State Mission Mode Project e-district - Department of Electronics and ...

Study Report on Assessment of the Model e-districts
development centre in the District Collector’s office, employing over 30 software professionals in
the Project team for the development of e-governance application software packages.
The pilot-e-district rolled out over 20 e-governance software packages comprising of various areas
of citizen interface with the government. The major beneficiaries were agriculturists, land owners,
students, widows, agricultural labourers above 65 years of age, schools, local body population,
rural population, below poverty line people benefiting from social welfare schemes such as
marriage assistance scheme, pregnant women assistance scheme etc.
4.2 Phased Implementation Strategy
The implementation strategy for the Pilot e-district was based on the citizen’s requirements. The
project had a phased Implementation. The first two application software packages was introduced
within 90 days of commencing the e-district project were the Grievances handling software and
National Old Age pension software. These packages had been commissioned in the Collectorate and
all 7 Taluk offices on the 16th May 1999.
Earlier OAP section in the Taluk offices was the neglected area in Taluk administration. This wing
was in charge of serving the citizens in distress such as agriculture labourers who had crossed 65
years of age and have lost the ability to do labour anymore, widows, physically challenged persons,
deserted house wives etc. The beneficiaries under the OAP scheme get a life long pension of Rs.200
per month. The problems faced by this segment of citizens were two fold. Firstly, the application
processing took as long as one year or more. Secondly, the selected beneficiaries got their monthly
pension through money orders very late, usually next month. With the introduction of process
based automation software for handling all the OAP schemes on 16th May 1999, the entire district
migrated to paperless stage with regard to OAP schemes. The paper based registers were done
away with. All the transactions were routed through the online procedure. The money orders were
generated by the system instead of manually being written. The turnaround took place in less than
9 months. Due to the no backlog of work, whenever the visitors from outside wanted to see the
OAP software functioning, the district administration had to send out an alert to the Taluks to keep
at least some work pending so that the visiting team could see the online functioning. This was
followed by the other difficult areas such as land record administration online, DRDA online and
Block offices online.
4.3 In-house Software development centres
Part of the Collectorate building was converted into a software development wing. Four software
development centres were set up in the Collectorate building and 32 programmers were recruited
57