Dr.-Ramesh-Narasimhan-Case-study-on-ICT-Adoption - NMIMS

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32 Nemmadi: bytes and bites of ICT implementation M Das Aundhe and R <strong>Narasimhan</strong> that they were not familiar with. Village accountants resisted the system as it reduced their authority by taking out of their control a document that had value to farmers. They went on strike for being sidelined from the implementation process. The system was opened for public use in late 2001 after legislative amendments made the use of computerized RTCs compulsory. The Bhoomi project won the United Nations award, 11 and Shekhar Puri was awarded the Prime Minister’s prize for 2005–2006. Project Bhoomi centralized land records at the taluk level. Hitherto, the villagers paid the village accountant and got the RTCs issued in the village. Post Bhoomi, villagers had to travel to the nearest taluk headquarters, which could take them a couple of hours. This resulted in additional expenses for them in addition to loss of the day’s wages. There had been complaints about other logistics problems too, for example, public transport and overnight stay. Citizens wanted the delivery points to be at a closer proximity. This would also meet with the government vision of getting ‘closer to the citizens’. To improve their reach, the state government put in place a rural telecentres project, with the plan of locating the telecentres at the hobli level. The offering of Bhoomi services alone in the rural telecentres was not viable. Therefore, Shekhar Puri thought that other rural digital services, for which the citizens had been travelling to the taluk office, could also be offered through these telecentres. These digital services would make the telecentres viable and at the same time serve as a single window for all the services. Shekhar Puri argued that rural digital services would also serve to further reduce the exploitation of rural citizens at the hands of village accountants. This arrangement would ensure Nemmadi (peace of mind) for the rural citizens. Buoyed by the success of Bhoomi, Shekhar Puri took it upon himself to champion Nemmadi too, and make Bhoomi viable. Thus, the Nemmadi project was born. The stated vision, mission and objectives of Nemmadi are furnished in Appendix G. Decision making in Project Nemmadi In May 2003, Shekhar Puri engaged the National Informatics Centre 12 to conduct a preliminary <strong>study</strong> to identify the services that could be offered digitally to the citizens in rural Karnataka. This <strong>study</strong> revealed that approximately 40 services were being availed by the citizens at the government offices. There had been increasing demand for these services with the increase in government schemes for affirmative action. Bhoomi catered to this increase in demand for RTCs; Nemmadi was expected to meet the demand for other services. The scope of Nemmadi was broader than that of Bhoomi with respect to scale and scope. Nemmadi offered 38 services, in contrast to the couple of services being offered by Bhoomi. Bhoomi’s services were database-centric; Nemmadi’s were workflow based. Nemmadi had 800 telecentres against 177 outlets of Bhoomi, and this rendered the former far more complex. Shekar Puri believed an approach to address this complexity was to involve a private sector partner in the project. According to him, private sector partners with energy and enthusiasm were needed to take up this task, as they would infuse it with the requisite speed and vitality. He persuaded his political leadership regarding the PPP model. He highlighted the idea of an easily accessible rural centre, which would function independently and without much government investment or involvement. He pointed out that it would provide employment to rural citizens too. Eventually, the minister came around to accepting the involvement of a private partner in Project Nemmadi. With Bhoomi, Shekhar Puri had learnt how to make things happen. He gave Nemmadi all his energy, and the benefit of his experience. He decided that the private entrepreneurs at the hoblis would set up the telecentres and charge the users a fee of Rs 10 (equivalent to US$0.2) per certificate. Shekhar Puri planned the way forward – a prototype and a pilot project would help decide on the state-wide launch. The pilot project The e-Governance Department began the telecentre initiative in 2004 with a pilot project in Maddur, a town in Mandya district of Karnataka. Mandya happened to be the political constituency of the CM. The National Informatics Centre executed the pilot project, using the existing technical infrastructure of Bhoomi. First, a prototype of two services was built and demonstrated to a small committee comprising divisional commissioners, tahsildars, caseworkers and a few representatives from the industry for their comments on the prototype. However, the village accountants and revenue inspectors were not a part of the decision-making process. After demonstration of the prototype, the two services were improved and piloted in March 2004. Karnataka had some existing telecentres set up by an organization called N-Logue, as proof-of-concept of telecentre technology. Shekhar Puri decided to utilize the ten telecentres of N-Logue that were being run by local entrepreneurs to offer telecom and telemedicine services for the Nemmadi pilot project. Shekhar Puri, as the project champion, began to push things forward – he got funds sanctioned for additional client machines, got the district collectors to procure them on a war-footing, and talked directly to the tahsildars and compelled them to process applications. In the rural government machinery, sometimes the government functionaries of the Revenue Department did not listen to him as they did not directly report to him. During such times, he roped in the right forces such as the Chief Secretary and/or the minister to remove the hurdles. He adopted a carrot-and-stick approach and continuously supervised and followed up until the tasks were accomplished. This micro-management by Shekhar Puri, according to the Nemmadi Project Leader at the National Informatics Centre, contributed to the success of the pilot project, but displeased many functionaries along the way. This success proved that the technology was viable, thus paving the way for the roll-out of more telecentres. In 2005, another 14 services were added to the two services piloted in Maddur. In subsequent stages of the pilot, N-Logue was given the mandate of ramping up the number of telecentres. However, it could not mobilize an adequate number of village entrepreneurs for running the telecentres. Therefore, Shekhar Puri decided to float an open tender for private partners for Nemmadi roll-out.
Nemmadi: bytes and bites of ICT implementation M Das Aundhe and R <strong>Narasimhan</strong> Process and technology Each Nemmadi telecentre consisted of a desktop computer system, peripherals and a human telecentre operator (see figure in Appendix C). The private partner provided the infrastructure set-up. In addition to the telecentres, Nemmadi also consisted of 176 taluk back-offices, where the citizens’ requests for services were processed. Each telecentre at the hobli level was connected to the nearest taluk back-office. All taluk back-offices and telecentres were also connected to a central database at the State Data Centre (SDC) in Bangalore. The exchange of data between the two took place through the SDC for reasons of security. The architecture of Nemmadi is shown in Appendix D. Atalukback-officecouldservicemorethanonetelecentre, and was headed by a tahsildar, a government functionary in charge of the taluk. He was assisted by a group of functionaries, including: (i) village accountants and revenue inspectors at the field level, (ii) caseworkers at the taluk office level and (iii) a taluk back-office operator. When a citizen visited the telecentre with a request for a certificate, the telecentre operator entered the oral request of the citizen into the system, in the required format. If the certificate had been issued previously, the operator connected to the SDC, gave a search based on the key field and recovered the existing valid document from the SDC database. He issued a print of the same to the applicant. In the case of a new application, the application along with the necessary documents was scanned and saved. The telecentre operator uploaded to the SDC the soft copy of the application. The operator at the back-office in the taluk downloaded the soft copy of the application from the SDC. The back-office operator also received the hard copies of the applications, which were delivered to him from the telecentres. He matched the hard copy and the soft copy of the application, checked the attached documents, and sorted out the applications by moving them to the respective revenue inspector’s login. ‘Moving to a particular login’ was a phrase used to imply authorizing the concerned person for further processing in the system. The revenue inspector referred the cases to village accountants, if necessary, and provided field verification reports to the backoffice operator. These reports were manually signed by the village accountant and revenue inspector (except in those hoblis where a digital signature of the revenue inspector was available). The back-office operator accepted the field verification reports and moved the corresponding applications to the caseworker login. The caseworker entered the field verification reports into the system, generated the ‘office note’ and gave his comments and recommendations. The back-office operator then moved the application along with the office note to tahsildar login. The tahsildar digitally signed the certificate, and it was printed (the entire process flow is depicted in Appendix E). Once digitally signed, these certificates were uploaded to the SDC and printed at the telecentre. The certificate, thus generated, contained a bar code, which represented the digital signature of the tahsildar (Appendix F). The government provided the stationery for the certificates, since it had to be on government letterhead. Nemmadi also intended to incrementally build a citizen database. As part of servicing a request, the details of all the 33 family members of an applicant, such as caste, occupation and income, were collected and stored at the SDC. While this was the prescribed process, the case authors observed a variant in some telecentres. An assistant from the revenue inspector’s office in the hobli collected the application forms, after the telecentre operator keyed in the details. The latter sorted out the applications and sent them to the village accountant for verification. This ‘adjustment’ enabled the village functionaries to control the queue of the applications. Telecentres – The roll-out and the challenges Shekhar Puri decided on a big bang approach – 800 telecentres in hoblis across Karnataka, within a period of 4 months. He wanted to launch Nemmadi before his term ended. He realized that identifying 800 entrepreneurs (after N-Logue’s inability to scale up at the pilot stage) at the village level in such a short time was impossible. Moreover, each one would offer his own bag of services. Uniformity of services would not be ensured and scaling up would be a major problem. Therefore, he floated a request for proposals from private sector organizations that could set up all the telecentres across the state. Several companies, including large software companies (e.g., Tata Consultancy Services, Sify Technologies) responded with their proposals. The deal was bagged, on the basis of lowest price quoted in an open tender (in both north and south zones of the state), by a consortium of three organizations – 3i Infotech, Comat Technologies and N-Logue Communications – set up in 2006. 3i Infotech was a global Information Technology company that provided technology solutions to over 1500 customers in more than 50 countries across five continents, spanning a range of verticals – banking, insurance, capital market, mutual funds and government. It was promoted by the NYSE-listed ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank. Comat Technologies, a private equity-funded organization, was an IT software services organization at its inception in 1996. It had not only carried out many software projects for several public sector organizations, but had also offered medical transcription services and litigation coding support for US-based companies. These services largely required skills in software-based scanning, digitization and indexing work. Comat Technologies’ foray into e-governance started with providing services for election photo identity cards for the Government of Karnataka in 1999–2000. The first major breakthrough that catapulted Comat Technologies into the big league of e-governance was the scanning and digitization of land records for creating the database for the Bhoomi project. For this, it built upon its skills developed in servicing US-based clients on medical transcription and litigation support. N-Logue Communications was set up by a professor and his team from IIT Chennai (a premier engineering college in India), and specialized in Wireless in Local Loop technology. This technology was expected to be cost-effective and, hence, appropriate for application in rural India. N-Logue was involved in prototyping the telecentre technology during the pilot stage of Nemmadi.
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Dr.-Ramesh-Narasimhan-Case-study-on-ICT-Adoption - NMIMS

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