAL & MARKETING

Each Child with Laptop in Classroom

CORRESPONDENCE

E-Bridge

MIS for Safe Motherhood & Child Survival 50

Phone: +91-120-2502181-85, Fax: +91-120-2500060,

EduNxt

MKCL Digital School Program

Email: info@egovonline.net

e-Huda

mKRISHI

Eliminating queues in OPD

Mobile Banking

eMedLabs IPM

Monofeya Portal

e-Office - Apply Governance

Mukhya Mantri Jeevan Raksha Kosh

Municipal eGovernance Project

egov – G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA–201 301, India

egov is published by Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd in technical collaboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS). Owner, Publisher, Printer: Ravi Gupta, Printed at

e-Procurement of Goods, Works and Services 10

Vinayak Print Media, D-320, Sector - 10 Noida, U.P.

e-Tax Administration Programme

Farmer Extension Agricultural Research Education 60 Financial Intermediaries Course

or by any means, electronic and mechanical,

FINO Tatkaal

including photocopy, or any information storage or

From Customer Satisfaction To Customer Delight 52

egov / www.egovonline.net / August 2010

MyID

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

retrieval system, without publisher’s permission.

Kendriya Vidyala Automation Project

44 18

N-LIST for Scholarly Content

NovaGoviya.org - e Agriculture Project

Nutrition Surveillance System

O-P Online Scholarship Management System 8

GRID NAME

SECOND GRID

Pocket Education (PE)

Project SMS Unhappy

Punjab Technical University Distance Education Programme 41

R Railways Office Management System

Raising Healthy Kids

Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme 53 RMC Governance Initiative

RTI Central Monitoring Mechanism

Rural Veterinary & Extension Services

S Sahakara Pragati

Sakshat Amrita Vocational Education

SAPling

Save the Baby Girl

SCCL- ERP- Project

School Report Cards under DISE

eINDIA AWARDS 2010 The eINDIA Awards is the premier accolade to innovative endeavors made in assimilating technology in developmental concerns. The initiative aims at identifying and felicitating unique and innovative initiatives in the ICT for development space, as also the projects that can be easily replicated in a sustainable manner. While eINDIA Awards had a formal two-tier Jury process, it also had a parallel online mechanism for the Citizen’s Choice Award in all 26 sub-categories under eGovernance, Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, Municipal IT and Telecentre. The online voting process allowed citizens to vote and recognise projects that have impacted their lives the most. As part of the formal evaluation process a panel of 25 distinguished international Jury members had to first assess the nominations on certain pre-defined criterion, with each project being evaluated by a minimum of three Jury members. The average weighted score was then used to select the Top 5 from each category. The list was then used by the In Person Jury, which met in Delhi on July 22, 2010 to decide on the winners in each of the segment.

THE AWARD JURY

Smart Krishi

 Ashish Sanyal

 Sri B S Raghupathy

Smart Parking

Sr Director, DIT, Government of India

Joint Director, DET, Bangalore

Soil Nutrient Management Tool

 Shakila T Shamsu

Joint Adviser, Planning Commission

T Teaching-Learning Paradigm through ICT Interventions 45 Telemedicine Initiative

Teleradiology Solutions

Tripura Vision Centre Project

U-V-W

 Brig (Dr) R S Grewal

Vice Chancellor, Chitkara University

 Rajen Varada

 Sourav Banerjee

Resource Person, UN Solution Exchange

Senior Education Specialist, USAID

 Dr Ashok Kumar

 Prof Arun Nigavekar

DDG & Director, CBHI, Government of India

Former Chairman, UGC

 Dr Basheer Ahmad Shadrach

Executive Director, Telecentre.org Foundation

 Prof Vasudha Kamat

Joint Director, CIET, NCERT

 Dr V Balaji

 P Vigneswara Ilavarasan

Global Leader, ICRISAT

Assistant Professor, IIT-Delhi  Rufina Fernandes

USB powered 3 lead ECG monitor

 Dr Gopi N. Ghosh

Vadalur Knowledge Centre

Assistant Representative & Resource Person, FAO

Chief Executive, NASSCOM Foundation

Voice and Video over Broad Band

 Dr. B S Bedi

 Michael Gurstein

Adviser-Health Informatics, C-DAC

Sr Journalist, The Journal of Community

Water Cess for Pollution Control Board Web Based Examination System

11 42

 Dr Ananya Raihan

Secretary General, B’desh Telecentre Network

eINDIA AWARD CATEGORIES eGOV MUNICIPAL IT TELECENTRE DIGITAL LEARNING eHEALTH eAGRICULTURE

06 egov / www.egovonline.net / August 2010

Pg No 08-20 22-24 26-27 36-46 48-57 59-62

Informatics Centre for Community Informatics Research, Canada

 Michael Riggs

 Lekha Kumar

FAO, Italy

Commissioner, Income Tax, Government of India

 Hardik Bhatt

 Dr R Siva Kumar

CIO, City of Chicago

CEO, NSDI & Head-NRDMS, Government of India

 Dr R Sreedher

 Dr Akhilesh Gupta

Director, CEMCA

Adviser, DST, Government of India

 Anir Chowdhury

 Sunil Kapoor

Policy Advisor to PMO, UNDP, Bangladesh

Zonal Director, Fortis Healthcare Limited

 Dr S S Jena

 Ndaula Sulah

Chairman, NIOS

Executive Director, Ugabytes, Uganda

AWARDS

GOVERNMENT TO CITIZENS

NUTRITION Surveillance System IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Department of Women and Child development & UNICEF OBJECTIVES  Effective coordination at policy and implementation level among various departments to ensure better child development  Proper monitoring of ICDS programme

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Decrease in per student administrative expenditure  Over 100% increase in number of students benefiting from the scheme during last three years  75% improvement in efficiency  Elimination of duplicate claims in the first year of automation

CITIZEN

CHOICE #1

he project that has been implemented in Chhattisgarh locates and tracks severely malnourished children dynamically, every month by name and their location. It also captures data from over 34,000 Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in the state and helps in providing meaningful information through analysis and reports. Through a complete system re-engineering, the NSS has strengthened the ICDS scheme of Chhattisgarh and initiated timely, life saving action for children of the state. The Nutrition Surveillance System (NSS) was initiated with a vision to ensure easy analysis of information and to locate all severely malnourished children of the state every month, through a dynamic process. Since the effective implementation of ICDS largely depends on proper supervision, monitoring and co-ordination of the programme, it is critical to get a timely report of the “as is” scenario. The introduction of NSS has helped the state make the valuable data useable at different levels by ensuring easy analysis and feedback to improve performance. It also enables time wise analysis through graphs generated at all levels—AWC, sector, project, district and state levels—and dual maps generated through GIS that have the time series analysis. Analysis has shown that over a period of time, the reporting system of ICDS has shown improvement both in terms of quantity and quality.

OUTCOME  Improvement in nutritional and health status of children in the agegroup 0-6 years  Reduction in incidence of mortality, morbidity, and malnutrition among children  Over 75% of AWCs currently reporting through the NSS

ONLINE Scholarship Management System

he OSMS project aims at enabling students from the minority community to apply online for fee reimbursement and scholarship scheme through the Andhra Pradesh State Minorities Finance Corporation (APSMFC) website. The scholarship is available for post-Matric students till the PhD level—including all professional courses like BTech, MTech, MBA, MCA, MBBS, MS, and MD. The solution includes a disbursement gateway that interacts with the bank’s payment gateway and helps disburse scholarship amount directly into the students’ bank accounts, making the entire process more efficient, effective and accurate. The system also helps APSMFC avoid delays in disbursement, errors, scams, or subjectivity in awarding the scholarships. OSMS also enables automatic reconciliation facility that is connected directly with the automated feedback mechanism of the partner banks. This enables reconciliation of all accounts within 24 hours of disbursement. Besides, since the scholarship is deposited into the students’ accounts, their fee is transferred to the respective colleges and institution’s account directly. With the automation of the entire workflow, the solution has further helped make the process transparent, thereby eliminating chances of any dispute. It further helps update the workflow status automatically, with corresponding reports being published online. OSMS has also helped cut down on the number of processes involved—from 24 in the manual system to six.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Andhra Pradesh State Minorities Finance Corporation OBJECTIVES  Establish an automated and objective, rule-based transparent scholarship and fee reimbursement calculation system  To make the state scholarship disbursement system more transparent and efficient

GOVERNMENT TO CITIZENS

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Better citizen convenience  Hassle free and faster delivery of government services  1,230 citizen services listed within six months as part of the project making the use of MyID Number mandatory

AWARDS

MY ID

aunched in January 2010, MyID is the Government of Malaysia’s initiative to make the citizen identity card number as the sole reference number for all Malaysian citizens when dealing with Government agencies. The implementation of MyID applies to all government agencies at all levels. Overall, 600 government agencies—federal, state and local councils—are part of the project that provide all types of services related to citizens as an individual. The project also enables citizens to transact with government agencies using their Identity Card Number no matter where they are through the various channels provided by the agencies, be it at the counter, through telephone, online, and short messaging system (SMS) or at the service kiosk. The use of MyID is also being looked upon as an initiative to cut down on the issuance of multiple reference numbers and hence the need for citizens to remember them. Instead, Malaysians will now have to remember only their Identity Card number to use government services and avail benefits. It also aims at helping the government agencies extend better services, provide convenient, hassle free and speedy transactions to the citizens. Besides, the country’s government is also looking at the use of MyID to expedite service delivery and eliminating problems arising from lost, untraceable or misplaced documents.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit OBJECTIVES  Create a single citizen reference number for all government transactions  Transformation of the country’s public service delivery mechanism

ICT for Livestock Productivity (Nandini) IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Department of IT, Orissa & UNDP OBJECTIVES  Enhance productivity of livestock by systematising their reproduction cycle  Improve productivity of the current veterinary services  Create a Decision Support System (DSS) for department functionaries and OMFED

JURY AWARD

roject Nandini is an initiative to enhance livestock productivity, particularly for the members of the Orissa State Cooperative Milk Producers’ Federation (OMFED), through use of ICT. The project aims at helping the farmer with timely information on animals that have attained peak yield, livestock that are due and suitable for oestrous, pregnancy diagnosis, parturition and artificial insemination. Armed with the database of livestock in the region, the project is also able to send SMS alerts to farmers about their animals that need to be vaccinated, de-wormed and dried off, complete with a help desk for overall support. The project is also meant to provide support for the Livestock Inspectors (LI) and feeds them with Gram Panchayat or village wise, fortnightly “To Do” list of animals due for heat, artificial insemination, pregnancy diagnosis, drying off, calving, deworming, vaccination and exception report on animals to timely administer treatment measures. Presently Nandini covers over 387 villages of Jagatsinghpur district and about 500 villages of Cuttack and Mayurbhanj district in Orissa, with the service delivery centers being extended up to village level to provide on time service at the door step of livestock farmers in the project area. It is also helping the state government improve its responsive veterinary services.

OUTCOME  Re-orientation and re-structuring of state veterinary services  Improvement in milk production and productivity of livestock  Village wise database for government agencies

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

GOVERNMENT TO BUSINESS

e-PROCUREMENT of Goods, Works and Services IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Mahanadi Coalfields Limited & NIC OBJECTIVES  Better transparency in procurement process  Reduction in procurement cycle time  Standard-based, uniform tendering system across the company

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Coverage of over 80 percent services provided to various customer segments of the corporation  Improvement in investor service facilities  Better transaction and work flow management

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

s the name suggests, the project aims at automating the procurement process at the Mahanadi Coalfields Limited, a Mini Ratna PSU and fully owned subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL). The web-based e-Procurement system enables MCL to improve its purchase decision making process, thereby helping it finalise contracts and procurement of materials much faster. The system includes tendering models for all three types of procurements—services, works and goods. With the MCL e-Procurement process allowing automatic technical and commercial evaluation of the bids, the system also helps the organisation completely do away with the subjectivity in the procurement judgment. This has helped MCL bring in more transparency and reduce the number of complains and other complications in the tender evaluation process, resulting in faster decision. The e-Procurement system has also helped MCL increase its supplier and bidder base, which has in turn helped the organisation prevent unethical business practices in tendering and cartelisation of vendors. With the e-Procurement system reducing the paper work and manual computational process drastically, the system has also helped MCL reduce clerical mistakes in computation. This has helped the organisation further reduce the overall cost of procurement process. MCL claims that the process complies with the IT Act 2000, CVC guidelines and the procurement manuals of Coal India Limited.

OUTCOME  Reduction in average procurement cycle time from 120 days to 30 days  Increase in bidder base  Reduction in paper work, manual computational process and human errors in evaluation process  Reduction in overall cost of procurement

DIGITAL MIDC Single Window Clearance System

he Single Window Clearance (SWC) system is an initiative to provide digital interface to all the stakeholders of MIDC –from information to guidance and complete online application process that includes filling of forms, submission, tracking, interaction, and approval facility. The web-based solution aims at making it easier for potential investors to seek various clearances and approvals with minimum number of visits to MIDC & other department offices, thereby making Maharashtra a better business investment option. Overall the solution has three basic components—web-based SWC, file tracking application and backend transaction processing engine that enables transaction and workflow management. It also intends to integrate the Land Management System and the Building Permission Application Management System to provide seamless service to its customer and other stakeholders and allows new customers to make online application for land. Once the plot is allotted, the customer becomes eligible to avail of the full gamut of services. The solution is a modular one and can easily be configured for various services and hence is a replicable and scalable model. Currently MIDC is expanding the services module to include other government departments like Pollution Control Board and the Directorate of Industries. The portal also provides a single window view for the approvals and clearances required.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) OBJECTIVES  Create a single window system for investors support and clearance in Maharashtra  Automated tracking of files and approval status

GOVERNMENT TO BUSINESS

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Better verification of returns filed by the industries and mines  Facility to adjust multiple orders with single payment instrument, and single order with multiple payment instruments  Faster dispatch and availability of Cess Orders

AWARDS

WATER Cess for Pollution Control Board

he project has been initiated to automate the various processes of the Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board like tax collection on the consumption of water by industries or mines for different purposes and automatic allocation of unique assessee number to each company. The system has enabled industries and mines to file their monthly water consumption details—metered/ non-metered and payment details—online. The process is followed by verification by all 13 regional offices of the state pollution control board and the data is uploaded on the central server at the head office enabling Cess Incharge in correctly assessing their values and comments. This not only helps levy of correct cess rates based on the purposes of use, the system also helps the Pollution Control Board generate monthly Cess Orders. For the small scale Industries (SAS), the solution provides for a platform through which they can evaluate the Water Cess returns they have to pay to the Board on the annual basis. This eliminates the hassles for the industries to visit Board or Board Officials for the returns related queries. Since the system covers nearly all activities covering the key process of the Pollution Control Board, it can be easily adapted by other State Governments with minor customisation.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board & NIC OBJECTIVES  Facilitate industries and mines to fill online water consumption details  To get exact status of rate applied, interest and penalty imposed, rebate and advances received  Reconciliation of money and monitoring pendencies, dues at a glance

e-TAX Administration Programme IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Department of Commercial Taxes, Kerala OBJECTIVES  Shift from adversarial and antagonistic approach towards tax payers and build a partnership based on trust  Computerise all critical activities of the department to improve efficiency  Remove user interface with the tax officials

JURY AWARD

he Department of Commercial Taxes is the major source of revenue to the Government of Kerala, accounting for three-fourth of its revenues. The Department caters to 160,000 traders (tax payers) through 431 offices across the state. Traditionally, tax collection had the image of being corrupt with cumbersome procedures. KVATIS is the application software developed and deployed by the department to facilitate tax administration which can be accessed through the state commercial tax department website <gateway www.keralataxes.gov.in> . The tax payers do not have to go to the Commercial Tax Offices to file their returns. Instead, the solution allows them to file e-Returns complete with invoice details enabling state government officials to verify return documents online. Earlier dealers had to submit challans or cheques along with their returns in their respective offices. Now the web application of the department is integrated with those of the banks to enable payment online. For those who do not have access to internet facilities, Akshaya Centres in the state have been authorised to file returns and effect e-payments. The user has a hassle free experience and the government has the advantage of realising the revenue instantaneously instead of waiting for the cheques and DD’s to be encashed.

OUTCOME  User friendly filing process  Scrutiny of returns made easy  Tax collection up by 14 percent—from Rs 11,571 crore in 2008-09 to Rs 13,200 crore in 2009-10  Rich data bank of dealer transactions making cross verification easy

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

eOFFICE: Apply governance IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Aarogyasri Health Care Trust OBJECTIVES  Create an effective office management system  Enhance productivity  Enable prioritisation of work  Improve efficiency and bring effective administration  Data storage and retrieval

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Enabled proactive disclosure of information by government departments through the user friendly Content Management System  Better management of request for information by all public authorities  Effective monitoring of RTI implementation

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

he Aarogyasri Trust has initiated the automation of this process of policy formulation and decision making by effectively using ICT. Aarogyasri Trust has chosen e-Office application as an ICT tool to achieve seamless integration of work between departments. Since the Trust is actively engaged with the Andhra Pradesh government for providing healthcare facilities to the citizen, it also needs to deal with a huge volume of data all of which form an important input to decision making and policy formulation for the organisation. With the implementation of the e-Office solution, the organisation aims at making its services more accessible. The project also aims at bringing in more transparency, accountability and efficiency in delivery of healthcare services to the citizen. The office automation application also defines the workflow for the trust and integrates around 39 department functions, including field operations, vigilance, claims, pre- authorisation, accounts, human resources, and last but not the least, public grievances. This has enabled the trust to deal with the huge challenge of implementing the complex Arogyasri healthcare scheme across 23 districts. The application also has an HR module and a dash board that helps in periodic monitoring of departments, divisions and units to give a clear status of various files in the form of visual alerts at the selected organisation level.

OUTCOME  Seamless integration of all department functions across 23 districts  Better interdivisional interface through knowledge sharing, efficient interaction, creation, movement, tracking and disposal of files  Better decision making ability

RTI Central Monitoring Mechanism

n its bid to ease mounting pressure on its officials for furnishing information under the RTI Act, the Central Monitoring Mechanism implemented by the state government is an example of how IT can be used for information management and meeting greater need of governance and citizen service. Coupled with its seek and search option, the solution serves as a one point information base for all public authorities in Orissa, providing information to everybody at the click of a button. The project also aims to ensure maximum dissemination and use of information under the Act by all target users—public authorities, Public Information Officers (PIO), First Appellate Authorities (FAA), APIOs and citizens. This RTI intervention has also been able to trigger the need for information management system and e-Records that is driving the paperless office concept in the state machinery. Taking the initiative further the state government is looking at connecting 25,000 offices into a single network, including 38 departmental public authorities, 30 districts, 314 blocks and 316 Tahasils level PIOs. The project presently serves the needs of over than 1,500 offices that are connected to system ensuring compliance to the RTI Act, 2005. It also has a public feedback mechanism that enables citizen post their comment on each of the government data made public.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Information and Public Relations Department, Orissa OBJECTIVES  Provide single point access to all RTI related information catering to section 4, 6, 7 and section 25 of RTI Act, 2005 in a uniform manner

GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

JURY AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Enables authorities to locate schoolwise information through a drill down approach  Enabling basic search facility through use of multiple variables— school management, category and area

AWARDS

SCHOOL Report Cards Under DISE

he USP of School Report Cards project <www.schoolreportcards.in> is the availability of report cards in various Indian languages—Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati. The report cards are also made available in English. AS part of the projects expansion plan, efforts are being made to provide report cards in other regional languages as well. The project also uses an innovative approach of providing a two page “Descriptive Report” that is generated automatically for all the schools in a way that it looks as if someone has analysed the data for each school and has written the report. The report has number of permutations and combinations to decide the sentence to be written into the report. However, it can also make available raw data as per the user’s requirement in Excel format, thereby creating a demand for DISE data. The District Information System for Education developed by NUEPA in collaboration with the MHRD is in use in all the 600+ districts of the country. MIS units have been established both at state and district levels at which DISE software is installed. The report generated through use of DISE is also being used for chalking out district level elementary education plans throughout India for the country’s flagship education programme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. In view of the usefulness of the efforts made through DISe initiatives, a good number of states have decentalised the data entry at the level of block and the DISE SW fully support data entry and report generation at different levels.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY University of Educational Planning and Department of School Education & Literacy OBJECTIVES  Create an automated system for analysis of school report cards  Help in better planning and monitoring of India’s flagship education programme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan

MGOVERNANCE

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Easy access to government services to 28 million mobile citizen  Huge cost saving since the project delivers various government services on a single ICT infrastructure  Personal websites for citizens to manage government-related information

MALAYSIA Government SMS Gateway

he eKL Initiative (eKL), launched in 2007, is an extension of EG and is aimed at transforming government service delivery system through the use of ICT. The project is based on Malaysia’s “One government, many agencies no wrong door” approach and has been implemented to create a digitally connected Klang Valley, whereby services of all government agencies are linked and the sharing of resources and information facilitates the provision of end-to-end interactive online services 24 X 365 via multiple service channels. Mobile Government is also part of the country’s eKL initiative and is looking at extending the reach of government services through mobile channel and leveraging on the high penetration rate of 28 million mobile citizens. The project enables citizens and businesses to have a more convenient access and an alternative direct mode to government services through mySMS 15888 Government SMS Gateway project. While mySMS 15888 is a public service delivery system that helps deliver services at the fingertip, the country is looking at riding its ICT infrastructure strength, to serve citizen including businesses through a different delivery channel other than the Internet, counters and kiosks. The project that was launched on 31 July 2008 also aims to delights Malaysians by realising a vision of “1 Nation, 1 Government, 1 Number”.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Malaysia Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) OBJECTIVES  Bridge the digital divide between government agencies and citizens  Transform government service delivery system through the use of ICT  Integrate service delivery in an effective and efficient manner

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

MGOVERNANCE GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

RMC Governance Initiative IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Rajkot Municipal Corporation OBJECTIVES  Reduce delays in providing information on property tax and water charges  Enable time bound delivery of citizen services

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Facility to book KSRTC bus ticket through mobile phones from anywhere in the world  Increase in passenger loyalty due to ease of reservation  Increase in reservation revenue.

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

ajkot Municipal Corporation (RMC) has started different m- Governance services, to provide efficient, timely information to Citizens of Rajkot. The project provides for a convenient communication point for time bound service delivery powered by pre-defined process-cycles and backoffice computerisation. The project has also enabled the municipal corporation meet citizen expectation of better and more transparent service. As part of the service offering under the initiative, Rajkot Municipal Corporation has also started providing alerts of all transaction details to its valuable tax payers through SMS. This is for the first time that any municipal corporation has started such service in India. To avail this facility a tax payer has to enter his mobile number on the RMC website <www.rmc.gov.in>. Once registered RMC sends details of modifications related to property tax alteration—their payment, cancellation of payment receipt. Once complain is addressed the officer can send complain number with status, which will be automatically updated in the system based on the status send. Whats more, as soon as the officer changes the status of complain the information is simultaneously sent to the respective citizen through SMS. Similarly, RMC official can receive the list of pending complaints, by sending short code message to a designated number that is also backed up by a Call Center operation.

OUTCOME  SMS alerts of all transaction details to tax payers  Availability of pending case status to Rajkot Municipal Corporation officers  General Daily income-expenditure SMS to senior RMC officials through SMS

ANYWHERE Anytime Advance Reservation

WATAR, as the project is called is web based reservation system that facilitates booking of tickets for Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation busses using credit and debit cards. Travelers can now easily book KSRTC bus ticket on their mobile phones. KSRTC has been deploying the IT tools in the best possible measures to optimise its efficiency and reduce operational cost and at the same time, providing quality services to its customers. The solution enables citizens to register using their mobile number on KSRTC website. Once the registration is completed, passenger can book bust ticket on the move. Using the solution, KSRTC also sends SMS for the confirmation of seat booked through e-booking, counters and mobile device. The SMS contains all the details required for the travel—trip code, date of journey, PNR and seat numbers, the starting point and the destination, departure and arrival time. On completion of the booking process, e- tickets are generated and sent via e-mail to the passenger. Those users who do not have an e- mail can show the ticket details at designated KSRTC counters and get their tickets and also get a confirmation in the form of SMS. Presently, over 18,000 passenger seats are being booked every day through AWATAR.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation OBJECTIVES  Adopt information technology in its day-today operations  Optimise efficiency and reduce operational cost and at the same time providing quality services to its customers

GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT MGOVERNANCE

JURY AWARD

OUTCOME  Better patient care planning by the hospital  Reduction in waiting time for patients and better staff response  Availability of statistics and data on volume of patients and type of ailments for better planning

JURY

MENTION

OUTCOME  Reduction in queue at the booking counters  Reduced travel needs of passenger and has saving in time and cost  Encouraged Bangladesh Railway to upgrade its system and technological base  Increase in customer satisfaction

AWARDS

eLIMINATING Queues in OPD

he project aims to streamline the process of hospital visits and minimise patient waiting. It captures patient’s mobile number in the EMR, which is then verified by the telecentre during the first visit or at the time of admission. The telecentre gives the appointment for the patient based on the doctor’s order in the EMR and confirms with patient through a voice call as well as by SMS. The solution also enables the telecentre to email the list of all scheduled patients to the medical record department of JPNATC, so that necessary files and OPD cards can be taken out in advance. A final list of appointments is emailed, copies of which are put outside each room and also with the concerned doctors. Thanks to the initiative, the patients can now just flash their SMS with the token number which is checked against the list present and a date stamp is put on the patient’s OPD card. The patient goes to the designated doctor when his token is displayed on the screen. Following the visit, the telecentre makes a voice call to the patient confirming that the appointment took place and schedules the next appointment on the scheduling software so as to make it a perpetual cycle.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY JPN Apex Trauma Centre, AIIMS OBJECTIVES  Streamline the process of hospital visits and minimise waiting times for patients by using m-Governence  Improve transparency and accountability in the OPD’s

GRAMEENPHONE Mobile Ticketing Service

angladesh Railway (BR) has partnered with Grameenphone (GP) to launch a mobile ticketing (m-ticketing) service to sell electronic train tickets to the public. The service allows any GP subscriber to open a mobile wallet (virtual stored value account) via a simple SMS request and use it to purchase train tickets directly from their mobile phone from virtually anywhere and at anytime. To buy an electronic train ticket through the service passengers need to access a USSD menu from their mobile phone and input the required traveling information. The solution enables customers to book and buy tickets up to 10 days prior to their travel date. The service is initially being offered for all intercity trains departing from Dhaka and Chittagong, the capital and principal port cities of the nation, respectively. Bangladesh Railway is also planning to soon bring other intercity trains under this service. The project was principally started to reduce the various hassles and inconveniences faced by train commuters when trying to buy a train ticket. While the service has also been effective in including the grass-root level citizens in availing modern technology in their day to day lives, it has also helped Bangladesh Railway improve its customer satisfaction score.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Grameenphone OBJECTIVES  Improve customers service and satisfaction  Reduce pressure on ticket selling agents in train stations through e-Ticketing  Reduce operating expenses of BR while an increase ticketing efficiency

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

ICT ENABLED PSU GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

e-HUDA IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Haryana Urban Development Authority OBJECTIVES  Computerisation of application process to reduce hassle for allottes  Eradicate corrupt practices  Bring in transparency in the system

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Helped fully resolve over 96% customer  Reduction in problem resolution time—over 64 percent complains being resolved within 48 hours and around 12 % within three days  Improvement in customer service

CITIZEN

CHOICE #1

he computerisation of the Haryana Development Authority (HUDA) has made helped this state PSU create a information channel for alottees. The information portal can be accessed by 30,000 alottees in the lean period and more than three lakh alottees in the peak period at the same time. The system provides seamless entry for alottees, enabling them to track the status of their application from anywhere and at anytime through use of Internet. The solution also enables allottee to monitor their paid, pending, delayed installments, as well as the interest due on these installments without coming to HUDA offices. The digitisation and reconciliation of accounts have been handled by the leading banks in the state, which have the experience of doing similar work with 100 percent success rate. Under the project, all allottees are issued a user Id and password to see the details of transaction any where anytime. The biggest grievance of the allottees was that they were not able to know their dues, even if as per them, they have cleared the dues. To do away with complaint a uniform standard accounting procedure was adopted by HUDA as part of the solution. It also enables HUDA to receive applications through a single window that also inform the allottes about pending dues, if any.

OUTCOME  Improvement in revenue realisation  Reduction in time taken to register an alotee from earlier three to six months to few minutes  Faster retrieval of information on vacant, sold or stayed plots

PROJECT SMS Unhappy

roject “SMS Unhappy” is a simple and unique grievance redressal system which operates on SMS, Telephone and the Intranet. A customer with any SBI Branch in Andhra Pradesh, having a grievance, is required to merely send an SMS to the designated mobile number— 8008 20 20 20—saying “Unhappy”. The mobile number, date and time of message and the message contents are captured and registered in the SMS Unhappy Web Link at SBI’s Happy Room server. The Happy Room is a complaint resolution centre set up to handle complaints lodged under the “SMS Unhappy” system. The solution enables SBI to automatically send an SMS to the complainant acknowledging the complaint and intimating the Unique Index Number. This also triggers an auto generated SMS to the concerned Branch Manager with a prompt to login to the Web Link, examine and resolve the customer grievance. The branch in turn resolves the problem and puts in their remarks in the system, which is available to the Happy Room Executives on a real time basis. Happy Room Executives then call up the customer, to inform about the action taken and close the complaint. An SMS intimating the closure of the complaint and thanking the customer also goes out to the customer on such closure.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY State Bank of India, Hyderabad OBJECTIVES  Improve customers service  Resolve the customer grievances faster by using simple ICT tools  Improve Customer Satisfaction score in sync with overall SBI Vision

GOVERNMENT ICT TO ENABLED GOVERNMENT PSU

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Availability of critical business and HR information on real time basis for effective decision support  Reduction in cycle times of various processes leading to higher service levels

AWARDS

SCCL ERP Project

ingareni Collieries Company Limited, a coal mining company jointly owned by Government of Andhra Pradesh and Government of India, has implemented the Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) solution to cater to all the business requirements of the company. As a part of its business operations the company has to deal with around 5,000 active customers who buy coal, and around 9,000 vendors who supply materials. The company also stocks, buys, deals with more than one lakh variety of materials. And all this through its huge workforce of 70,000 employees whose master data has to be maintained and the payroll is processed. Further the company has its sites spread over across four districts in Andhra Pradesh which are in rural backdrop having less IT penetration and lack of multiple service providers in providing long haul connectivity. The ERP rollout is aimed at streamlining the e ntire operations of SCC. The balance sheet and the profit and loss statements were generated in SAP in the first of implementation which had some of the data in legacy and some in SAP. With this implementation covering all the core business areas, SCCL can now forecast the probable business issues enabling it to take required preventive measures.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY SAP India OBJECTIVES  Integrate operations of various applications running in areas and mines located across geographies  Consolidation and integration of information  Clear visibility of mine Inventory

FINANCIAL INCLUSION

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Funds transfer in few clicks through a menu driven service on a real time basis  Ease of use for banking customers  Access of service from basic mobile phone with no need for GPRS/Edge/3G data connectivity

MOBILE Banking

his service provides banking over mobile USSD channel. The services include Intra Bank fund transfer, Mobile Top Ups and enquiry services. The mobile technology used for this service is USSD High grade servers m-Banking application USSD Gateway. The service provides an access to the Bank account to do various transactions; Balance Enquiry, Mini-Statement, Mobile Top Ups, Intra Bank Fund transfers. The service is deployed on a IMSI based MT delivery thus making it fully reliable and secured for an authentic usage. The service does not require any handset application or any specific handsets to deploy. It works on USSD technology which works on a real time menu driven interaction and thus works on any handset with a screen and a mobile connection. The service allows to carry the bank on the phone where a State Bank account holder need not to go to bank for his daily banking needs. The value added here is that the user do not require any high handset, no internet connection and no GPRS connection to use these services. The only requirement is to have a mobile connection with any handset and a State Bank account. Technical support is available 24x7 while the customer care support is available in the Banking hours.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Spice Digital Limited OBJECTIVES  Enable wire-free world connecting data source or application to any device  Make mobile phone an integrated communications device, with the ability to provide information and perform real time online transactions anytime, anywhere

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

FINANCIAL INCLUSION GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

BENEFIT Disbursement System IMPLEMENTING AGENCY APOnline OBJECTIVES  Timely Disbursement of Entitlements to Beneficiaries  Eliminating or reducing leakages  Payments to authenticated beneficiaries only  Generate MIS Reports  Reduce paper usage

JURY AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Over 1.6 million beneficiary families in two years  Initiated at Dharavi, the project has been scaled to 40 other points across Mumbai  Expanded to cover 60 points in Delhi

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

POnline designed and developed an ICT system framework for disbursement of NREGS wages and social security pensions. It is using network of post offices and advanced technologies for rural development programs in India. Tata Consultancy Services implemented ICT solution for NREGS in Andhra Pradesh for effective program implementation and monitoring. Government of Andhra Pradesh felt that in the whole program implementation, anomalies have been more frequent and hence disbursement through a structured mechanism is very much necessary. Disbursement of wages under NREGS has been a major concern for both state and central government. Previously payments of entitlements were being under taken by Branch Post Offices (BOs) located in villages manually. Payments were delayed inordinately and payment of entitlements to the right and appropriate beneficiaries was not assured. The system utilizes technologies like bio-metric (finger print) matching for authentication of eligible beneficiaries, robust hand held Point of Sales (POS)/ Point of Transaction Device (POTDs) devices for use in villages, GPRS connectivity for synchronization with central server, GPS for capturing the location of work and attendance. As an extension and forward linkage, APOnline developed ICT solution for NREGS, a framework involving DoP for disbursement of entitlements after accurate authentication of the entitlements through finger print authentication.

OUTCOME  Reduced turna round time in disbursement of entitlements  Robust wage delivery mechanism  Consolidation and reconciliation of funds on regular basis  Improved monitoring and control mechanism

FINO Tatkaal

ino Tatkal was launched at Dharavi, Mumbai in association with Union Bank of India as an offshoot product of the larger Financial Inclusion (FI) implementation. The aim was to provide door step banking facilities to the un-banked and under-banked migrants who have come to the city in search of livelihood and do not have access to formal banking facilities. The programme uses smart cards and bio-metric fingerprints to provide for safety concerns and completely overturns the customer’s ignorance to formal banking formalities by providing for a very high end technology and at the same time very easy to use facility. A customer sitting in Mumbai can send money to anyone of his dependents to any UBI Bank branch in India, where either of them would have formal bank A/C for cash withdrawal. This biometric set up enables cashless and paperless transactions through smartcard by only verifying through the fingerprint and gets paid electronically. It helps in saving time, opportunity cost and harassment by providing banking facilities even at non banking hours and all days throughout the year. Through this technology enabled by Fino, the Fino Tatkal facility is supported by backend data management system which can track any transaction across India and provide periodic analytical reports.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Financial Information Network & Operations OBJECTIVES  Provide the unbaked with access to formal banking facilities,  Deploy technology for easing the whole process- with use of smart cards and bio-metric fingerprints  Providing banking facilities 24x7x365

PRIVATE SECTOR GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Ability to have complete information on borrowers, credit fulfillment and collection  Integrates cooperative credit structure, including the MIS and financial reporting aspects at a grassroot level  Complete transaction transparency

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Improvement in workflow process— from estimation of a project to payment for a contractor  Automatic preparation of tenders documents  Ability to digitally sign and authenticate all official communication and notes

AWARDS

SAHAKARA Pragati

oOptions Technologies gives the company a 10-year exclusivity to enable computerisation of all the PACS in the state and use the channel to develop new avenues of business for the Primary Agricultural Cooperative Societies (“PACS”). The project, named “Sahakara Pragathi” aims to enable development of transformation models to make the PACS commercially viable and sustainable economic and financial hubs. The Project was started as an initiative to implement the recommendations of the Vaidyanathan Committee on cooperative sector reform. It would also enable development of transformation models to make the PACS commercially viable and sustainable economic and financial hubs. Such models would reposition the PACS as change agents in the rural economy and become the focal point for rural development and financial inclusion. It is the first public private partnership model of its size and scale to be implemented in any Indian State. Using the solution, CoOptions is creating a database of over 10 million farmers in Andhra Pradesh at full implementation, supporting the entire process from identification of borrowers, credit fulfillment and collection. The project embeds simultaneous capacity building and training of nearly 6,000 people, run the day-to-day functioning of the PACS. The PAX2002 technology solution incoroporates and fully integrates the cooperative credit structure, including the MIS and financial reporting aspects, at a grassroot level.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY CoOptions Technologies OBJECTIVES  Enable new businesses and revenue generation for PACS  Better project monitoring facility for all stakeholders—state government, NABARD, APCOB and DCCBs  Offer multiple products and services to farmer at the PACS

RAILWAYS Office Management System

he Office Management System (OMS) aims to eliminate the routine paper work required in the workflow from estimation of project to payment for a contractor. The project encompasses various stages including estimation, preparing a tender, uploading a tender, progress of work, correspondence, billing etc via an online platform. The driving factor behind office management system was the need to know the status of the ongoing civil engineering works, be in the estimation stage or the construction stage, at Hyderabad Division of South Central Railway. Tenders are prepared automatically, every other official communication is electronic and can be digitally signed to authenticate the notes. Billing and Payments to contractors is all well taken care of. OMS was innovated and initiated at South Central Railway, Hyderabad Division in July 2009. But its versatile structure has enabled it to easily get implemented at all the locations in India and also expand its reach to Defence, IT department, State construction company and many more. This can certainly be implemented all over the world where workflows are similar to those of Indian Railways.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Prodigy Systems and Services OBJECTIVES  Eliminate redundant manual, error prone work  Ability to cull information on the status of ongoing civil engineering works

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

PRIVATE SECTOR GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT

VOICE & Video Over Broadband IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Sai InfoSystem India OBJECTIVES  Delivering e-Governance applications and other infotainment services to the semi literate masses at an affordable cost

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

oice and Video over broadband project aims at delivering triple play services—voice, video and data from the single platform. Hitherto, all technologies were aimed at delivering all three components separately either for the reasons of technology, economy or contents which can be pushed from such platform. This project aims at making it viable for the project operator and affordable for the subscriber of the service. However, the project is not a plain replica of Internet Based Delivery of Contents. The most crucial differentiator is its independence from the Computing Platform. The initiative “Voice and Video over Broad Band” has made it possible to enjoy the fruits of Information Technology Revolution for the masses. In emerging economies, where neither Government nor the citizen has capability to invest in different mechanism to deliver different contents for different target groups, “Voice and Video over Broad Band” holds a greater promise of simultaneously delivering e-Governance applications and other infotainment services to the semi literate masses at an affordable cost because of distribution of basic infrastructure cost between various applications required by citizen. It in collaboration with BSNL to offer these services to the citizen on Private Public Partnership Model. This business model allows SIS access to the established network and customer base of BSNL, which will reduce the required investment to a great extent resulting in cost effective services to the end user with minimum go to market time.

OUTCOME  Low cost video telephony option  Ability to help organisation increasing productivity at work  Increasing in quality of both personal and business communication

CALL FOR ENTRIES

India eGOV 2.0 AWARDS | 2010

FOR MORE DETAILS AND ENTRY FORM LOG ON TO www.eGovonline.net/eGov2.0

INNOVATIONS IN USAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR GOVERNANCE & SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND PROGRAMMES BY GOVERNMENT & PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES BY CITIZENS, CITIZEN GROUPS, NGOS & POLITICAL PARTIES

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

LAST DATE FOR SENDING ENTRY SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

AWARDS

PUBLIC SECTOR

Monofeya Portal IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Monofeya Governorate OBJECTIVES  Provide full information and data about the governorate  Simplify citizen service delivery system  Provide data necessary for decision-making process

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Simplicity of the initiative received citizen and print / electronic media appreciation  Achieved complete disintermediation  Good level of transparency in service

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

onofeya is the first governorate in Egypt to apply the electronic system in performing services to its citizens. The Monofeya Portal (www.monofeya.gov.eg) is an example of the e-Government adopted in Egypt to overcome nepotism, jobbery, waste of time and money, traffic and the accumulations of citizens in the governmental authorities to get their services. The idea of establishing a specialised governmental portal came true to overcome the red tape. The portal is considered as a civilised media interface on which the citizen could realise the efforts of development and projects which are planned to be established in all fields in different areas of the governorate and to achieve the best performance of interactive services. The citizen can be well-informed by the newly- enacted local laws, taxes through legal partition on the portal. The investor can find easily the appropriate place and conditions required to start his project and factors of success and all information needed from the governorate by feasibility studies made by specialists. All the news and information about the different sectors of the governorate are updated daily. The services rendered through the system are increasing remarkable that shows the progressive demand of the citizens. Database reports are taken regularly to be used as an indicator to the leadership in drawing the annual development plan.

OUTCOME  Number of rendered services increased from 17 to 381  Citizens are regularly updated about the stages of processing their services

ISSUANCE of Birth & Death Certificates

he citizens of Hyderabad are issued birth and death certificate through alternate channel through the e-Seva centers with door delivery or delivery at e- Seva centers. Citizens can submit applications at any e-Seva center or apply online. The target is the citizen and their family members living anywhere in the world whose birth/death occurred in GHMC area. Zero additional expenditure is incurred on the initiative by GHMC or e-Seva. For any delay in the service, the citizens are compensated for delay in service at the rate of Rs 50 for each day’s delay. The citizens are not required to visit the GHMC for collecting the certificates, the applications can be submitted at any e-Seva center or through the website (www.ghmc.gov.in) or (www.esevaonline.com) and receive certificate at door step anywhere in the world or it can be collected at e-Seva center. Applicant details are posted to GHMC online. All services connected with birth and death certificates such as copies, corrections, non- availability certificates are provided. Automatic SMS are sent to the citizens as soon as certificate is printed. The service is available across GHMC and citizens world over can access the services online.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Greater Hyderabad Municiapl Corporation OBJECTIVES  Ensure complete disintermediation, transparency and citizen empowerment in civic service.  Achieve citizen satisfaction in service delivery  Optimum utilisation of existing IT infrastructure

AWARDS

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Finding a parking lot effortlessly has increased customer satisfaction  Possible jams have been minimised and controlled  Customers can access vacant parking lots without wasting time driving around looking for a place to park

PUBLIC SECTOR

SMART Parking

n order to solve the parking problem, a lot of research and development is being done all over the world to implement Smart Car Park systems which would not only be able to provide information about vacant car parks to the drivers, before they physically reach the car park but will also enable them to reserve for the car parking lot while sitting at home. The Smart Parking solution is a sensor-based system, executed under the National Ubiquitous Computing Initiative of the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. The sensors are deployed in each parking lot to detect the presence of the vehicle. This information can be availed in real time. There are guiding nodes, which assist the drivers in finding a vacant lot in the parking area, thereby easing a commuter’s search within parking complex. The system uses latest and cutting edge technologies. It is currently being functional at GHMC Parking Complex, Abids, Hyderabad. These sensors are fixed at Public Parking Complexes, Shopping Malls SEZ Stadiums Airports. With the help of this parking solution real time parking information can be accessed anytime, anywhere. The solution intends to be modularised which can be customised according to the user requirements. Depending on the parking complex layout, the deployment of guiding nodes, entrance display and the parking administration Graphical User Interface (GUI), which generates the topology for parking management will change accordingly.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY C-DAC—Hyderabad OBJECTIVES  Automation of the existing parking systems to reduce the staffing requirements for traffic control within the facility  Guiding the driver to find a parking space in a more efficient and convenient way  Reservation of the parking lots whenever or wherever for the customers

PRIVATE SECTOR

MUNICIPAL e-Governance Project IMPLEMENTING AGENCY eGovernments Foundation OBJECTIVES  Introduce reforms to improve administrative efficiency  Bring in transparency  Equip local bodies to provide better citizen services  Streamline the processes and standardise it across all the municipal bodies in the state

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

n 2005, the Karnataka state government initiated an ADB funded state-wide reform initiative covering the largest 57 municipal bodies in the state, named as the ‘Nirmala Nagara’ Project (referred to as NN. The vision was to create a standardised set of systems and processes across the state which would not only provide the benefit of knowledge sharing across the individual bodies but also create a common platform on which comparative evaluation between municipalities could be undertaken. Under this framework, some of the most innovative decisions taken on the e-governance front are the creation of a centralised system which was common in terms of process and data model across the state. The centralised approach enabled the technology team to leverage the Internet to develop an application that was accessed by the individual municipal bodies over the Internet. The applications were hosted centrally at an independent entity (Karnataka Municipal Data Society) which provides the applications to the individual municipal bodies for an annual subscription fee under the SaaS model. This is also a first under the Indian government context already serving as a model for other states. The Ministry of Urban Development in its Programme JNNURM has mandated the states to follow similar model.

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Redressal rate of over 90% achieved in the last 1 year  Implementation of a fund-based double-entry accrual accounting system in all the municipal bodies

telecentre

AWARDS

GRASSROOT

DIGITAL Local Language Content Competition IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Nenasala ICTC, Uva OBJECTIVES  Make content available in local language  Promote writing habits among the local community  Contribute to increasing foot falls and, consequently, income of the Nenasala

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Is registered with IGNOU to conduct Certificate, Diploma and Associate Degree Programmes  Been able to share content and make partnership with various organisations

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

his project hopes to increase the volume of contents in local language using the Information and Communication Technology. Consequently, local people will be able to get information in their language according to their need. The community will be involved in the project by submitting content for the competition. Most importantly, therefore, community participation is a key factor for the success of the project. At the end of the project, the Tamil speaking community will be able to collect information in Tamil language about Sri Lanka. Because of the availability of the content in local languages, the Nenasala will start getting many users than ever before. As a result, its income will also increase and the telecentre will be able to sustain itself as well as the project. In the long run, the community will also benefit from the content aggregated through this competition and uploaded on its website. Through this project, they hope to divide the digital gap among the rural community and also contribute towards building the knowledge society combined with ICT empowerment. The project aimed to target and benefit the users of telecentre covered area in the villages. For the implementation of the project the area schools teachers, some educated volunteers, youths gave support to the telecentres.

OUTCOME  Benefit the community through access to information and knowledge in local languages  Rural people can learn to use ICTs for generating and uploading content  Enhance ICT usage within the community

VADALUR Knowledge Centre

adalur Knowledge Centre is a village knowledge centre located in Vadalur, Cuddalore District, Tamilnadu, India. It is a partner in Grameen Gyan Abhiyan (Mission2007). Every village, a Knowledge Centre) is chaired by Prof. MS Swaminathan. Vadalur Knowledge Centre follows former Indian President, APJ Abdul Kalam’s Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) model for Rural Prosperity. The project was started to implement and showcase a model village knowledge centre, which is a frontline delivery system in the PURA complexes for providing knowledge connectivity. Vadalur Knowledge Centre wishes to empower the youth to undertake development tasks of the villages and establish rural enterprises to provide large scale employment to the youth of the village. This Village Knowledge Centre is one of the essential components for realising the goal of graduating into a knowledge society and transforming the nation into a developed country before the year 2020. There was a initial struggle to make people understand what is Village Knowledge Centre and how to use ICT to provide services. People initially hesitated and did not believe that doctors could able to speak with them through computers from different town. This initial resistance was overoame by doing lot of offline activities.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Vadalur Knowledge Centre OBJECTIVES  Act as a front line delivery system in Vadalur PURA complex for providing knowledge connectivity  Provide skill development for the rural youth, women and farmers.  Make use of ICT tools effectively for knowledge dissemination in rural area

source alternative for building, deploying, integrating and managing on-premise and cloud-based applications. "With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat provides the middleware components necessary for organizations to standardize their application architecture with confidence using a flexible approach to accommodate user choice", said Craig Muzilla, Vice President and General Manager for Middleware, Red Hat.

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio, a comprehensive family of open source middleware software products to enable developers and organizations to build, deploy, integrate and manage applications on-premise and within the cloud. For more information about JBoss solutions, visit: www.redhat.com/jboss/.

Volume 8 June 2010 - July 2010

JUST DIAL AND LIFESPRING HOSPITALS WINS THE 2010 RED HAT INNOVATION AWARD This is the first time an Indian Company has won it in the history of the Awards. Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards are designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat's platform and middleware solutions by customers, partners and the open source community. In the recently concluded Red Hat Summit, Just Dial, the leading Indian local search company and LifeSpring Hospitals, a chain of affordable, high quality maternity hospitals were felicitated for winning the 2010 Red Hat Innovation Award in different categories. Just Dial was also awarded with the title of 2010 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. The two companies were also felicitated by Jim Whitehurst, global CEO of Red Hat along with other Red Hat customers at a recent customer showcase event in India called “The Beat of open Source – Powered by Red Hat”. In the event, he also inaugurated the first edition of Red Hat Case Studies Dossier

for Indian subcontinent containing case studies of some of the key Red Hat customers such as IRCTC, C-DAC, SBI Life, New India Assurance and the like. These customers have varying industry background such as finance, government, telecom, healthcare, and others and have utilized quite a few solutions from Red Hat infrastructural stack. “These success stories emphasize the fact that Red Hat's value proposition is getting stronger by the day in the Indian subcontinent,” said Nandu Pradhan, Managing Director – Red Hat India. “Today, it has established as the most cost effective as well as high performance platform for enterprise wide deployment and I am confident that Red Hat will soon become platform of choice for the enterprises in Indian subcontinent.” For detailed case studies of Red Hat's customers, visit: http://customers.redhat.com/

CONTACT DETAILS: • MUMBAI: RED HAT INDIA PVT. LTD., B 304, B Wing, Delphi Building, Hiranandani Business Park, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, TEL: +91 22 3987 8888, FAX: +91 22 3987 8899. • KOLKATA: RED HAT INDIA PVT. LTD., C/o. MLS Business Centres India Pvt. Ltd.6th Floor, Block A, 22, Camac Street Kolkata - 700 016, TEL: +91 33 4019 2228, FAX: +91 33 4019 2229. • DELHI: RED HAT INDIA PVT. LTD., Copia, Suits # 602A-602B, 6th Floor, Plot No. 9, Copia Corp Centre, Mathura Rd, Jasola, New Delhi 110 025, TEL: +91 11 3064 2000, FAX: +91 11 3064 2017. • CHENNAI: RED HAT INDIA PVT. LTD., Olympia Tech Park, Level 2, Altius, 1-SIDCO Industrial Estate, Guindy, Chennai 600 032, TEL: +91 44 4299 4257 / 58, FAX: +91 44 4299 4300. • BANGALORE: RED HAT INDIA PVT. LTD., No. 102, 1st Floor, Prestige Loka, #7/1, Brunton Road, Bangalore 560 025, TEL: +91 80 2532 0712/13/14, FAX: +91 80 2559 2295. • PUNE: RED HAT SOFTWARE SERVICES (INDIA) PVT. LTD., Level - 1, Tower - 10, Cyber City, Magarpatta City, Hadapsar, Pune 411 013, TEL: +91 20 3046 7000, FAX: +91 20 3046 7499.

Sales Enquiry: • Puneet Saxena: psaxena@redhat.com, 09982680208; • Santosh Kumar: sakumar@redhat.com, 09711301076; • Himanshu Gupta: hgupta@redhat.com, 9810272483;

E-GOVERNANCE NEWSLETTER

• Debasish Roy: droy@redhat.com, 09748729456; • Nilesh Shinde: nshinde@redhat.com, 09821092168;.

For additional information visit www.redhat.com or email: marketing-in@redhat.com © 2009 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. “Red Hat,” Red Hat Linux, the Red Hat “Shadowman” logo, and the products listed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the US and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

C-DAC BUILDS MISSION CRITICAL E-GOVERNANCE SERVICES DELIVERY GATEWAY, FIRST OF ITS KIND IN THE WORLD, COMPLETELY ON RED HAT STACK BUSINESS CHALLENGE NSDG (National e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway) is one of India's Mission Mode Projects (MMP) under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Government of India. This mission critical e-Governance project was entrusted with C-DAC for its development. The key objective of NeGP is to collaborate and integrate information across different departments in the centre, state, and local Government. NSDG was specifically aimed at integrating the services offered by the departments of central government, such as issuing a birth certificate, passport, and land records, amongst others, so as to provide a single window service to the customer. Government systems are characterized by islands of legacy systems using heterogeneous platforms and technologies and spread across diverse geographical locations in varying states of automation. NSDG needed to simplify the above task by acting as a standards-based messaging switch and providing seamless interoperability and exchange of data across the departments. NSDG, acting as a nerve centre, needed to handle a large number of transactions and help in tracking and time stamping of all transactions of the government. Apart from the process and people challenges, there were loads of other challenges in front of CDAC while designing the entire architecture of the gateway.

To begin with, the gateway was a first of its kind to get developed in the world. “We didn't have any role model to follow,” said Zia Saquib, Executive Director, C-DAC. “The only gateway project before ours was that in the UK, but our architecture was much more difficult and complex.” Protocol specification was also very complex and challenging as there was going to be a lot of asynchronous messaging traffic due to a non-existent IT infrastructure at the backend. “The system needed to be designed in such a way so as to handle traffic of 250 messages per second and to add to that, it also should not take more than three seconds of processing time within the gateway. There can't be any compromise on the performance,” said Saquib. “As the initial stage of the development is very crucial, we didn't want to restrict ourselves in any kind of proprietary vendor lock-in. The flexibility of fine tuning the software component that we use was extremely important.”

SOLUTION With performance, scalability, and flexibility criteria in mind, for C-DAC to implement the NSDG project successfully, it chose Red Hat as its trusted technology partner. Red Hat's open source solutions were an ideal fit as they not only met the above criteria, but also allowed C-DAC to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in, while taking advantage of the rapid innovation of the open source community. “We have used the complete Red Hat stack; the operating system and the middleware for the development of the NSDG system,” said Saquib. Currently, there are a total of 32 servers on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform has been implemented. “We have also used Red Hat's clustering suite to address the failover issues.” C-DAC has based NSDG's core framework on JBoss Enterprise Middleware. “We started with JBoss.org for the development and are now moving on to the supported enterprise-class version as we moved to production environments,” said Saquib. “Over the last one and a half years, we have found that JBoss is quite stable and sturdy. It matches our performance requirements.” “In addition to Red Hat's reliable products, Red Hat Support is a benefit that is so important for our mission-critical projects, such as NSDG,” said Saquib. Red Hat helped C-DAC in getting a sound understanding of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.3. The system is capable of processing any request in less than three seconds within the gateway and is quite stable with close to zero downtime in the last one and a half years – a strong testament to its successful implementation.

BENEFITS

l A Cookbook implementation guide, making cloud setup

l “Red Hat freed C-DAC from vendor lock-in and enabled it

to build the NSDG system, which is flexible and delivers high performance,” said Saquib. l “JBoss being an open source product helped us

tremendously in fine tuning it as per project needs with the source code available at our disposal for customization.” said Saquib. Additionally, with JBoss, C-DAC didn't have to seek any developer license or wait for the arrival of trial media that usually happens with proprietary platform providers. C-DAC had almost no waiting time to get started with development of NSDG on JBoss. l “With the right blend of performance with flexibility, Red

Hat Enterprise Linux becomes the natural choice while developing mission-critical turnkey systems,” said Saquib. “With an excellent support network at the back, Red Hat products give us a sense of comfort.”

For more information about Red Hat and cloud computing, visit: www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud.

l A detailed reference architecture providing step-by-

step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring the private cloud. l Consulting services to enable turnkey assessment,

implementation and operational management of a private cloud. l Training classes, to transfer knowledge and best

R E D H AT C L O U D F O U N D AT I O N S ,

EDITION ONE Real Clouds. Today.

PLAN

BUILD

MANAGE

practices to customers, creating a strong base of skills among their staff quickly and efficiently. With the launch of Red Hat Cloud Foundations solution, Red Hat now has the ability to provide consistent cloud and on-premise environments as it can provide the full breadth of enterprise-quality capabilities, including virtualization, operating systems, middleware and application frameworks also on cloud.

SOLUTION GUIDE

PRODUCTS

CONSULTING SERVICES

TRAINING COURSES

REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE & COOKBOOK

l With the successful completion of NSDG at the national

level, C-DAC in collaboration with Redhat has once again proved that Open Source can surely be applied to mission critical projects and reap rich benefits from it.

The high performance and flexibility that comes with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform makes it the natural choice for developing mission-critical turnkey systems. The excellent support network and ecosystem available for Red Hat solutions provide a strong sense of comfort, allowing one to sleep well at night. - Zia Saquib, Executive Director, C-DAC

RED HAT INTEGRATES SERVER AND DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 brings virtualization to more organizations by overcoming cost and scalability barriers. Red Hat recently announced the next step in the integration of its enterprise-grade server and desktop virtualization portfolio with the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 2.2. In addition to providing the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, the 2.2 update includes new scalability capabilities, migration tools and features to expand the performance and security of the solution. Released in November 2009, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.1, which introduced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, has gained momentum with

RED HAT UNVEILS COMPREHENSIVE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS WITH THE LAUNCH OF CLOUD FOUNDATIONS In an effort to simplify the deployment and management of cloud solutions, Red Hat recently announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations offering. It is a major new offering family delivering comprehensive solutions which would expand the reach and appeal of cloud significantly, offer the richest set of development and deployment environments in the industry and deliver consistency between the datacenter and public clouds.

quick and simple.

The first edition of Red Hat Cloud Foundations includes the following elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds:

customers, including Fujitsu, IBM and NTT Communications, adopting it for their cloud deployments and customers like Swedish-based Voddler and Sri Lanka-based Etisalat, adopting it for their datacenters. "Already experiencing traction with server and cloud deployments, the RHEV solution would now expand its reach with the delivery of our desktop virtualization management capabilities to help more customers to break down the barriers to virtualization adoption," says Navin Thadani, senior director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is now globally available. To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, visit: www.redhat.com/rhev.

RED HAT USHERS IN NEXT GENERATION OF WEB APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT WITH JBOSS ENTERPRISE PORTAL PLATFORM 5.0

l Industry-leading products for implementing a private

cloud, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.

PG 2

Red Hat has also announced the general availability of its next-generation portal solution, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0. The advent of JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

5.0 marks the next stage in Red Hat's goal of providing the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of middleware products. Organizations worldwide now have a flexible, open

PG 3

PRIVATE SECTOR

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Till today 813 patients have been benefited through the telemedicine  Timely access to diagnostic, specialty healthcare advice at the grass root level through the low cost telemedicine network centering around the district hospital as the service provider

telecentre

AWARDS

TELEMEDICINE Initiative

elemedicine Master Centre is an e-Initiative to provide quality care to the unreachable population. Project was started in 2006 with one peripheral centre and has now grown to provide services to 31 peripheral hospitals in India and 53 African countries through Pan-African Network, making it the largest Telemedicine Service provider in western India. It is a unique venture for the country undertaken in Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Adivasis form 64% of the local population here. It is seen that 65% percent of Indian households seek health care from the private medical sector and only one-third use the public medical sector. Common reasons for not using health care facilities of the public sector, is the poor quality of services and non- availability of a nearby facility. It is in this context that the present programme gains relevance for it addresses realities that hinder effective health care for rural populations. The Telemedicine centre provides widest range of services on its national and international network. Apart from teleconsultations and tele-ducations in this network, home care division is developed; an innovative development by Telemedicine centre where Tele -ECG facility is being provided, which is first of its kind in the country. ECG facility at patients home is directly transmitted in cardiologist’s mobile. The telecentre is using various low cost techniques to reach more houses in villages.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Dr. Balabhai Nanavati Hospital OBJECTIVES  Transfer immediate and fast data  Increase availability of quality medical service to those in need  Promote the growth of Telemedicine  Improve quality of medical services

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited IMPLEMENTING AGENCY One97 Communications OBJECTIVES  Empowerment of people living in rural India  Provide pertinent information and services through affordable mobile communications  Improve decision making ability of farmers  Work with like minded organisations for e-transformation of villages

JURY

MENTION

FFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited (IKSL) is an attempt to leverage the communications needs of rural India by providing relevant and location specific content for empowering the people living in villages of India. Towards this, IKSL provides five free voice messages per day to the subscribers of its Green SIM Card along with a dedicated Helpline for resolution of their problems by a team of experts. Other activities like Mobile Based Quizzes, Phone In Programmes, etc are also taken up. The project was started for the empowerment of the farmers and other people living in rural India and provide them knowledge inputs for effective decision making in their day to day activities, particularly in agriculture. It aimed to address the limitations of conventional Extension System and also take the latest technology and expert advice directly to the ears of the farmers and other subscribers from rural India. The free voice messages are of one minute duration and cover diverse areas. The requirements of information are addressed at state level, zonal (group of districts) level. The new platform used for OBD purpose can facilitate providing content specific to a cooperative society (retailer)’s area.

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  About one million users are ustilising OBD and Helpline services

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

SPECIAL FEATURE

CISCO

THE SMART +CONNECTED eGOV WAY Excellence in governance is about experience that’s engaging, where information access is simple, and services accessible

he way governments are run is changing like never before, as citizens increasingly expect the same flexibility, responsiveness from government services as they do from private organisations. This demands a change in vision, and in the way operations are run and citizen services delivered. This is not a small thing to ask of any government machinery, given that it is typically constrained by stringent budgets and procedural lags. The answer is Cisco Smart+Connected Communities, which uses intelligent networking capabilities to weave together people, services, community assets, and information into a single pervasive solution.

through smooth service delivery. Two vital facets of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities framework facilitate efficient delivery and management of services within a community.  Community+Connect helps deliver comprehensive services to residents and businesses in a connected community  Community+Exchange helps enable the management and operation of a connected community and sharing of information across an ecosystem of government agencies and private sector partners Both Community+Connect and Community+Exchange are facilitated by the underlying Cisco Service Delivery Platform.

The elements of change

Community+Connect

Cisco Smart+Connected Government solutions provide organizations the ability to stay connected with constituents, while managing operational costs. It provides governments with the technology and facilities that enable highquality constituent engagement

With the network as the underlying service delivery platform, the Community Connect framework leverages real-time information and applications to help governments deliver improved and more efficient citizen services.

egov / www.egovonline.net / August 2010

One of the core responsibilities of governments is to protect and serve citizens. Whether it is crimes, fire, accidents, or natural disasters, governments can leverage the power of information at the right place and at the right time to quicken emergency response. Healthcare delivery and community transportation are other areas of influence for the government, where the power of collaboration and connectedness can transform the way these services are run. The result would be a government experience that is engaging, where information access is simple, and services more accessible. For example, citizens would be able to renew their driver’s license from the comfort of their homes. Commuters can look at bus schedules, expected delays and plan their journeys to work better.

Community+Exchange Cisco’s Community+Exchange is a back-office operations center that connects community

clusters to create a networked ecosystem. By leveraging the network as a highly secure and resilient service delivery platform, government agencies can share information and collaborate with private sector partners to facilitate utilities, transportation, telecommunications, safety and security, health, and government social services. A networked ecosystem ensures that data delays do not occur. For example, a driver’s license procured from a service bureau may be used as identity proof for other government documentation. Verifications such as these can be done quickly by simply accessing the license database to validate authenticity of the licence. Another example would be an address-verification for

CISCO

SPECIAL FEATURE

WHETHER IT IS A CRIME, FIRE OR A NATURAL DISASTER, GOVERNMENTS CAN BE INFORMED AT THE RIGHT PLACE AND AT THE RIGHT TIME TO QUICKEN EMERGENCY RESPONSES

WITH THE NETWORK AS THE UNDERLYING SERVICE DELIVERY PLATFORM, THE COMMUNITY CONNECT FRAMEWORK LEVERAGES REAL-TIME INFORMATION AND APPLICATIONS TO HELP GOVERNMENTS DELIVER IMPROVED AND MORE EFFICIENT CITIZEN SERVICES

Possibilities of Smart+Connected governance With the Smart+Connected government, citizens can connect to the Road Transport Authority (RTO) remotely to renew their driver’s license. The vision test can be carried out on the applicant, photograph taken and a digital signature transferred using TelePresence technology.

issue of passport, through the nearest police station. The crunch in elapsed time, using the networked ecosystem, could have positive ripples on the entire process. Connected government agencies can better serve the needs of an on-demand culture while simultaneously improving workforce productivity, thus enhancing citizen experience. The characteristics of a Smart +Connected government are: Enhanced citizen experience: Web-savvy citizens will receive the same level of service from their government that they receive from private-sector

organisations such as retailers and financial institutions. They will have 24-hour online access to data and services, and will be able to receive this information on both wired and wireless devices. Better communication: Citizens will be able to lodge requests or complaints and also track requests at their convenience. Cisco’s Citizen and Business Interaction Network provides a homogenized, 24/7 call-in channel that enables this. More productive and collaborative: Employees in remote offices will be able to operate and interact

with the same flexibility and timeliness as those at the main government campuses. Cisco’s Unified Communications framework enables secure, collaborative communication, regardless of the employee’s access device or location. It also facilitates information sharing and speeds up decision making. Agile, nimble and mobile: Government employees will be able to connect to their constituents and co-workers with voice, video, and Web collaboration, from any workspace—desk, conference room, home, airport, or

between appointments through Cisco TelePresence solutions. If employees can deliver government services no matter where they are, government operations are far less affected by inclement weather, natural disaster, or intentional disruption in any specific geographic location. Smart+Connected solutions for government can thus usher in an era where citizens find interactions with government engaging, responsive and even futuristic. This may just be the platform for governments to flip their constraints into strengths.

August 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

SPECIAL FEATURE

FORBES

AUTOMATING SELF-SERVICES Hi-tech building blocks are being used to enable diverse micro transaction needs of the citizens

ransaction growth is the natural

network, which is at present support-

outcome of economic growth.

ing over 15,000 installations. It has a

Major sectors across the board

comprehensive offering that includes

are faced with tremendous challenges in

supply of hardware, software and support

dealing with this growth while catering

services spanning over 125 service

to the consumers’ demand for greater

locations all over the country. FTL has

convenience and efficiency in handling

established a state-of-the-art national

their transactions.

network operations-and-control centre at

Forbes Technosys Ltd. (FTL) is a

Thane where it provides managed services

pioneer in transaction processing

support to its clients in banking and ATM

solutions, services and networks that help

services, power and utilities companies for

organisations handle large transaction

bill payment processing, cheque truncation

volumes effectively and efficiently, while

systems and financial inclusion.

improving quality of their services and reducing costs. FTL’s portfolio includes e-Governance

Driven by innovation FTL is driven by the need to provide

solutions such as G2C transaction kiosks,

innovative products, services and solutions

bill payment kiosks, PoS terminals, elec-

to customers. In addition to selling

tronic cash registers, portable biometric

solutions, FTL is working with government

enabled platforms for UID registration

departments and public utilities on a

and authentication, franking machines for

public-private partnership model basis

postal services, stamp duty collections and

(BOO, BOOT) in order to enable automa-

judicial franking.

tion in several areas including ticketing, bill

FTL provides integrated solutions and services and has a pan-India support

payment services and G2C transactions. Through partnerships with Department

FACT FILE • Forbes Technosys Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forbes and Company, is a pioneer in self service automation with a strong focus on banking, telecom, power, government and retail. • Forbes and Company (F&CL) founded in 1767 by John Forbes from Aberdeenshire in Scotland. Forbes has diversified business interests in shipping, engineering, water purification systems and technology. • Forbes is a part of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group which has revenues of around USD 2.8 billion (FY10 est.) and an asset base valued at USD 1 billion. The Group is a conglomerate with diverse business interests in construction, shipping, healthcare, energy, engineering and technology. Other subsidiaries of F&CL include Eureka Forbes, SCI Forbes, Nypro Forbes and Forbes Bumi Armada. Shapoorji Pallonji is the largest private shareholder (18.5%) of Tata Sons Limited, the holding company of the Tata Group.

egov / www.egovonline.net / August 2010

“WE ARE WORKING ON PILOTS FOCUSED AT END CUSTOMERS” Ajay Singh, CEO, Forbes Technosys Limited

How is Forbes different from other Kiosk companies? Forbes is a systems integrator and maunfacturer of Kiosks. Our differentiators are that we have a control over every aspect of the Kiosk, from design of Kiosk – hardware & software to operations in the field. We have an ISO 9001:2000 plant and software development centre at Thane. These products are supported in the field by 500+ personnel at 100+ locations across the country. We have set up an integrated National Network Operations Control Centre to manage the large network of Kiosks across the country. This centre continuously monitors each Kiosk up to the component level (24x7x365 days) and helps allocate and manage breakdowns. Is Financial Inclusion an important area for Forbes? Financial Inclusion, both urban and rural, is crucial to India’s growth and is the future of inclusive banking. India’s huge telecom reach has to be replicated by the banking industry to take banking to the masses. While there are several challenges to accomplish this, Government initiatives like UID can be a catalyst in the financial inclusion process. FTL has launched a series of products for finanical inclusion which include Bio-metrric enabled & solar powered ATMs as well as Portable MICRO ATMs for Banking Correspondents.

of Posts, FTL is providing next generation

FTL is engaged in the roll-out of India’s

franking and stamping solutions in differ-

first multi-city, multi-channel, multi-modal

ent states of the country. FTL has been

network that will enable anytime bill pay-

responsible for the first implementation

ments, mobile recharges, ticket bookings

of judicial franking systems in the country

and a host of other services.

in the state of Bihar. FTL has launched a

FTL’s goal is to use high-technology

series of products for financial inclusion

building blocks to provide products and

which include biometric-enabled and solar

services to satisfy the diverse and special

powered ATMs as well as portable micro

needs of the Indian consumers and make

ATMs for banking correspondents.

their life easier.

AWARDS

ICT ENABLED SCHOOL

DESTINATION Success IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Indian High School, Dubai OBJECTIVES  Enable teachers to teach in an efficient and effective way  Create paperless office, quick and fast communication, virtual classrooms, video lessons, online assessments, and extended learning

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Brought out creativity, planning, designing, imagination amongst students  An e-library was developed by the students

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

estination Success is a holistic educational solution with digital content, print and digital activities, lesson plans, interactivities to evaluate student learning, professional development services, IT executive for technical maintenance and teacher support. This is one of the largest eLearning implementations in the region covering more than 7000 students, 220 classrooms with Interactive Boards, complete connectivity in school, Wi-Fi campus, more than 100 hours of IT training for over 600 teachers, and digital interactive content deployed in the school in association with S. Chand Harcourt. The Wifi Campus with Internet accessibility in all areas has enabled students and teachers to research and study during the entire school day. The teachers have become more IT proficient, comfortable in independently navigating through the solution to use a variety of its features, including the Interactive White Board, for teaching. One of the greatest teaching steps has been the planned use of the same content by two-three different subject teachers leading to a vibrant cross disciplinary learning by students.

OUTCOME  Students have shown a marked ease and proficiency with technology  Enhances critical thinking and problem solving skills

RAISING Healthy Kids

he project enables the students to recognise and recall deficiency diseases and their prevention by consuming healthy diet. Through the project students came to know the importance of food in growth and health, spread awareness among peers and the community about the importance of bio pesticides, natural fertilisers and going natural, and imbibe tips given by the experts and put them into practice. The project also identify reasons of malnutrition and obesity among children, examine the cause and effect of emotional development, communicate the results of data to peers, parents and community. The target group is children between 6 to 16 years. To create awareness among all the students of the school constructive changes in food habits at home front was brought into. After imbibing healthy eating habits amongst the students, they were made to show concern towards underprivileged children, periodically visited the schools and appraised them on ‘Need to eat healthy’, visited villages and conducted awareness programmes. As the school is tied up with Global gateway project, the project was taken to the UK, Australia, Japan, and the USA.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Public School, Jubilee Hills OBJECTIVES  Create an environment where physical activity and healthy eating are accessible and encouraged  Generate awareness among students through activities using technology

ICT ENABLED SCHOOL

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Increase in student’s attendance and attention  Less weight on school bags  Saves time  Revision by playing back old lessons

AWARDS

EACH Child with Laptop in Classroom

lassroom equipped with Interactive whiteboard, (electronic board), projector, teacher laptop, X class (Digital Classroom Management Software), Internet connectivity, 24 laptop trolley, and 24 laptops. Once a teacher writes anything on the whiteboard, with a click of button (through Xs class Software) it can be transferred to all the children’s laptop within a second. The file transferred can be in different formats, like pdfs, ppt, videos etc. The teacher then has an option of starting a quiz, each student gets a quiz screen with a set of questions, he/she once answers within seconds, it generates a result. This is fastest way of assessing how much a child has understood a concept. A Laptop chargeable trolley with 24 laptops is used. The laptop trolley enables to charge laptops in 1 hour. Once charged laptop works for 5 hours non-stop.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Podar Group of Schools OBJECTIVES  Establish the success rate of laptops in classrooms for student aged around 11-12 years  Share the data written by teacher on Interactive White Board to all the laptops instead of copying of the taught lesson on board to notebook by a child

MKCL Digital School Programme IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation OBJECTIVES  Empower school children to capture various technology enabled learning experiences  Give an opportunity of personalised, self paced, collaborative learning experience to school children

JURY AWARD

aharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) was promoted by the Department of Higher and Technical Education, Government of Maharashtra, India. It was incorporated under the Companies Act, 1956 on August 20, 2001 as a Public Limited Company under CIN. U 80302 MH 2001 PLC 133101 to create new paradigm in education and development through universalisation and integration of Information Technology in teaching, learning and educational management processes in particular and socio-economic transformative processes in general. Digital School is a program that empowers school children to capture various learning experiences in a technology enabled and teacher facilitated environment by means of different activities and interactivities complementing school curricula. The target group includes school children, reaching out to 14 districts of Maharashtra and number of schools where the program has been implemented is 397 schools. The project ensures the deployment of eLearning platform inside school for school children to offer co-curricular and extracurricular multimedia based interactive learning content.

OUTCOME  The program has been successfully implemented in 397 schools with 2, 75000 students got benefited with innovative learning experience

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

UNIVERSITY ICT ENABLED SCHOOL

LEARNING Management System &

CITIZEN

Computer Based Tutorials

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Punjab Technical University OBJECTIVES  Enable Students to learn online, anywhere any time  Enhance learning capability by providing gist of subject with animation and illustrations  Enable students to learn on their own pace

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Elimination of lengthy and tedious manual processes  Effective Time Utilisation  Accuracy of data reduced man-hours

CHOICE #1

MS is a facility so as to supplement the Distance Education Programme of Punjab Technical University. This is meant to impart an opportunity of learning to the students at his own pace where he has a dedicated online mentor, a large group of fellow students, various online resources and a wide exposure to enjoy applications of computerisation and communication system. In LMS, learner is provided with a login and user id. The key idea is that an LMS in a learning context supports the teaching and learning process, rather than replacing it. The learner can contact the system admin for any technical problem in the LMS. With LMS, learner could get real time updations regarding their course, resource library, digital library and can chat with fellow students and faculty. He can discuss any topic which is complicated and if is facing difficulty in understanding. The learner can also interact with his colleagues on blogs. With the user of LMS, learner can get the benefit of getting education from the experts sitting across the world. There is no geographic limitation for learning with the help of LMS.

OUTCOME  The concept is a very effective as learners can easily understand the concepts with the help of pictures, graphics and animations

e-Bridge

TU has established a state of art Electronic Data Processing Unit that handles tabulation and declaration of result and certification of more than 1,50,000 students enrolled in its Distance Education Programme. All subjects are allotted unique IDs individually which are linked to various courses offered. In each session, more than 8 lakh records are entered and processed. This EDP system processes reports at click of a button, handles student verification, updates Auto Semester Progression and maintains individual Electronic Records of students. Scalable to 10,00,000 students, this unit is managed only by a team of 10 people led by the EDP Manager and an Assistant Registrar. The EDP connects the University with the Regional Centres, the Learning Centres and the students through a dynamic web portal (www.ptudep.org) and the intelligent ERP software (web based) which is operated by the Learning Centre and supervised by the Regional Centre with a central server at Reliance Data Centre in Mumbai. The Learning Centre punches the data in the ERP Software which is then imported to the EDP. Through this many reports like name ratification, subject specialisations, fee deposit sheets, compiled results. can be generated at a click of a button.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Punjab Technical University OBJECTIVES  Digitally and electronically connect all the tiers in the system  Have a Central Database System to ensure speedy and accurate tabulation and declaration of results  Generate an effective MIS, for analysis and intelligent reports

ICT ICT ENABLED UNIVERSITY ENABLED SCHOOL

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  EduNxt environment is used by over 90,000 students and will be made available to over 1, 50,000 students  Usage has increased continually to a daily average of over 2500 unique users

AWARDS

EduNxt

duNxt initiative was launched by Sikkim Manipal University’s Directorate of Distance Education (SMU – DE). Currently the University has over 1,80,000 active enroll student base from over 300 towns. These students get counseled by university authorised learning centers. SMU-DE has 725 authorised learning centers spread across India. EduNxt enables collaborative and interactive learning environment which includes small group mentoring, virtual classrooms, simulation, self- study content, recorded presentations and shared browsing. The 3 As of affordability, zccessibility and appropriateness are the guideline to scaling up EduNxt across distributed learning. Meanwhile, the 4Cs of Content, Collaboration, Communication and Computing are the basis of developing EduNxt. The platform has functionality which provides a student to interact with 63 core faculty and 6500 counsellors in order to utilise the varied expertise and vast experience of this community. The EduNxt is also being used to train, certify and orient these 6500 counsellors to technology based education and its benefits. As of now SMU- DE has more than 1500 trained and certified faculty members at 725 authorised learning centres across India.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Sikkim Manipal UniversityDirectorate of Distance Education OBJECTIVES  Take the fruits of online learning to all the Distance Education students of the SMU-DDE  Develop a sense of togetherness among the members and different stakeholders

N-LIST for Scholarly Content IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre OBJECTIVES  Provide access of electronic resources to government /governmentaided colleges  Enable crosssubscription to e-resources  Fill-in the serious gap of providing access of e-resources to colleges

JURY AWARD

he Project is being jointly executed by the UGC- INFONET Digital Library Consortium, INFLIBNET Centre and the INDEST-AICTE Consortium. In the project IIT Delhi provides for cross-subscription to e- resources subscribed by the two Consortia, i.e. subscription to INDEST-AICTE resources for universities and UGCINFONET resources for technical institutions; and access to selected e-resources to colleges. The authorised users from colleges can now access e- resources and download articles required by them directly from the publisher’s website once they are duly authenticated as authorised users through servers deployed at the INFLIBNET Centre. The project has four distinct components, to subscribe and provide access to selected UGC-INFONET e-resources to technical institutions and monitor its usage, to subscribe and provide access to selected INDEST e-resources to selected universities and monitor its usage, to subscribe and provide access to selected e-resources to 6,000 Government/Government-aided colleges and monitor its usage, and to act as a Monitoring Agency for colleges while evaluate, promote, impart training and monitor all activities involved in the process of providing effective and efficient access to e-resources to colleges.

OUTCOME  Provides access to more than 2,100 journals  Currently, 684 eligible colleges are already accessing e-resources  More than 25,000 faculty members and students in 684 registered colleges have been given User ID and Password to access e- resources

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AWARDS

ICT ENABLED BUSINESS SCHOOL SCHOOL

ACADEMIC Institute Management System IMPLEMENTING AGENCY MIT School of Management, Pune OBJECTIVES  Make learning more effective, more inclusive, more flexible, more interesting and personalized  Aid the teaching faculty to cater to a large group of students more effectively

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  A single information gateway with user- centric navigation  Complete information on course outlines, grades, etc  Up-to-date information on the happenings on campus

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

he project was started with an aim to evaluate the teaching-learning process, wherein the primary stakeholders are the teachers and students, and for the management and administration of the institute, wherein the primary stakeholders are the administrators and staff members. The Learning Management System (LMS) part of the project brings in “Blended Learning” paradigm into the curriculum. Using the Institute Management System (IMS), the administrative staff, increases the efficiency of the workflow and makes it more responsive towards the other stakeholders of the system. The program is an attempt in creation of a single platform for all the tasks related to any stakeholder in an institute under one centralised system. The Net-ID for a student/faculty/administrator/staff would be the single most powerful way to access/retrieve/modify with appropriate access controls and all security measures in place. Continual Evaluation processes keep the students more involved in the process of learning ensuring higher knowledge retention and superior application of fundamentals. Usage of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for primer and foundation courses lets the students assimilate and master the concepts at their own pace, giving personalized learning solutions in addition to class room teaching. Usage of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for primer and foundation courses lets the students assimilate and master the concepts at their own pace, giving personalized learning solutions in addition to class room teaching.

OUTCOME  Automated library with slim++ software with which students can check and put requisition of book on line. Examination system is automated.

ATRIUM

he Atrium, intranet platform was deployed on one of the best platforms – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The project was conceptualised with the aim of providing a single platform for the entire ISB community students, faculty members, administrative staff, etc., to access organisation level information, with complete role based privileges so that privacy settings are assured. The complete deployment was planned and executed by the internal technical team without involving any external partners. The entire process of creating the scope, evaluation of various software, features list and user requirements mapping, beta launch, customising the navigation, look was innovative that the portal is currently a default information gateway. The portal has now become an integral part of the campus life for the ISB faculty, staff, and students as it is a centralised repository of knowledge. It is used as a collaborative tool and has effectively reduced spam emails to the entire ISB for events, announcements, celebrations, etc. For those who are new to the School, it serves as virtual induction platform, with comprehensive information on the campus and the city itself. With complete information on the School, its programmes, departments, roles and responsibilities of the staff, newcomers are quickly able to familiarise themselves with the community. The features available in MOSS 2007 have helped to create a user-centric intranet with organization level information.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Indian School of Business OBJECTIVES  Provide a single platform for the entire ISB community  Access organisation level information, with complete role based privileges

ICT ENABLED ICTBUSINESS ENABLED SCHOOL SCHOOL

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  A single window for the entire organisation’s data/information, knowledge, resources with complete access control  Reduced administration hassles, and improved the core business

AWARDS

SAPling

he Project – “SAPling” is a full-fledged, process-driven, integrated SAP system at the Indian School of Business. A higher education and research portfolio solution from SAP was introduced in order to support and plan the expansion of ISB. The project started with a small seedling effort of automating the business processes targeting the entire ISB community. The need to use cutting edge technology and best practices to deliver strategic information and improved service delivery has motivated the ISB to choose SAPs Higher Education and Research implementation. The development process involved creating a well defined scope with inputs from various key stakeholders across the organization and providing an exhaustive checklist. The support of a good customercentric, technology-oriented team and a knowledgeable partner to implement the project further contributed to the programme’s success. Meticulous training for the various stakeholders and effective change management initiatives further ensured that the programme was properly adopted across the School. The programme also enabled easier integration of data across various out-of-box applications such as bidding, event management, online application for programmes, placement portal, CRM, etc. The data is pulled from the online admissions portal, venue and event management portal, learning management system, elective bidding system into SAP for all the other departments to use as a central repository.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Indian School of Business OBJECTIVES  Automate business processes  Unify the data in a single source for all business units; gaining access to data anytime, anywhere  Implement collaborative and systematic operational management; improving service delivery

OPEN & DISTANCE LEARNING

PTU Distance Education Programme IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Punjab Technical University Distance Education Programme OBJECTIVES  Provide affordable, flexible and relevant technical education  Reach out to a strong network of 32 regional centers & 1600+ Learning centers providing services to over 1,50,000 students

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

unjab Technical University, (PTU) started its Distance Education Programme (DEP) in 2001. In DEP, PTU offers undergraduate and post graduate Diploma and Degree programmes in the field of IT and management, hotel management, airlines and tourism, paramedical and allied technologies, fashion, interior, jewellery and textile designing, fire, safety and hazards management, mass communication and journalism and multi-media technologies. All these programmes are approved by Distance Education Council (IGNOU), New Delhi. In PTUDEP, there is a unique model of PPP. The administrative, conduct & secrecy powers rest with the University wherein the University designs courses, syllabi & curriculum, prepares learning material, establishes learning centers, conducts & evaluates examinations, provide certification and maintain quality. Regional Centres coordinate with university and assist in establishment of learning centres and their trainings, prepare and publish advertisements, data base management and MIS, process forms and fees, take care of logistics and supplies, coordinate in conduct of exam, disseminate information, organise center meetings and trainings whereas learning centres maintain infrastructure as specified by PTU.

OUTCOME  There are more than 1,50,000 students acquiring qualifications in different courses  There are more than 1600 learning centres all across India

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AWARDS

ICT ENABLED SCHOOL OPEN & DISTANCE LEARNING

LIVE Webcast Courses IMPLEMENTING AGENCY CDEEP IIT Bombay OBJECTIVES  Provide quality education in the field of science and engineering to any willing individual from India or any where free of cost  Address the deficiency of quality faculty  Transmit its courses free and unencrypted through the satellite EDUSAT

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  The programme is running very successfully and it is going to be operational for faculty members.  It has proved to be good model for dual degree programme

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

he live webcast course at Center of Distance Education Programme (CDEEP) IIT Bombay was started with the objective to provide quality education in the field of science and engineering to any willing individual from India or any where free of cost. The project provides web based distance education solution to whomever, wherever and whatever. About 500,000 students enroll in engineering studies in India every year at the undergraduate level which is only 2.5 percent of the age group. Although only a select group studies engineering, according to McKinsey studies, only 25 percent of the engineering graduates of India are employable. The main reason for this state of affairs is deficiency of quality faculty in the engineering colleges of India. Because of this dismal state, not many students with a Bachelor’s degree in engineering are ready to go for higher studies. Moreover, less than 1 percent of them can hope to enroll in Master’s programs. Naturally there is big shortage of Master’s and Ph.D graduates in India. During last fifty year IITs have established themselves as one of the most premier institutions around the world in providing engineering education. Just 1 percent of the aspirants get admitted to the IITs, through an entrance exam JEE. IIT Bombay offers a total 1000 semester long courses in science and different branches of engineering.

OUTCOME  Till date more than 100 courses are transmitted on live webcast  Government College of Engineering Poona (COEP) has accepted the courses of CDEEP IIT Bombay as plug in replacement for there regular courses

WEB Based Examination System

eb based Examination System is secured with IP based policy and students are allocated with roll numbers for logging into the system. The Online Examination System is a web based application developed in open source MySQL and PHP. This customised software has been developed for dual degree students of PAU. This is run from an In–House Apache Webserver on their internal network. The examination consists of different types of multiple choice questions and subjective questions. The questions and time to attempt are fixed. The answers are evaluated and the marks obtained for each along with the answer given by the student are stored in the database. The examiner can get the results immediately. The software maintains the details for each student as well as provides a facility for editing the student details if required. There is password based access for individual answer sheets and general mark lists. This Online Examination System in PHP and MySQL can be modified and customized to suit the need of any Educational Institutions, Primary and Secondary Schools, Colleges, Professional and Vocational Institutes, Universities or Training Academies. This software is suited to any kind of examinations and it will save valuable time spent on assessing the answer books and the results can be obtained immediately.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Punjab Agricultural University OBJECTIVES  Automate the examination procedure  Save valuable time spent on assessing the answer books and the results that can be obtained immediately

ENABLED SCHOOL OPEN & ICT DISTANCE LEARNING

JURY AWARD

OUTCOME  The mobile learning initiative was evaluated via a questionnaire and the evaluation showed that the students highly accepted the SMS learning  The messages received were easy to understand and are easy to remember

AWARDS

POCKET Education

he Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) through the School of Distance Education (SDE) boasts of state-of-the-art telecommunication capabilities and innovative educational approach to enhance the educational architecture and learning environment in Malaysia. The dawning of the age of the Internet saw SDE produce a home-grown learning management system in 2003 with full migration to Moodle in 2005. In the 2007-08 acedemic session, SDE piloted the use of the hand phone in distance teaching via the use of SMS in a second year Physics optics course with the code JIF212. The chosen topic of ‘dispersion’ was redesigned in a SMS fashion such that the students could receive short messages based on the topic. One of the main thrust of this project is to incorporate pacing by constructing the text message according to the sequence of topics in the learning materials. Being in vocation, the students could benefit from the SMS received and enhanced connectivity in their study. The success of the pilot led to the construction of a dedicated system in USM Called Pocket Education. Weekly segments of content-rich SMSes are loaded onto the system for a scheduled delivery over the period of the study. An in-house interactive system is currently being developed for a multi-application construct in the scalable mobile learning mode.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Mobile Learning OBJECTIVES  Provide education though Mobile devices  Develop course content to suit SMS requirements  Incorporate pacing by constructing the text message according to the sequence of topics in the learning materials

SKILL DEVELOPMENT

JAWAHAR Knowledge Center Initiative IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Institute For Electronic Governance OBJECTIVES  Socially challenged sections of the society have equal opportunities for employment in the IT & ITES sectors  Bridge the gap between industry and academia and thus improve the rate of employment

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

The Institute for Electronic Governance (IEG) is a state level nonprofit society established by Government of Andhra Pradesh, to offer solutions in the discourse of quality human resources by bringing synergy among the institutions of the government, industry and academia. IEG has started its training programe by establishing Jawahar Knowledge Centers. The JKC initiative has been inaugurated in December 2004 by the Honorable Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Late Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy in order to bridge the gap between industry and academia and thus improve the rate of employment. At present IEG is training nearly 100,000 students with a special focus on students from rural backgrounds. IEG has also started a separate program called Special Training Program (STP) to ensure that all the socially challenged sections of the society have equal opportunities for employment in the IT & ITES sectors through imparting state of the art training. Under this project IEG has trained about 800 socially and economically challenged Engineers for improving their skills in IT related sectors totally on free of cost and placement assistance was provided. The so far training programs taken by IEG are in the direction of producing industry ready graduates in cooperation and collaboration with Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education and several Universities within the state.

OUTCOME  The program helps in bridging the gap between industry and academia  Helped in taking major companies for campus placements to the colleges in the tier II and III towns

august 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

AWARDS

ICT ENABLED SCHOOL SKILL DEVELOPMENT

FINANCIAL Intermediaries Course IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Crux Management Services OBJECTIVES  Provide basic knowledge in banking operations  Help the candidates in developing an overall understanding of the several aspects including role and function of Business Facilitators / Business Correspondents and Financial advising and counseling

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  On 11 March 2010, S.A.V.E. delivered for its first-ever module on plumbing in the Tribal Settlement of Kumbitankuzhy  First time ever that Governmentfunded vocational training in the field of plumbing was imparted to women and girls

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

eserve Bank of India has permitted banks to use intermediaries such as Business Correspondents/Business Facilitators (BC/BF) to reach out to the rural population. Keeping this objective in mind, the IIBF has mandated Crux to offer a certificate course, with structured classroom work followed by examination, targeted at the newly-emerging cadre of financial intermediaries called BF/BCs. This course is aimed at those individuals and organisations who will take banking and financial services to people. The business facilitators/business correspondents help banks to identify potential customers, undertake advising/counseling of village people about appropriate bank products and services. They further help villagers to complete the formalities that are needed to transact with the bank, in putting through basic and small value transactions of the rural people. They also educate customers about terms of sanction and help in matters related to compliance of sanction terms, repayment and recovery. This course is aimed at enhancing the skill sets of business facilitators /business correspondents. The journey of the IIBF started with an MOU being signed between IIBF and Crux.The program is scalable as Crux involves and associates the local authority to generate the interest and utilize the infrastructure. There is a huge demand for skilled manpower to achieve financial inclusion for more than 50 percent of the Indians who will largely benefit from the availability of financial services.

OUTCOME  The program has trained people from the less privileged background and has certified close to 95% of the participants  The program used ICT as a way to conduct the training programmes to make it more effective

SAKSHAT Amrita Vocational Education

unded by the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development, SAVE applies path breaking haptic technology and virtual reality to the realm of vocational education. Software and hardware developed at SAVE will eventually reduce the need for instructor time and time on expensive machinery. This would also ensure that the curriculum and testing functions of vocational courses can be standardized across India. SAVE is demonstrating the means to provide vocational education on a broader scale. And by targeting individuals who have thus far been sidelined in India’s economic progress, SAVE’s work offers concrete proof that with proper application of modern technology, prosperity and growth are increasingly achievable for all sectors of society. SAVE caters to a population that until now has been disproportionately handicapped in their ability to enter into effective income-generating activities. With SAVE courses accessible from anywhere where there is Internet or satellite connectivity—desktop and laptop computers, standard mobile phones and smart-phones; location will no longer be a barrier to vocational education. SAVE courses can be transmitted to remote locales, equipping these vulnerable communities with the skills and means they need to survive and prosper in a changing world. The unique application of haptic technology to vocational education will minimize the need for materials and tools.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Amrita Vishwa Vidya Peetham OBJECTIVES  Apply haptic technology and virtual reality to the realm of vocational education  Offer courses that can be transmitted to remote locales, equipping vulnerable communities with skills  Demonstrate the means to provide vocational education on a broader scale

SKILL DEVELOPMENT ICT ENABLED SCHOOL

JURY AWARD

OUTCOME  947 people have found IT based jobs and 35 people have obtained non-IT based jobs  About 19596 farmers have accessed information related to agriculture

AWARDS

COMPUTERJI Jode Duniya se

ga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) [(AKRSP (I) ] has partnered with Microsoft for an information technology project. “Computerji Jode Duniya se”. This initiative of AKRSP (India) focuses on enhancing livelihoods in remote rural areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh & Bihar by using information technology as a tool. The AKRSP (I) is active in six districts of Gujarat and three districts of Madhya Pradesh. In 2007, AKRSP(I) initiated its work in Samastipur & Muzaffarpur districts of Bihar. The Computerji project was initiated to address all gaps in IT training and skill development. Computerji centres are located in areas with tribal and marginalized population. Five centres are located in the remote tribal areas of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and the remaining eleven centres are set up in areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh & Bihar, which have a majority of OBC/SC population. The Computerji centre is based on Private-Public Partnership model. Private organizations and communities have contributed for setting up and running the centres. These centres impart training on computer skills at a very nominal rate as well as introduce community to the use of computers for livelihood enhancement activities. It is a revenue-based structure. People are charged for the computer course, while the information is free. This makes it financially viable.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Aga Khan Rural Support Programme India OBJECTIVES  Impart training on computer skills at a very nominal rate  Introduce community to the use of computers for livelihood enhancement activities  Address all gaps in IT training and skill development

PRIVATE SECTOR

TEACHING Learning Paradigm through ICT Intervention IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Educomp Solutions Ltd, Haryana OBJECTIVES  Bridge the digital divide by improving education delivery in predominantly rural Government schools through ICT  Reach out to even those schools for whom technology would have remained but a dream and to make their aspiration a reality

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

ducomp has ushered a whole new teaching-learning paradigm in schools across India by developing quality courseware and multimedia in regional languages, and providing quality training to teachers, developing training modules to contain 21st century learning skills, project based learning, on making lesson plans and unit plans, and continuous evaluation. It has introduced local language empowering MagiKeys Software to enable ‘Online’ or ‘Offline’ learning in different languages. Special local language multimedia training aids and courseware have also been developed to enable speedy and intuitive adoption by both students and teachers. It aims at helping state governments to increase their achievement of targets by investing initially minimal resources via Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) Model. They have been offered interventions, products and services that have bridged the learning opportunity gap between the haves and have-nots. The implementation process via BOOT Model in 14 states and over 15,000+ Schools, facilitating adoption by more and more schools.

OUTCOME  Educomp trained teachers in ICT and also helped to create an entire value chain where students could in turn be trained  It has helped the employees of the Company to become partners in developing rural India through government schools

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AWARDS

ICT ENABLED SCHOOL PRIVATE SECTOR

KENDRIYA Vidyalaya Automation Project IMPLEMENTING AGENCY S Chand Harcourt OBJECTIVES  Engage students in their learning and raise their levels of conceptual understanding  Improve communication, collaborative and ICT skills and to develop higher order thinking skills in students

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  CRW engulfs components, such as, teleconferencing technologies, and enables instructions to be received simultaneously by multiple, geographically dispersed learners

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

he S.Chand Harcourt technology enabled education solution Destination Success was launched as a pilot programme in five Kendriya Vidalayas in different cities including: Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Simla. The pilot programme aimed at testing the solution offered by S. Chand Harcourt in these schools for its effectiveness in meeting the needs of the government schools. The purpose of the pilot was to assess the suitability and feasibility of providing a low cost self sustaining model under PPP. The academic aim of the programme was to empower teachers with the knowledge and strategies to meet the needs of the 21st century education through the use and integration of technology in the teaching learning process. Since the S.Chand Harcourt solution was the first technology enabled solution and on the basis of the discussions with the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, it was decided that the pilot programme would be introduced for the primary classes III-V in the schools. Also, S. Chand Harcourt effected a system for continuous support to the school and teachers in having a qualified IT executive on the school premises to help teachers in the use of the solution telephonic and electronic discussions with the school assigned coordinator of the programme to address queries/difficulties and follow up visits to the school by the S. Chand Harcourt trainers.

OUTCOME  The teachers are more IT proficient and comfortable in using the solution  Increased creative teaching skills and cross disciplinary teaching and learning  Using a blended approach in teaching

DIGITAL Class Room Windows

digital classroom window (CRW) is typically a teacher centered technology. A CRW can be created by streaming a live classroom activity from one place to another using the internet broadband and the innovation in ICT. A CRW can be of different types. It can be passive / active CRW. A passive CRW is one where only listening and viewing the activity in the class room is possible, whereas an active CRW is one which allows to interact and participate actively with the professor and the students respectively from a remote classes. The time mapping was convenient and the professors were cooperative and involved. An active classroom was set up at the Hindustan university campus, to facilitate lectures and interaction delivered by Australian professors, for the students, through CRW. The same facility was extended to KCG College of Technology, using the resources from the Hindustan University. This CRW facility can also be extended to the University of Sydney campus. The CRW could reach out to more students than the conventional classroom strength. In other words it maximises the reach of the class room of renowned colleges, university and resource person globally, by optimising the ICT facilities. This provides a gateway to active and live learning facilities, effectively than distance learning, learning through pod casts or elearning.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Hindustan University OBJECTIVES  Llisten to the lectures of leading professors from Sydney University, who could not visit Hindustan university campus due to time factor and financial constraints

AWARDS

GOVERNMENT POLICY

HEALTH Services Management System IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Department of Medical Health & Family Welfare, Rajasthan OBJECTIVES  Ensure better health for women  Minimise maternal mortality, neo natal mortality and trace areas with decreasing sex ratio at birth  Monitor health care institutions

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Unique health ID issued to approximately 25 lakh patients  Automatic generation of cash collection and inventory reports  Faster dispensation of drugs to the patient at pharmacy through online prescriptions with less medication errors

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

he Pregnancy, Child Tracking & Health Services Management System is a web-based online system developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) Rajasthan for Medical, Health & Family Welfare Department, Government of Rajasthan, for improving its services right upto the grass root level (health sub-centre). The system is extremely useful in ensuring better health for women, minimising maternal mortality, neo natal mortality and in tracing areas with decreasing sex ratio at birth. It is also useful in monitoring functioning of all health institutions across the state numbering more than 13, 000. The Pregnancy, Child Tracking & Health Services Management System is targeted towards improving health services right upto the lowest level health institution in the state viz; Health Subcentre at village level. The system makes it possible to monitor all institutions with online details of individual beneficiary getting services from them. The users are located at state, district, sub district level. Monitoring of individual case through the system ensures that health services are provided to every woman who has registered for ANC at any centre or other government institution across the state. Monthly requirement of vaccine dosages is automatically prepared by the system for each of the health institution. Thus it is also an effective tool for monitoring service delivery by every health institution. In addition, hospital activity indicators provide information about IPD, OPD, investigations, etc. which are useful in assessing service delivery.

OUTCOME  Improved health services  Better health surveillance  Reduction in maternal mortality  Reduction in child mortality  Improved child health because of better monitoring of vaccination programme

HEALTHCARE Management Information System

he Government of Maharashtra (GoM) realised the challenges of dealing with providing healthcare services to a huge population and decided to use ICT as a tool to enhance their ability to deal with this complex delivery model. Through the HMIS project, the GoM outsourced the entire patient registration and front office management of OP/IP and casualty services with an objective of reducing patient waiting time and bringing more professionalism and better patient experience when they approach government hospitals. GoM brought out a very pragmatic model of “Outsourced Service Delivery“ on a monthly payable basis for seven years, wherein the government absolved themselves of making huge upfront investments thus making the project more affordable. The contract was awarded to Hewlett- Packard India Sales Pvt. Ltd through a competitive bid process to computerise the operations of 14 government medical colleges and 19 teaching hospitals in Maharashtra by implementation of HMIS for the purpose of education, training, research, patient care and related activities. The project targets the population that is dependent on government hospitals at large, doctors, nurses and paramedics who are key players in the delivery of care, diagnostic services providers, medical and nursing students and medical researchers.

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Medical Education and Drugs Department, Maharashtra OBJECTIVES  Create unique health ID for patients visiting state government run hospitals  Reduce patient waiting time for registration and consultation  Bring in transparency through a more accountable system

GOVERNMENT POLICY

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Fall in the MTP ratio (specially female)  High delivery rates of females  Proper reporting on daily basis by all the centres

AWARDS

SAVE the Baby Girl

he gender composition in India has worsened over a period of time. With the sex-ratio alarmingly decreasing amongst children in the age group of 0-6 there is a real threat of greater gender imbalance and unhealthy adult sex ratio in the society. To tackle the problem head on, the Kolhapur District Collector initiated an ICT-led innovative solution to the problem, as a web portal “Save the Baby Girl” and “Silent Observer (SiOB)” in the second phase. All sonography centres in the district are made online and submit the report of all sonography tests online to monitor their activities and are being fitted with SiOB. Kolhapur District, Maharashtra has a ratio of 839 females per 1,000 males and it is one of the lowest in the state. Keeping it in mind, the balance could only be brought to the lower age-group of children 0-6 years through any possible initiative. Foreseeing this, the administration decided to target the age-group of 0-6 years for Census 2011 and for 7-14 years for the census 2021, for a balanced and healthy sex-ratio. The girls have been aborted because of various reasons as male dominance in Indian culture, traditional rituals, financial dependency and dowry.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Kohlapur District Administration (Maharashtra) OBJECTIVES  To control female foeticides  Have a monitoring solution for sonograhy centres having machines working on ultrasound technologies

TRIPURA Vision Centre Project IMPLEMENTING AGENCY ILFS ETS for Government of Tripura OBJECTIVES  To take preventive and primary eye care services to remote locations  Measuring the quality and effectiveness of the service offered at various eye care centres

JURY AWARD

he tele-ophthalmology project is initiated for the ophthalmology department, Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Tripura. It is aimed at offering primary and preventive eye care services to rural citizens of Tripura by adopting advances in medical sciences, biomedical engineering and its convergence with Information and Communication Technology. Poised with the challenges of inadequate medical facilities and limited eye care specialists in the rural areas, this initiative has overcome all geographical, economic, social barriers earlier faced by the rural citizens and helped them in obtaining quality eye care services from Vision Centres located at their doorsteps. The Vision Centre is a comprehensive model for providing eye care in a decentralised manner located at the 35 block offices of the state. All patients visiting the vision centre are completely examined by the ophthalmic assistant and the medical record is uploaded electronically for doctor’s live tele-consultation from the IGM base Hospital in Agartala. Audio/video conferencing tools seamlessly integrate with the medical information system in facilitating the quality consultation process. The medical/glass prescription, and any further follow-ups required are scheduled live from the Base Hospital and the directions are given to the patient in the Vision Centre.

OUTCOME  Contributed in saving the vision of rural citizens in terms of avoiding needless blindness  Enhanced the capacity of prevalent eye care system of Tripura by structurally integrating primary, secondary and tertiary care

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AWARDS

GOVERNMENT CIVIL SOCIETYPOLICY

MIS for Safe Motherhood and Child Survival IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Deepak Foundation OBJECTIVES  Monitor health service delivery to pregnant and nursing women and their newborns  Monitor activities of grassroots health functionaries related to maternal and child health  Share health indicators with all stakeholders

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Citizens are able to get the SMS service about the nearest hospital facility and other details  Details of doctors working in various specialties can be recorded

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

he Safe Motherhood and Child Survival (SMCS) project is the core project of Deepak Foundation undertaken since 2004 in partnership with the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Gujarat, with the broad objective of reducing the maternal and infant mortality rate in the District. The project goals are in line with the Millennium Development Goals (1990-2015), National Population Policy (2000), National Rural Health Mission (2005-2012) and the Gujarat Population Policy (2002) goals. The project aims to reduce maternal mortality ratio to less than 100 per 100,000 live births and reduce infant mortality rate to less than 30 per 1000 live births. The core activities are formation and strengthening of Village Health and Sanitation Committees (VHSCs), behavior change communication (BCC) through training of village volunteers i.e. Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Trained Traditional Birth Attendants (TTBAs), setting up of emergency transport network at block level and two Mobile Health Units in difficult tribal belts, establishment of Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC) unit linked to a Community Health Centre covering 9 lakh tribal population and setting up of Help Desk at district level receiving referral cases from peripheral areas. Tracking of individual pregnant woman beneficiary through a specially created web enabled Computerised Management Information System (CMIS) is an initiative within the larger SMCS project.

OUTCOME  Compilation of over 219,852 pregnant and nursing women data till May 2010  Timely referrals of high risk women and children  Better coordination among mother and child healthcare functionaries

DR SMS and Health Information Portal

r SMS service, the first-of-its-kind in India, provides contact details of nearest health facility centres or institution through SMS in the needed hours. The project was inaugurated by Sri V S Achuthanandan, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Kerala in Kozhikode district. During emergencies, timely attention is more important than specialised attention given late and Dr. SMS helps to find the nearest place where such facilities are available. The facility is available round the clock. The Dr. SMS service for medical information can be received by typing the health pin code facility (for example health 673004 heart) and sending it to a particular number. The reply SMS will have the name of the nearest hospital with heart diseases. If a Health Hospital name SMS is sent, the reply will have hospital number along with the facilities available. To check whether a particular specialty is available then a Health Hospital Name Facility SMS should be sent. The public can get the service through sending an SMS in the above format to 537252 anywhere from Kerala. As mobile penetration is high, this service can be made available in every nook and corner of the state. Data collection has been taken up the District Medical Officer of Khozikode district. The details of the various hospitals and its facilities are captured in the system.

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IMPLEMENTING AGENCY NIC-Thiruvananthapuram OBJECTIVES  To provide contact details of nearest health facility centres or institutions through SMS

CIVIL SOCIETY GOVERNMENT POLICY

JURY

AWARDS

HEALTH Risk Assessment Index of India

AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  Two thousand assessments conducted in the pilot phase  Selected by DMAI as its exclusive partner to conduct their Health Risk Assessment Index survey for the next two years

ake Me Healthy is a pioneering and unique venture in India in the field of Lifestyle Health & Chronic Disease Management and is taking Preventive Healthcare to the doorsteps of the people using Tele-Health Technologies. Make Me Healthy conducts lifestyle health risk assessments for the individuals in the comfort of their home or office, in just 15 minutes. All that an individual needs to do is make a call or send an SMS to book an appointment. The assessment comprises of collection of family and personal health history, information about social habits and biometric screening comprising of: random blood sugar and HbA1C, ECG, spirometry (PFT), total cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, pulse oximetry and body composition. All of these tests are conducted using state-of-the-art US FDA and CE approved Bluetooth enabled devices. The data is transferred from the devices to a laptop/PDA using Bluetooth and from there to the Central Monitoring Station (CMS) using GPRS/3G. A team of doctors at the CMS examines the collected information and correlate them with the test values to create a final assessment report. The assessment report provides a comprehensive parameterised and overall risk rating along with detailed information on chronic diseases, ways to prevent and delay their onset along with doctors’ recommendations, customised diet charts and fitness regimes.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY MakeMe Healthy & Disease Management Association of India OBJECTIVES  To conduct holistic health risk assessment with the use of technology  Focus on preventive healthcareglance

ICT ENABLED DIAGNOSTIC

eMEDLABS IPM IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Institute of Preventive Medicine OBJECTIVES  Provide laboratory services in diagnosis of diseases through pathology, microbiology and biochemistry  Provide facilities in diagnostic units in all medical laboratory tests  Meet the problems of the target group for the various services

JURY AWARD

he Institute of Preventive Medicine, Public Health Laboratories and Food (Health) Administration is a multi-faceted department with multifarious activities and functions in the process of achieving preventive health care. The project was started to solve the problems by harnessing the state-of-the-art ICT where the quality of the investigations and the reports used to be poor and complaints used to occur everyday from the citizens visiting the public health labs, the long queuing time to get the vaccination done for the international travellers, recurring complaints and problems on several issues related to infectious diseases, to ensure timely reporting of the investigation reports especially in the case of diseases such as Human Influenza A-H1N1, to solve the problem of delays in reporting, to treat the doctors irrespective of their location in the state, and to have a cue of blood availability status where if known before hand, then timely decisions can be taken especially during the golden hours.

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  In diagnostics nearly 2 lakh tests, every year since 2007, with an average of 600 tests per day

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AWARDS

ICT ENABLED DIAGNOSTIC GOVERNMENT POLICY

FROM Customer Satisfaction to Customer Delight IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Dr Lal PathLabs OBJECTIVES  Provide customer delight, one stop shop for all queries  Serve the target group of people who cannot visit the lab personally

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  A success story spanning over three years of covering remote hospitals and providing high quality low cost reports  Creating a reading centre of excellence with over 40 radiologists at the Teleradiology Solutions headquarters

JURY

MENTION

et up effectively last year (2009-10) on 1st April, 2009, the Programme/ Project idea was conceived two years back and was implemented fully (phase one) in 2009-10 last year. The idea was to provide a ‘One Call Does It All’ kind of a model wherein all home collection customer enquiries, queries, etc can be received and personalised attention given for execution of actual service at customers’ home and workplace in a hygienic, fast and safe manner. This facility was initialised at Janak Puri where a state of the art communication and knowledge hub was set-up – first of it’s kind in the country in diagnostics domain for customer delight. This hub was an amalgamation of latest technology, communication knowhow, innovative systems and superior integration of the diagnostic labs across Delhi/NCR and a team of best customer service professionals adapt with medical knowledge at the same time. Based on the customers’ feedback few years back- it was felt that there is a need for home collection of samples especially in a busy city like Delhi and NCR. Information on tests, fasting requirements, scheduling of actual home collection service, getting test reports, etc could thereby be handled from this customer care number in a personalised manner from the comfort of one’s home.

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Customers can be followed up regularly for feedback  The initiative has received an overwhelming response from the customers

TELERADIOLOGY Solutions

eleradiology Solutions, India’s first Teleradiology program, was founded in 2002 by two Yale trained physicians. The project was initially set up to provide hospitals in the United States with night shift radiology solutions. However the organisation has grown rapidly and now provides teleradiology services to hospitals globally in Singapore, Puerto Rico, Croatia, Georgia, Denmark, Netherlands and remote parts of India. Within India, the organisation, through the Telerad Foundation, provides reporting services free of charge to hospitals in remote parts of the country. Teleradiology Solutions (US) was the first Indian health care organisation to be accredited by the US Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations (JCAHO). It is also the first organisation outside Singapore to be accredited by the Ministry of Health, Singapore and provides teleradiology services to 11 medical centers in Singapore under the National Health care group. It has used the domain expertise involved in providing diagnostic services using ICT that it has gained via working for the world and is now using this within India to help increase the reach of diagnostics to patients all over the country.

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IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Teleradiology Solutions OBJECTIVES  Use technology to send high quality diagnostic reports to hospitals across the world  Provides Teleradiology services to hospitals around the globe  Emergency reports are provided within 30 minutes to locations diametrically across the globe

GOVERNMENT POLICY HEALTH INSURANCE

JURY AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  The BPL population receives treatment for most types of serious illness without facing a catastrophic financial burden

AWARDS

RAJIV Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme

he scheme is an innovative and non-conventional health insurance scheme in PPP mode and many following features, making it a unique. Aarogyasri is a non-conventional health insurance scheme that runs as an independent trust with Hon’ble Chief Minister as Chairman to oversee the implementation and act as the regulator of the scheme. Through this scheme, the Government is able to provide insurance coverage of up to Rs 2 lakhs per year on a family floater basis for 2.03 crore families at a cost of only Rs 400/- per family per year. This could be achieved by the Government without cutting in to other provisions in the budget for healthcare. Further the huge disease and patient load could be substantially managed with the implementation model. Every day, atleast 8000 patients are screened in health camps and PHC’s, around 4000 patients get registered in network hospitals, around 2500 patients are treated as outpatients and 1500 patients get inpatient treatment. The scheme is also bringing in quality medical infrastructure and expertise in to the state. Several new hospitals have come up at the district and sub district levels. Presently on any given day a minimum of 13000 beds are occupied by Aarogyasri beneficiaries across the state. The software used in Aarogyasri has been designed by Tata Consultancy Services. While Aarogyasri Trust provided the domain knowledge, TCS provided the technical design and developed the solution accordingly.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Aarogyasri Health Care Trust OBJECTIVES  Improve access of BPL families to quality medical care for treatment of identified diseases  Assist BPL families for their catastrophic health needs without compromising the importance of existing healthcare delivery system of the government

CHIEF Minister Kalaignar Insurance Scheme IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Tamil Nadu Health Systems Society OBJECTIVES  Provide quality and free healthcare for the economically weaker sections and the downtrodden

JURY

MENTION

n its quest towards a healthy society, the Tamil Nadu Government has launched the Chief Minister Kalaignar Insurance scheme for life saving treatments on July 23rd, 2009 for providing quality and free healthcare for the economically weaker sections and the downtrodden. The eligibility criteria are carefully determined so as to benefit the needy and the deserving lot. This has been possible by roping in selected private hospitals apart from the Government medical colleges and District hospitals in the state. More than 600 surgical procedures and treatments identified by senior medical/surgical consultants are covered under the project. For efficient administration and management of this scheme, advanced IT elements have been used. Usage of Biometric cards has helped in getting malpractice-free, unique identity cards for the beneficiaries contributing in its own meagre way towards being a eco-friendly process, as it has dispensed away the use of paper forms. Using the Video Conferencing facility has facilitated close and effective communication between the central e-Governance teams and the remote teams. The scheme is targeted to cover the poorest of the poor/ low income/ unorganised groups. Beneficiaries of this scheme would cover the families of the 27 welfare boards as well as families earning less than Rs.72,000/- per annum. With the currently fixed eligibility criteria, more than 1.3 crore families will get to benefit from this philanthropic project.

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Launched across the entire state in one shot  Improvement in the mortality rate and the good number of beneficiaries from the less populated and remote district

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AWARDS

GOVERNMENT POLICY HEALTH INSURANCE

MUKHYA Mantri Jeevan Raksha Kosh IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Department of Medical, Health and Family Welfare, Rajasthan OBJECTIVES  Provide free and better health services to those who cannot afford medical expenditure

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Miniaturisation, portability and better clinical workflow solutions Low power consumption

nfotech’s medical team has conceived, designed and developed world’s first USB powered three lead compact ECG monitor to offer a low cost and effective cardiac diagnostics. The system works with the power supplied by the USB port. The USB-based ECG monitoring system resembles a pen-drive. The main features of this system are three- lead ECG Monitoring and Heart Rate Measurement. Plug-in this module into one of the PC’s USB ports and run the application software on the PC to monitor the ECG of an individual. The other end of this device is provided by the ECG leads which needs to be attached to the patient for whom ECG is to be monitored. The ECG data can also be transmitted to an expert in the cardiology room using ZigBee in case of emergency. Remote Monitoring of ECG can be done on any PC with minimal hardware. It requires no cable spaghetti in intensive care units or improved clinical workflow low power (from USB). It is quite user friendly and is affordable. Being the smallest functional ECG monitor, Infotech USB- ECG can become the most important tool in the doctor’s kit. Lead selection ECG analysis is done for arrhythmia detection with interface option with MATLAB /LabVIEW or similar packages.

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CHOICE #3

ukhya Mantri’s Jeevan Raksha Kosh (MM-JRK) is an insurance scheme initiated in Rajasthan for the poor population. The Hospital Management System for Mukha Mantri Jeevan Raksha Kosh is a web based on-line application, intended to facilitate free medical treatment to poor patients in any Government health facility at state, district or sub district level. The system extends right up to the Community Health Centres (CHC). The system is developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC), Rajasthan and is part of HEALING which is a comprehensive e-Governance tool of the department. The system is intended to cater to a target population of more than one crore. System is operational for about 500 health institutes, which includes 6 Medical College Hospitals, 33 District Hospitals, 11 Sub division Hospitals, 7 Satellite Hospitals and 388 Community Health centres (CHC). Currently data is reported from 400 locations and records of more than 30 lakh patients are available online. Software provides appropriate interfaces for online verification of patient category (BPL / Astha / HIV-AIDS / State BPL / Old Age pensioner/ Widow Pensioner / Handicapped pensioner) from their respective data bases.

USB Powered 3Lead ECG monitor

CITIZEN

OUTCOME  Has interfaces for more than 500 different locations spread across the state  System is operational for about 500 health institutes

PRIVATE SECTOR

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Infotech OBJECTIVES  Offer low cost and effective cardiac diagnostics  Enable portability to improve reach to remotest parts in the country

PRIVATE SECTOR GOVERNMENT POLICY

JURY AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  Easy access to information about consultants, their availability, fees, facilities available in different hospitals

AWARDS

HELLODoctor24X7

elloDoctor24x7 was conceived to provide round-the-clock medical and healthcare information to the public over phone as a primary medium coupled with SMS, email and fax as the secondary medium. Based on the premise of streamlining healthcare information over mobile phones, a group of medicos and technocrats sat down to implement an ICT enabled infrastructure where these services can be rendered to the public. Originally the brainchild of two medicos, the programme has been operational in Orissa with its service delivery centers based in Bhubaneswar. HelloDoctor24x7 DataCentre keeps accurate and up-to-date healthcare information and uses a range of software tools, both developed in-house and open sourced, to streamline the overall process while providing the information at the least possible time. With a futuristic vision, HelloDoctor24x7 aims at providing these services while improving the process. Currently its range of services include Medical and consultant directory, blood donors availability nearest to your hospital, Online appointment fixing, online counseling, Doctors on call, EHR coupled with in-house PRM (patient relationship management, a customised CRM) to keep track of patients case history and development, telephonic triage service.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY HelloDoctor24x7 Healthcare OBJECTIVES  Streamline healthcare information  Enable people to access healthcare services seamlessly anytime, anywhere

HMIS Project IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Medical Education and Drugs Department, Maharashtra & HP India OBJECTIVES  Create unique health ID for the patients visiting state Government run hospitals which will be used as permanent MRD number for the patient  Reduce the waiting time for patients by making all patient data available

CITIZEN

CHOICE #3

he Government of Maharashtra realised the challenges of dealing with providing healthcare services to a huge population and decided to use ICT as a tool to enhance their ability to deal with this complex delivery model. Through this project, the GoM also outsourced the entire patient registration and front office management of OP/IP and casualty services with an objective of reducing patient waiting time and bringing more professionalism and better patient experience when they approach these government hospitals. Taking the lead on the healthcare in PPP mode, the state government has adopted the model of “Outsourced Service Delivery” on a monthly payable basis for seven years, with no upfront investment being made by Maharashtra. The deferred payment model has made the project more affordable. The contract was awarded to Hewlett-Packard India through a competitive bid process to computerise the operations of 14 Government Medical Colleges and 19 teaching hospitals in Maharashtra by implementation an HMIS for the purpose of education, training, research, patient care and related activities. The project enables the state government to create unique health ID for the patients visiting state Government run hospitals which will be used as permanent MRD number for the patient

OUTCOME  Over 25 lakh patients issued unique health ID card across four hospitals that have gone live since October 18, 2008  Computerised in-patient admission done for approximately 2.10 lakh patients

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AWARDS

ICT ENABLED HOSPITAL GOVERNMENT POLICY

COMPUTERISATION of Wellness Centres IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Central Governement Health Scheme (CGHS) OBJECTIVES  Make CGHS services more patient friendly  Introduce innovative services like  Beneficiaries could be permitted to draw medicines from any where  Credit facility to beneficiaries for treatment taken under emergency in another city

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  All MOH Hospital Department are linked to the same online record  The entering and accessing data in the system is quick, simple, and easy

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

he CGHS in India provides a comprehensive health care for central government employees and their family members, pensioners and their dependant family members, Members of Parliament, ex-MPs, and judges of the Supreme Court of India. The Linux and web-based computerisation program rolled out under the scheme has helped connect all CGHS Wellness centres through Internet and central server. The data of beneficiary is accessible from anywhere in India using the beneficiary ID. Earlier each family used to have one family CGHS card number. Now each member of CGHS has a unique ID number, which enables data tracking, medical records including medicines consumed. In Delhi each beneficiary is provided with Individual Plastic Card bearing unique ID with GS1 pre fixed bar code. This makes availing CGHS facility user friendly. Bar code scanner can also be used to identify beneficiary making services more user friendly and accountable. CGHS supplies medicines by Central procurement. These medicines are procured locally through authorised local chemist attached to dispensary. Manual preparation of these local indents used to take many hours and chemists often used to supply after 3-4 days from the date of prescription causing inconvenience to beneficiaries because of delay and repeated trips. After computerisation, the local purchase indent is automatically prepared (when the medicine is not available at dispensary) as the doctors start making prescriptions.

OUTCOME  Faster registration of patients  Updation of patients’ medical records  Better coordination in advise for investigation of various pathological tests  Improvement in medicine distribution mechanism

HIS for Hospitals in Malaysia

alaysia’s Health Vision 2020 is to deliver affordable healthcare services to all its citizens through the use of modern, IT enabled, state of the art healthcare facilities created across the nation. In line with this Vision, Malaysia have constructed a number of healthcare facilities across the nation that will be IT enabled and will contain modern, state of the art healthcare equipments and modalities. The Ministry of Health, Malaysia has decided to automate all their hospitals in a phased manner. As part of phase-1, 13 hospitals are being computerised with different levels of automation. The different levels are BHIS, IHIS and THIS. The a Hospital Information System (HIS) is an attempt to provide a mechanism for the sharing of information between all the functional units of a hospital using modern information technology. Patient information will be made available on line accessible for authorised care providers at point of care in order to provide a seamless contiuum of care to the patients. Under the 7th Malaysian Plan (7MP), Economic Planning Unit (EPU) has approved the implementation of HIS in 13 hospitals which were then called Package.

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IMPLEMENTING AGENCY IT Department, Ministry of Health, Malaysia OBJECTIVES  Provide solution that is scalable and can be deployed to any size of hospital, ranging from 100 beds to 800+ beds  Provide solutions that is modular and yet fully integrated  Possess excellent product R&D team

ICT ENABLED HOSPITAL GOVERNMENT POLICY

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  The application was widely appreciated by all functional areas of the hospital  Vast improvements in the Turn Around Times  Reduction in medical errors

AWARDS

APOLLO eHIS Med Mantra

pollo Hospitals, in association with Tata Consultancy Services as technology partner, aimed to create a next generation Hospital Information System (HIS), Med Mantra. The association came into being after a thorough research by Apollo for an appropriate HIS product that could meet the requirements of the network of its hospitals in a truly paperless manner and will be able to embrace innovative technologies like RFID. According to Apollo, there was no single product available in the global market that was matching to its requirements as those products were majorly built for standalone hospitals and as such integrating multiple hospitals was a major challenge. The project aims to ultimately cover all 43 hospitals in Apollo’s network, as of now that includes 8600+ beds, and all the new beds that are planned to be added to the network. The system will also run 65+ Apollo clinics out of a single centralised deployment. As per Apollo’s expectations, the total user base, after it is completely operational is to touch about 12,500 direct users and about 15,000 indirect users. The project is already operational at four of its hospitals namely Hyderabad main, Secunderabad, Bhubneswar, and Mauritius. Apollo is further targeting to implement the technology in another 23 hospitals by the end of this year.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad OBJECTIVES  Develop and deploy next generation HIS covering end-to-end requirements of all the hospitals, diagnostic centres and clinics in Apollo’s network  Make the hospitals truly paperless  Meet the global standard compliance

BACKBONE HIS IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Kovai Medical Center and Hospital OBJECTIVES  Working towards a paperless system  Initiating and maximising the usage of SMS  Bring those transactions directly into the financial system and generate GRNs

JURY AWARD

ovai Medical Center and Hospital (KMCH) is a 500-bed Multidisciplinary Super specialty hospital located in Coimbatore. KMCH has successfully achieved several important milestones while implementing BackBone HIS. KMCH launched a full scale project of introducing a comprehensive HIS roll-out that covered all of its operations. In addition, it decided early that every one of its centres will be automated with a robust HIS. The hospital is equipped with state-of-the art medical equipments and is located on an 20 acres site with 11 operation theatres. KMCH also has specialised clinics like asthma clinic, diabetic clinic, slim clinic, Pain clinic, de-addiction clinic, painless labour clinic, andrology clinic, diet clinic etc and one of the best Emergency-Trauma Care Center network in the region. With the help of BackBone HIS, KMCH has an emergency control room facility, which operates round the clock to coordinate all Trauma Care Centers across KMCH. A very interesting feature offered by the kiosk is a patient self-registration service that speeds up the process for the patient and the hospital staff. The Hospital also has satellite centers located in different parts of Coimbatore and nearby district. Based on the success of the paperless concept, there is also a mechanism to generate purchase orders directly through the system for wholesalers and retailers.

OUTCOME  Improves patient experience and reduces administrative work  Text Messaging in communicating vital information  Information kiosk that provides information on several important issues

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PUBLIC SECTOR

SMART Krishi IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Orissa e-Governance Services OBJECTIVES  Provides facility to farmers at his door step to do the soil testing  Develop a knowledge base on the basis of soil profiling of each and every village for better farming management practices  Help the farmers to get the best price for his farming produce

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

OUTCOME  KSC s have succeeded in delivering the location specific, need based advisory and diagnostic services to the farmers  The project is providing instant access to the best management practices of the selected crops relevant to locality, daily market

AWARDS

CITIZEN

CHOICE #1

roject Smart Krishi is intended for e-Delivery of G2C services at Panchayat level to the common man through Common Service Center (CSC) established in each Garm Panchayat under NeGP mandate. The project was implemented in Orissa to improve delivery of agriculture related services and information to the farmers. A baseline study was conducted when the project was conceptualised and it was found the farmers are not aware of the importance of soil profile for pursing different crops. Farmers’ awareness levels on different government scheme, best practices were very poor and negligible. There was no avenue for farmers to know the availability and cost of various agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilisers which the farmer is indenting to purchase. Very few farmers knew the current market price of agricultural products. Farmers were also unaware of the weather forecasting, and were not able to plan for their activity. During implementation it was viewed that the connectivity in the CSCs situated in remote area were very poor. Keeping in view, the light weight web pages has been designed by using web 2.0 technology so that the application runs with a minimal bandwidth. Once the farmers got the essential agricultural services at the GP/CSC level, their satisfactory and acceptance of the system increased tremendously, which created a demand from farmers side.

OUTCOME  Substantial number of soil samples have been tested and reported  Farmers get the soil report within 5 days at their door step  Weather report and advisory notes in local language and in English are passed on to the farmers

KNOWLEDGE Sharing Centers

n the present era of knowledge revolution there is a need to equip farmers with information on climate scenario and market. Knowledge resource management in rain-fed agriculture area integrates information, communication, dissemination, utilisation for sustainable development leading to improved agricultural productivity. Use of ICT’s as an extension tool in knowledge management of the project exhibited multifaceted dimensions and multifarious roles for technology access. ICT’s component is included in the CRIDA’s NAIP project on sustainable rural livelihoods through enhanced farming systems productivity and efficient support systems in rainfed areas which is an action research pilot project in selected village clusters of the 8 backward districts of Andhra Pradesh involving a consortium of institutions from public, private and NGO sectors. I-Kisan, is a partner for ICT’s promotion, designing and establishing necessary infrastructure at cluster level. Realising the importance of ICT’s at this juncture, efforts are made in the project to open the avenues for technology access and utilisation by the rural clientele. The project made an attempt in using all these ICT tools for knowledge resources management in agriculture. User-friendly information is made available through touch screen kiosks (TSK). Queries addressal system through interactive voice response system (IVRS), awareness creation of the technologies through display announcement package (DAP), Internet, are the essential services of the KSC.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture OBJECTIVES  Envisages the access to value added information services on latest tools and technologies  Facilitates the sharing of data, information and the collective knowledge gleaned from research, experiences and interaction

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AWARDS

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

OUTCOME  The software available is comparable to any international software but is very affordable  The software has data analysis capability hence the veterinarian can play with data and ‘learn’ to finetune management, feeding and breeding strategies

PUBLIC SECTOR

RURAL Veterinary & Extension Services

nder the project, software applications for commercial dairy farms, dairy cooperatives or private multi-centric milk processing companies, bovine frozen semen banks and livestock markets were developed and validated. The software and the service delivery model was validated at 10 village centers (around 5000 animals) with active partnership of Chitale Dairy, at Bhiladi, district Sangli (Maharashtra). The RFID- handheld based system was deployed and tested in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu to implement fraud-free high credibility cattle insurance scheme. At Chitle Dairy, Bhilvadi, RFID enabled data recording system is tied around 10,000 cows and buffaloes. With this system the credibility of the data is high as recording is possible only when the service provider visits the farm and reads the RFID. These ICT are tools simple; the animals are first unique-identified by applying plastic or RFID bilateral ear-tag and details are registered in the serverbased ‘Herdman’ software. The village herd data is analysed to send daily ‘action’ and ‘alarm’ lists to the (para)-veterinarians and farmers on their cell- phones for undertaking management decisions. The data sharing is done through SMS / voice phone / or GPRS-based modules. The target is scalable system for networking village herd data to create state-level grid. To provide immediate benefit of data recording the network has been interfaced with web-livestock platform so that the farmers can get higher price for the animals with records.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Bombay Veterinary College OBJECTIVES  Develop software networking applications to collect and manage large volume of records from farms and dairy cooperatives  Evolve novel service delivery systems to ensure that the collected data is used to improve health and productivity

FARMER-Extension-Agricultural Research Education

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Project Implementation Unit, National Agricultural Innovation Project OBJECTIVES  Provide agricultural information content for incorporation into the knowledge organisation systems  Collaborate in developing information structure for semantic / ontological search engines

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he project was started to bridge the gap between technology developed by the scientists and that used by the farmers. The existing extension systems is one to one from extension personnel’s to farmers. However, due to shortage of extension personnel in the state departments of agriculture and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), the agricultural technology developed under National Agricultural Research System (NARS) and State Agriculture Universities (SAUs) is not reaching the farming community. Therefore there is need to use the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to transfer agricultural technology quickly to the farmers. This also facilitates in brining the farmer and scientists along with the subject matter specialists together in sharing the knowledge which was not possible in traditional extension service. Project is innovative in developing Knowledge Model for selected crops (9 crops-Paddy, Pigeonpea, Chickpea, Sugarcane, Wheat, Litchi, Groundnut, Sorghum, vegetable pea) which is first of its kind in the world. It provides semantic/ontological search engine (tagging related) for retrieving agricultural information from the portal. It has developed region specific multimedia content (text, images, graphics, audio, video) on crops in bilingual language (Kannada and English).

JURY AWARD

OUTCOME  1200 total fertiliser recommendations were given using online fertiliser recommendation systems  Region specific bilingual

PRIVATE PUBLIC SECTOR

JURY AWARD

CITIZEN CHOICE #1

OUTCOME  Farmers could get their queries answered with the help of experts from Agriculture University  mKRISHI was effective in disseminating IPM ( Integrated Pest Management) technology to farmers

AWARDS

mKRISHI

Krishi, an innovative platform developed by TCS is based on sensor and mobile phone technology to offer personalised and integrated services to farmers. It allows farmers to send queries in their local languages through a mobile phone and provide personalised responses with advice or relevant information in these languages. It also helps literacy challenged farmers by allowing them to use the service by means of voice SMS. TCS’s mKRISHI platform uses multiple technologies and has effectively demonstrated probably the first time, the use of soil, crop and weather sensor technology to deliver personalised advice. The platform also brings farmer’s stakeholders together, thus enabling integrated services. TCS is partnering with stakeholders such as agri input companies, poultry and dairy companies, agriculture universities, NGOs, rural banks and bringing them together on the mKRISHI platform, enabling farmers to meet his requirements in an integrated fashion. Since the platform is capable of providing location specific and time specific information on demand of agri inputs and supply of certain produce,the supply chain in agriculture sector would improve significantly. To develop mKRISHI platform several technologies have been develop and integrated. For those with limited literacy, IVR technology is developed on the handset and also provided voice features in the software to transport voice messages between the farmer and the expert.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY Tata Consultancy Services OBJECTIVES  Give personalised advice, anytime anywhere, on a handset of the farmer in local language  Bridge a gap between the farmer and the expert and other stakeholders  Improve yield, reduce cost, improve efficiency and get better prices for the crop as a result of personalised advice

SOIL Nutrient Management Tool

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY BoP Chair Manipal OBJECTIVES  Generating the recommendations for the farmers about the amount of fertiliser to be added to grow the particular crop  Storing and organising the details about farmers, and the crops grown and the recommendation given to them  Support of multilingual language

CITIZEN CHOICE #2

oil Nutrient Management Tool (SNMT) is a modernised software tool that helps the soil scientists to analyse the soil samples and regenerate the recommendations about the quantity of fertilisers to be added to grow a particular crop instantly. These recommendations can be used by the farmer to get the better yield with the sensible use of fertilisers. The SNMT is built in a unique way. It is not confined to generate fertiliser recommendations to the any specific crops. Its gives the flexibility to the soil scientist to analyse the soil sample and get recommendations to cultivate any crop. Normally, soil scientists when have to give a report on the use of fertilisers to grow a particular crop follow a set a procedures. In this, the tool recommends amount of fertilisers required to get better yield. The recommendations given are with respect to the crop which the farmer wishes to cultivate. As a prerequisite the scientist has to store the details of the crops for which recommendations have to be given. This mainly helps agricultural scientists to concentrate on their actual work rather then generating report of soil condition. It also helps keep a track of soil conditions. Can be easily accessed from any where through Internet and can be read in any local language.

OUTCOME  A unique tool as scientists will be able to give recommendations about use of fertilisers for any crop  Multi-language support is also a valued feature

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AWARDS

CITIZEN CHOICE #3

NOVAGOVIYA e-Agriculture Project

“N

OUTCOME  Online content opened e- learning to rural farmers helping them to use Telecentres to improve their knowledge in modern agriculture  Improve their agriculture best practices that help sustaining the environment

PRIVATE SECTOR

PUBLIC SECTOR

avaGoviya” means the new farmer, is a sustainable and modern agriculture knowledge development initiative aimed at developing rural farming communities transforming rural Telecentres to Modern Agriculture Digital Knowledge centers. The target groups are Telecentre managers, rural farmers and agriculture micro business entrepreneurs. The project covers whole Sri Lanka through 650 Telecentres Island wide. Navagoviya Project is multi stakeholder partnership, initiated by CIC Agri businesses, in 2008 with the partnership assistance of ICTA e-SDI funding. The content was created by Professors in University of Peradeniya and Technical implementation was done by e fusion private ltd. The project focus was to provide modern knowledge in sustainable agriculture to farmer education at Telecenters. The 600 inter connected Nenasala Tele Center Network attracting rural communities is great potential as a Modern Agriculture Knowledge center. The content was developed in electronic form and integrated into an e learning system by adding photos, animations, videos by developers and hosted on www.navagoviya.org On completion, Telecentre operators were selected from Telecentres and given a residential training on e-Agriculture by professionals using the content and navagoviya.org portal and seminars for rural farming communities were conducted at Telecentre communities to create awareness on e learning of modern agriculture.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY CIC Agribusinesses, Colombo OBJECTIVES  Create an online digital knowledge base in local languages  Re-train farmers on sustainable and modern agriculture helping to improve rural agriculture, farmer’s economy  Help sustain impact on environment.

CALL FOR ENTRIES

India eGOV 2.0 AWARDS | 2010

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INNOVATIONS IN USAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR GOVERNANCE & SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND PROGRAMMES BY GOVERNMENT & PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES BY CITIZENS, CITIZEN GROUPS, NGOS & POLITICAL PARTIES

egov / www.egovonline.net / august 2010

LAST DATE FOR SENDING ENTRY SEPTEMBER 15, 2010