Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka might claim themselves as IT leaders in the country but when it comes to using IT for monitoring the UPA government’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG), it’s Orissa that’s the undisputed leader. So much so that almost all its 3,672 Panchayats in 19 districts under the scheme update data online on a daily basis under a Monitoring and Information System (MIS).
In Barkani Panchayat in Balangir in Bolangir district, three rural connectivity works were approved connecting three adjoining villages.
You can study the muster roll for the village which gives the names, caste, village and wages paid to each of the persons who have worked on this project. For example, Brajamohan, a Scheduled Caste unskilled labourer from Ainlachuan village, worked on a water conservation project and earned Rs 315 for six days of work.
In Borguda village in Kalahandi district, the renovation of Chintaman Sagar water tank, spread over 5 hectares, will be completed under NREG.
Such detailed, real-time data is available only from Orissa and nowhere else in the country.
This despite the fact that Orissa has issued job cards to only 80 percent of those who have registered themselves for the scheme as against Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat which have issue job cards to 100 per cent of the applicants. But when it comes to day-to-day monitoring, Orissa is the clear leader.
This is thanks to NREGAsoft, a software for monitoring the scheme’s implementation, developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
This software, which won the Microsoft Award for e-Governance 2006, is to be used by all states but as of now, is being used in only 14 states under the scheme in 112 districts of the 200 districts covered. It’s only Orissa, however, that is using the software for all its Panchayats in all the districts under the scheme. “Orissa is way ahead in implementing all the modules of the software. All the other states are now trying to catch up but they will take time,” said Madhuri Sharma, the technical director at NIC who headed the team which developed NREGAsoft.
Ironically, the reason behind this is a delay in conducting the survey of BPL (below poverty line) households due to a case filed in Supreme Court in 2002-03. Since the matter was sub judice, the then Secretary, state Panchayati Raj and IT, S N Tripathi took this as an opportunity and conducted a survey of all Orissa households and enlisted the data in web-enabled format in hard discs. This was pushed further by Orissa Chief Secretary Subhash Pani who asked Tripathi, who was now state Secretary for Rural Development and IT, to use NREG as an opportunity to automate all rural development-related processes.
Thus Orissa developed templates not only for labour registration details but also for details of work undertaken and financial progress. In fact, these templates were later used by the NIC in further developing their NREGAsoft software.
That’s not all. Orissa also creatively used the already available block-level network established by the Indian Space Research Organisation during the early ‘90s. The Panchayati Raj department had only to supply computers to plug into this. The state also brought in staff reform by abolishing 1486 redundant posts in its Panchayati Raj set-up and replaced them with 325 computer professionals. This eased the transition to e-governance.
This also makes economic sense. Tripathi says that in other states, where implementing and monitoring has been outsourced, it costs about Rs 30 for issuing each job card — in Orissa it costs barely Rs 5.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Ravish Tiwari
Quelle/Source: The Sunday Express, 15.10.2006
