SEVANA - Towards a Holistic and Human-Centred Approach to E-Governance

Author : P.V. Unnikrishnan
Date added : 2002-04-15

Brief Project Background

Information Kerala Mission (IKM) is a mission team established by the Government of Kerala (http://www.keralagov.com), the Southern most State in India, for computerising Local Self-Government Institutions (LSGIs) in the State. Established in 1999, the Information Kerala Mission envisages establishing a network of the 1215 Local Self-Government Institutions (LSGIs) in the State, the District Planning Offices and the State Planning Board. The Mission has development and deployment of software applications, training, and establishing technical support systems and handholding mechanisms as its objectives. Software applications are for computerising the LSGIs as well as for monitoring the projects implemented by the LSGIs. The Mission intends to train a massive number of staff and elected representatives of the LSGIs through a specially designed training programme. The Mission attempts to link the educational and other technical institutions across the State in establishing a reliable network for technical support. Participation of entrepreneurs is considered as a key factor in the activities of the Mission - especially in training and technical support. The Mission has implemented the programme on a pilot basis in five Local Self Government Institutions in the State. Pilot roll out of the computerization programme was started in September, 2001. The feasibility and applicability of the software applications, training strategy and the supporting methodology developed by the Mission have been rigorously assessed in the pilot programme.

Sevana is one of the three application software packages that Information Kerala Mission has developed in the first stage of the ICT programme. Sevana,- which means service - is meant for better delivery of the services offered to the people. The other two packages are called Sulekha and Sanchita. Sulekha helps in monitoring the development projects implemented through the Peoples’ Planning Programme, a participatory programme for the planning and implementation of local level development. Sanchita is a CD-ROM based encyclopaedic repository of legal and statutory documents on decentralisation and the administration of local bodies. These products are meant for all the LSGIs in the State including Grama Panchayats (Rural Local Bodies) and Urban Local Bodies.

Sevana has its focus on the LSGI-citizen interface. It handles two major functions of LSGIs - handling of registrations and delivery of services relating to social welfare and social security schemes. It is an attempt to integrate the various services available to the citizens from the LSGIs. The system was so designed as to provide linkages to the other databases such as the Below Poverty Line (BPL) Database, Electoral Database etc., at a later stage in order to transform this into an integrated database on the citizens of Kerala.

Sevana makes a serious attempt to overcome the lacunae in the present civil registration system in India, which is a major issue of concern. It uses the coding scheme for the medical certification of causes of death in accordance with the guidelines issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Centred on the civil registration system and a citizens’ database, the application seeks to improve the delivery of citizen-centred services at the local levels, initially through front offices and later through community Internet Kiosks. This could be the first step towards a demographic surveillance system for the State.

Most of the social welfare and security schemes targeted at the poor and the underprivileged are distributed through the LSGIs. These pensions cover several hundreds of beneficiaries within the purview of a typical LSGI. Even though they are monthly pensions, by and large the distribution is done normally on a quarterly basis. The preparation of beneficiary lists, aggregation of the pension amounts, filling up the money order forms with addresses of the beneficiaries etc., are tedious and error-prone. Sevana eases the workload and facilitates a speedy, error-free, efficient, and transparent process. A grievance redressal mechanism has also been incorporated to introduce citizen-orientation to service delivery.

Facility for converting dates based on the Malayalam calendar to the Gregorian calendar and a graphic utility for entering personal identification marks are the important features of Sevana. With the provision for citizens’ registration, a concept of integrated citizen’s services database is introduced for effective delivery of service. The software used has a multilingual interface (Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada - the last two for the border districts). It is web-technology based and therefore possesses improved accessibility and user friendliness.

An important feature of Sevana is the extensive use of masters. This helps achieve a fairly high level of standardisation in the process. Implementation of Sevana necessitates a careful process of data entry for the records of the past years in order to aid the transition from a completely manual system to an electronic system. Sevana has also gained substantially from the business process reengineering inputs that emerged from the participatory process of system analysis and documentation.

Sevana has a four-tier architecture based on Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. The product has been developed using Visual InterDev on Windows NT platform. The database server is MS SQL Server 7.0 and the Web server is Internet Information Server 5.0. It uses ISM developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) (http://www.cdacindia.com) for the multilingual interface. Sevana can be operated with Internet Explorer 5.0 or later versions.

Results

Till date, Sevana has been deployed in five Grama Panchayats viz. Kattakada, Madavoor, Amboori, Vilavoorkal and Vellanad in Trivandrum district. The experience of this pilot roll out has been extremely encouraging. A clear improvement was evident in service delivery. Waiting time at the counters for disbursement of pensions reduced from 5 days to 2 days on average. Time required to process and release pensions by mail reduced from 9 days to 10 hours on average. Beneficiaries of a particular pension are typically not allowed to avail of another. However, as all the schemes are independent without any inter-linkage, this condition could be easily circumvented. By implementing computerised citizen’s registration mechanism such duplication could be avoided, resulting in better beneficiary targeting and plugging of leakages.

An application for a certificate normally takes days for processing, primarily due to the time-consuming search process involved. Sevana has extensive search facility and this could substantially help the situation. It reduces the time taken for distribution of certificates from a minimum duration of one day to a matter of minutes.

This is what Mrs. L. Sakunthala Kumari President of Vilavoorkal Grama Panchayat viewed as the advantage of computerisation that makes computer technology acceptable to her. She pointed out the ease with which the employees of the Grama Panchayat handled the disbursement of pensions ever since Sevana was implemented. However, her real excitement was about the timely delivery of the pensions to the hundreds of beneficiaries on the eve of Onam, Kerala’s most important harvest festival. She pointed out that the Grama Panchayat used to find it difficult to disburse pensions in time due to the drudgery involved in the manual process.

‘To me, what really matters is the fact that the most underprivileged of this locality are benefited through this programme and the use of this technology has to be promoted’, says Mr.Krishnakumar, a local political activist, referring to the attempt in electronic governance implemented on a pilot basis in Vellanad, one among the five Panchayats mentioned above.

Mr.Krishnakumar’s observations are important for two reasons. One, he is talking about a computerisation programme that has been implemented in a government office in a remote rural area. Second, he has the track record of the anti-computer agitations that rocked Kerala politics during the late seventies. Still, Krishnakumar does not seem perplexed. ‘The anti-computerisation struggles were essentially against increasing unemployment caused by computerisation. Today, while promoting computers, I still stand by the people, as it improves their life through efficient delivery of services’.

The message is clear. A generation to which Mr.Krishnakumar belongs struggled against computerisation years back because they saw computers as a technology that increased unemployment. When Krishnakumar welcomes computerisation in his Village Panchayat today, it is definitely not an expression of naïve pragmatism. It has got an underlying realisation of the potential of that technology to help the people.

Lessons

The acceptability gained by the project is a hard earned one. It is the result of the innovative experimentations that have been made to evolve a people- centred, and development oriented ICT programme appropriate to requirements of the people of the developing world. Useful lessons have emerged since the very beginning of the programme. To understand it better, the course of evolution of this programme has to be traced.

LSGIs are in fact the primary institutions of the three tier administrative structure of local administration. Unlike in other states, Kerala LSGIs are huge in terms of population and area and are well-established institutions with own buildings and substantial staff strength. Though LSGIs have been in existence in Kerala for several decades, they did not have any significant roles to play. Irregular elections, inadequate resources, and insufficient mandate had made them moribund entities in the State’s development milieu. It was the decentralisation initiatives made by the Government of Kerala, that brought the LSGIs to the central stage of the development discourse in the State.
Kerala has been attracting the attention of development thinkers of the world over including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, for its unique developmental pattern. Though the per capita income is hardly 1% of the average for the United States of America; Kerala has excellent development indices: an effective literacy rate of 90.59 against 99.0 in the US; the birth rate in Kerala was 17.0 per thousand against 16.0 in the US in 1995; the infant mortality rate in Kerala was within 6 per thousand, which was comparable with that of the US.

In fact, the Kerala economy has been showing declining trends, with a stagnant primary production sector and languishing traditional industries. The proliferation of new industries also has not happened in Kerala. With the dwindling remittances from the non-resident Keralites working abroad, Kerala’s economy has been showing the signs of an imminent crisis. It has been observed that the State would not be able to sustain the comparatively high standards of living in the wake of the above trends.

It was in this background that the decentralisation exercise was attempted in Kerala in 1996. The Government of Kerala devolved close to 40% of the State Plan funds to the LSGIs and initiated the Peoples’ Planning Programme for formulating the Ninth Five Year Plan. This unique programme prompted the people to decide on their developmental needs and evolve appropriate strategies to enhance production and social development.

The devolution of funds and the delegation of powers to implement development programme and various social welfare schemes necessitated better accountability, higher efficiency, and enhanced transparency in the activities of the Grama Panchayats.

This paradigm shift in development strategy has its roots in a few attempts that preceded the Peoples’ Planning Programme. The first among them was the ‘Campaign for Total Literacy’ that has raised the state’s literacy rates to near 100 per cent. It was followed by the ‘Panchayat Resource Mapping (PRM) Programme’ intended to generate comprehensive databases on land and water resources and the pattern of their utilisation. This was a mass conscientization campaign on the status of local resources and their utilisation for meaningful development. It culminated in an attempt to draw up an integrated plan for Kalliassery Grama Panchayat in Kannur and implement it with local people’s participation.

It was in this context that the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT) (http://www.cdit.org) in Kumarakom Grama Panchayat tried out an action research programme to explore avenues for applying Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for improving decentralised planning and local self-governance.

The experiment at Kumarakom included preliminary interactions with the local community to expose them to the potential of applying ICTs in solving their problems, a concept demonstration to establish the benefits of ICT application in productivity enhancement and improvement of delivery systems, preliminary hands on training , documentation of Panchayat level systems and participatory analysis of their features, detailed participatory system analysis, prioritisation, system design and implementation.

The experience of the pilot programme at the five Grama Panchayaths takes one back to the deliberations on computerisation held at Kumarakom.

During the initial level discussions, Mr.V.P.Kunjukunju, passionately called Kunjettan by the local people; a septuagenarian political activist and the then president of the Kumarakom Grama Panchayat showed a unique enthusiasm to accept this programme.
‘I had led agitations against the computerisation initiatives in Kerala in the seventies’, said Kunjettan fervently. ‘But, now I am for computerising the Grama Panchayats, because it would improve the functioning and services. I support it because it will help my people’. Kunjettan struck a chord of emotion when he countered the views against computerisation. ‘This is a struggle for improved governance and overall development.’

The software applications developed as part of this experiment were intended to facilitate the birth and death registrations; monitor the developmental plans implemented by the Panchayath and to track the files and other correspondences dealt by the office of the Panchayath. In fact, these applications may be regarded as the precursors to Sevana and other applications developed by the Mission later.

The uniqueness of this experiment was the Participatory Technology Development and Application (PTDA) approach, developed by Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, the leading Peoples’ Science Movement of the country and perfected by the Integrated Rural Technology Centre (IRTC), one of the promoters of the PRM programme.

The Kumarakom experience gave valuable insights on the field level implementation of an ICT programme for improving governance:

-The need for incorporating participatory methodology in the whole Software Development Life Cycle
-Need to evolve appropriate pedagogical strategies to address the diverse learning capabilities, and the heterogeneous socio- economic back grounds of the learners.

The pilot implementation of Sevana at the five local bodies gave the following lessons too:

-Transformation of the conventional records into electronic data requires a style book on practices to followed through out the State
-Relevant administrative reforms are required to implement computerisation programmes
-Constant follow up of activities

Development Impacts

It was in the light of the Kumarakom experiment that Information Kerala Mission was set up to undertake the establishment of a computerised network of the 1215 LSGIs of Kerala. The Mission worked out a methodology drawing in from the Kumarakom experience. The key features of the methodology were a participative approach to software development, emphasis on technical support mechanisms, and focus on training and handholding.

Information Kerala Mission has developed a learner-centred, activity based, and practice oriented training methodology for imparting training to the heterogeneous groups of users. The methodology draws in heavily from the Kumarakom experiment. The mission has embarked on an extensive programme for developing teaching materials in Malayalam, the local language. Teaching materials are also prepared in Tamil and Kannada for the border regions. The Mission views training and handholding as two crucial components that would contribute to the success of an ICT venture of such a massive scale.

The recent strides in ICT present formidable opportunities for human development - by enabling empowerment, by providing information and connectivity and by raising productivity, but achieving this potential depends on how the technology is used. ICT initiatives in developing economies have to necessarily keep in view the widening social disparities and have to pertinently address the issues of the marginalised and deprived. Sevana has clear focus on services to the common people and can go a long way in building up working models for ICT usage for the rural masses in a developing country context.

What is reflected in the comments of Mr.Krishnakumar and Mr.Kunjukunju is the attempt that Information Kerala Mission has made to use ICTs for improving the LSGI-people interface. This is with a conscious bias in favour of the most deprived and underprivileged sections of the local community. Sevana clearly is a leap forward in improving the efficiency of services and ensuring responsiveness, transparency, and accountability.

The ICT programme of the Mission is closely interwoven into the overall development fabric of the LSGIs. Sulekha is a case in point. It is in fact a Management Information System covering the entire gamut of activities that evolved as part of the Peoples’ Planning Movement. The other application software packages that the Mission has developed and is working on also address important issues on the development front as well as on the functioning of the LSGIs. This is what makes the Mission’s programme an effort towards a holistic and human-centred e-governance, integrated with the development process.

Project Information

Organisation : Information Kerala Mission
URL : http://www.infokerala.org
Total budget in US$ : 6.9 M US$

Contact Information

P.V. Unnikrishnan
pvunni@vsnl.com

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