The Andhra Pradesh government has taken a lead by creating a real-time dashboard that measures the effectiveness of the services delivered
Project Head: Babu A, CEO, Andhra Pradesh State FiberNet
One of the major issues of governance in India is the increasing inefficiency in delivery of public services in the face of rising expectations from the public. India’s experience since the independence has shown that due to expansion of opportunities both social and economical, removal of poverty will only result in good governance. However India has been in the backseat in many a development indicators like illiteracy, infant and maternal mortality, per capita income, employment, infrastructure, etc. The emphasis therefore comes to the major ailing factors in good governance viz, inefficient public service delivery, corruption, delay in services, random and skewed welfare distribution due to lack of proper data/ information.
There is hence, a need of an integrated system where services are devised keeping the citizen at the centre. The Andhra Pradesh government has taken a lead by creating a real-time dashboard that measures the effectiveness of the services delivered. The dashboard is an attempt by the government to improve delivery of services in an agile and responsive manner through data analytics, beneficiary feedback, project monitoring and process re-engineering of welfare provisions such that a minimum of 80 per cent public satisfaction is achieved in all government programmes.
The framework
Real Time Governance (RTG) is a new institutional framework devised by Government of Andhra Pradesh – to bring in positive ‘disruptive’ changes in governance, public administration and management leveraging the tools of e-Governance, technology and electronic communication. The RTG system utilises the tools of e-Governance to develop an institutional mechanism for developing ‘good governance’ practices and effective provisioning of public services.
The Government of Andhra Pradesh has established an institutional framework through RTGS – Parishkara Vedika to achieve transparency, accountability, and to make public service delivery efficient. RTGS is utilising all technological applications of e-governance for real time grievance redressal.
The major thematic areas of operation of RTG include: Grievance management (through a call centre called Parishakara Vedika), beneficiary feedback (on service delivery of social welfare benefits, pensions, public distribution system, scholarships and other government programmes and perception analysis on flagship schemes of the government), data mining and analytics (for independent performance measurement system at state level focusing on programme outcomes and dispensing feedback to officials at multiple administrative levels), coordination and crowd sourcing (application of Big Data for designing welfare projects in the state).
Andhra Pradesh has developed the People Hub – e-Pragathi, the state enterprise architecture wherein which all applications in the state are unified into a single platform. This includes – public welfare delivery services like food rations, social security pensions, fintech, health, transport, agriculture, etc), Forecasting and Early Warning System (to monitor weather events like rainfall to provide real time agro-advisories to farmers at village level. Establishing communication channels for disaster prevention and mitigation for preventing loss of lives and property during cyclonic events, flood and other calamities), projects monitoring (monitoring of high end infrastructure projects in the state in real time through drone applications.
Already National Polavaram Irrigation project is being monitored through this application), innovation and incubation (to promote Andhra Pradesh as a knowledge hub and fostering an enabling ecosystem to nurturing start-ups), and Social Media (to broadcast information to the public on important governmental activities and programs; along with exploring the potential of various social media in citizen engagement and interaction in grievance redressal, trust building and enhancing participation).
Through an integrated call centre and workforce of upto 1,750 (in three shifts), grievances are collected from the general public across the state. The call centre has a capacity of 1.5 million outbound calls per day. Citizens who might have come across issues of bribe and corruption can lodge their complaints to 1100 which shall in turn escalate the complaints to the appellate authority of respective departments including the Chief Minister’s Office. RTGS leverages e-Governance tools to institutionalise and devise key performance indicators along with their monitoring in real-time for effective and efficient public delivery.
RTG operates from State Command and Communication Centre with data input from CC cameras, drones, biometric augmented technology and virtual reality, machine learning technology, Internet of Things (IoT), etc, adopting the most advanced technology of international standards for governance. Real Time Governance envisages participatory governance with citizens as partners of institutions, ascertain their felt needs. RTGS collectivises the efforts of all departments through better coordination, enhancing decision support systems, institutionalising key performance indicators (KPIs) – leveraging ICT, innovation, crowd sourcing calls for bringing rapid and exemplary shift in governance.
Real Time Governance employs several latest technologies for data mining, data analytics and visualisation. Events can be visualised as they occur both centrally and remotely (device agnostic) and measure the effectiveness of security policies. High priority infrastructure projects are monitored with the help of drones from RTG. In addition, machine learning tools are employed for amplifying the efficiency in grievance redressal, beneficiary feedback, etc.
RTGS has a Weather Forecasting and Early Disaster Warning System wherein weather forecasting models like ECMWF, FORTRAN, GrADS, FERRET, Shell scripting for short, medium and long term weather forecasts, sea state forecasts are employed. Agro-Metereology Modelling like Dssat (Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer), AgMIP (The Agricultural Model Intercomparision and Improvement Project), SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool), Python are being used for crop yield forecasting whereas ArcGis 10.5, R program, MATLAB and Grads are used for weather data analytics.
The power of real-time governance
Grievance redressal on a real time basis has helped in resolving 1.39 crore grievances out of 1.49 crore received, which translates into a 93 per cent redressal rate. This has been achieved in a period of just eight months. Now a single window grievances registering platform is available to citizens. One major real time application by the project is the Praja Sadhikara Survey (PSS) – People Empowerment Survey in English, which is a solution architecture for devising all future welfare programmes in the state based on data. The survey was able to profile 1.4 crore households in the state covering almost 4.3 crore population. Through creation of dashboards, the government is able to monitor performances of flagship programs in real time along with validation through beneficiary feedback.