HINGOLI-Land of e-governance

One of the youngest districts of Maharashtra, Hingoli has star-ted making
headway in e-governance. A lot of pilgrims from all over the country are
attracted to Hingoli because of Aundha Nagnath Jyotirling, which is considered a
fine specimen of Hemadpanthi style and is also credited with the construction of
many excellent pieces of sculpture.

Narsi Namdev or Barashiv Hanuman are some of the holy places, which witness a
con-stant stream of devotees. When Marathwada was suffering from the Nizam’s
outlaw Razakar atrocities, Hingoli, Bamni, Talani, Anjegaon, Kahergaon and
Lohegaon were in the forefront of the Hyderabad Freedom Struggle for
over-throwing the yokel of slavery. This district is famed for its production of
jowar and cotton.

E-governance at Hingoli

E-governance initiatives have made headway at Hingoli as in other villages
in Maharashtra. Citizens always want a paper-less office where the informa-tion
is available at the click of a mouse. It’s like admitting a child into school,
you have taken care of every little detail that might be asked for but by some
oversight the birth certificate is lost. All you have to do is go to the
district headquarters and key in the details and minutes later the birth
certificate is in hand. No more problems of going back home and rushing back to
the school by which time the opportunity might be lost.

The Pune-based ForceOne Technologies Pvt Ltd has under-taken
to do precisely such tasks, which appear rather impossible now. The company is
in the process of linking all the villages in a particular dis-trict and then
linking it to the Mantralaya so that any authori-zed government officer will be
able to rattle out the figures of any panchayat in the state.

As the first step, it has linked 565 villages in Hingoli
district in Maharashtra and in the second stage, the villages of Baramati. Once
the second phase is completed, the com-pany is taking up the linking of the 33
districts, which includes two in Mumbai and Greater Mumbai.

The objective of the software is to ensure that all the
records of the village panchayats are maintained up-to-date and the drudgery
involved in creating and maintaining voluminous records is mitigated. A more
important objective is to ens-ure that true and perfect reco-rds of assessments
and reco-very of various taxes at the village level are available at any given
point of time. This will also help in planning the development of the villages,
as there will be a stronger reco-very of taxes.

The e-PanchayatTM system has been developed keeping in mind
the core operations of a Panchayat. The system is flexi-ble and can accommodate
addi-tional features and modifica-tion as per the directions of the Government
from time to time and as required by different Zilla Parishads.

But why has the company undertaken such an ambitious task?
The brainchild of this project is Radheshyam Mopal-war who was the Chief
Execu-tive Officer of the Hingoli Zilla Parishad. The software offers a
comprehensive solution for the requirements of villages, gram panchayats,
panchayat samitis, talukas and headquarters. E-Panchayat is a Windows-based
multilingual software. The first version has been developed in Marathi as per
the requirement of the Maharashtra Government.

The software was developed by three people sitting in Hingoli
district with a bare minimum of four machines. Jitendra Sontakke is the gram
sevak who has the domain knowledge and is the brain behind the whole software
development. He did not allow any sort of compromise and was insistent on
developing the software as per the gram pan-chayat’s specifications as the
user would be the common man.

Info in a flash

The software at the gram panchayat level automates report management, tax
management, property details, the voucher and receipt system, budget
application, registra-tion of birth and death and work management.

At the district headquarters level, development manage-ment
and village management are included. Data synchroni-zation from the villages to
the gram panchayats to the pan-chayat samiti to the talukas to the district
headquarters will be done on a daily basis or at some places at regular
intervals. All said and done, at any point of time, anybody will be able to
obtain the required data or certificate.

The company is also coming out with the next version, version
1.1 within a couple of months which will include additional features such as
water supply: sources and other details, educational det-ails, general
information of a village, its schemes, monitoring of beneficiaries, information
regarding agriculture, health, social welfare, animal husban-dry, real-time
population cen-sus and valid voters’ list from the villages. The software will
be used mainly at the Man-tralaya and will connect the different Zilla Parishads
in the State.

Issue of security

Security, of course, is a big issue. Is this system vulnerable to
unauthorized people gaining access to data or mutilating it? No way, as the
system requires a user ID and password without which nobody can access it.

It is given only to the admi-nistrator of the Zilla Parishad.
Only the administrator has the right to create new user IDs, change the password
and allot rights to the users.

Nothing comes for free, so what is the revenue the com-pany
expects from this kind of a venture? The revenue will come from the purchase of
the software which is priced at about Rs 10 lakh and about 20 CEOs have evinced
interest in it. The company is also eyeing other markets, including Jharkhand,
Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Gujarat, Chattis-garh and Goa (with Konkani
language but Marathi script). Language conversion is no pro-blem, says Savant.
The comp-any is also looking at the South to sell this software. If what we
venture out with becomes successful, then in a period of about 10 years, we can
even do away with the census office as every bit of data will be available at
the click of a mouse.