By Pankaj Maru
District collectorates are key functionaries in government administrations and bridge the gap between the state authorities and local bodies like police stations, courts, municipalities, village panchayats, talukas and others. Given the role they play, district collectorates are not just helping these local bodies and institutions in their daily functioning and governance, but are also directly involved in providing public services.
With such wide mandate and responsibilities, the district collectorates face many challenges and require a robust IT system or technology that can make their functioning more efficient, transparent, timely and easily accessible to people.
Like most district administrations across India, the South Goa District Collectorate faced similar challenges, until the administration gave a serious thought to developing an in-house software application that would provide a smooth and effective way of addressing those challenges.
With the help of National Informatics Center, the South Goa District Informatics Office undertook an IT implementation project where it successfully deployed DC*Suite software and modules that helps in functioning of 14 departments. Most importantly, the public or citizens are able to keep track of their service requests or applications status through nodes like Citizen Facilitation Center or touch screen based kiosk as well as mobile SMS and website.
Scenario prior to deployment
Though the district administration offices were functioning on computer systems with some stand alone applications, they were not well integrated in a way that all departments would have full access to files, information, details and activities that were being processed.
“Basically, there was no workflow or a file management system that could provide a complete view of information, processes and its monitoring across 14 different departments of collectorate including magistrate, courts, land and revenue, treasury and others,” added Kulkarni.
Deployment scenario
With the aim of making all services easily accessible to the citizens, the South Goa District Collectorate with the aid of National Informatics Office undertook a comprehensive exercise of finding a software platform that meets the requirements of collectorate functioning around 2009. Throughout the year, the district authorities and officials not only went to software vendors but also referred to other state collectorates in order to find a software platform that was efficient, scalable, robust and capable of integrating 14 various departments.
After a year long search, the South Goa Collectorate and District Informatics officials came across a software platform DC*Suite developed by the National Informatics Center, which the Kerala State Government and its district officials were already using it.
Thereafte, the officials and authorities of South Goa Collectorate and District National Informatics Center brought the basic source code and started to work on building various modules using the DC*Suite to match the needs of collectorates functioning around those 14 department.
According to Kulkarni, since NIC had developed the DC*Suite, there was no fee involved for getting the platform? source code, as it was being used internally by the local unit of NIC, Goa State. It was between 2010 and 2011, the South Goa District Informatics officials worked extensively to develop various modules on the DC*Suite platform.
“The DC*Suite has three main layers including the E-Services, Intranet and Back-office layers. On the functional areas of collectorate, around 17 modules have being implemented,” Kulkarni informed.
The E-Service is the front-end layer of DC* Suite which interacts with citizens and offer services to the public. There are several methods proposed in DC* Suite, where the services are offered over touch screen kiosks, SMS, internet and front office counters.
The Intranet is the middle layer which offers lot of collaboration services and tools such as e-mail, messaging, chat, video conferencing, bulletin boards and others. The back office layer remains the key functional area comprising of all 14 functional modules with which the government staff works and carry out the back-end operations.
“The software module includes inward/dispatch of tapals (posts), file movement, arm license, revenue recovery (Public Money Act), public grievances, issue of application forms, government quarters allotment, court cases, rest house reservation, cash module, explosive license, clinic license and renewals (Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act), land conversion, services and kiosk module, while natural calamity module has been partially deployed,” Kulkarni added.
According to Kulkarni, some of the modules such as land conversion, court cases and others have been added recently. During the initial deployment stage, some 7-8 top officials got involved, followed by training of contract staffs that helped to train the remaining staffs across departments.
“Rolling of small applications is easy but deployment of such large platform with so many modules is not easy and it requires lot of effort. However, there was good support from top officials and lot of interest was shown in training and development of modules,” Kulkarni explained.
DC* Suite is built using open technologies, while the codes of modules are built using PHP language and database runs on MySQL, along the LAMP platform.
The estimated project cost approved was around Rs.40 lakh, however the authorities didn’t had to spend on the software license, as the basic source code was supplied by National Informatics Center without any charge. However, the project expense largely involved contract staffssalaries that included the programmer and trainers. Besides, the cost also involved hardware procurement of some servers, clients for each of the employees, touch screen kiosks and networking equipments.
Benefits
“Since the DC*Suite is deployed on the intranet of collectorate, it is now easily being used by all staff across departments. With the software modules in place, today the staff are able to process applications of renewal, issual of licenses, court notices, changes in land records and delivery of posts both inward/outward and others have become very efficient and helped to reduced process time,” Kulkarni explained.
Today most part of deployment has been completed by the South Goa District Informatics officials and still are working on developing some new modules to further assist the collectorate functioning in more efficient and integrated manner.