CIOIN

M. Vinayak Rao

Senior technical director & state informatics officer,NIC-Madhya Pradesh

The findings of GIS-based systems help the administration in taking well informed decisions.

Executive summary

Much against the spirit of Gandhi's 'gram swaraj', India still sees a huge rural to urban migration. State governments have been taking measures to develop villages and arrest the migration, but  just  executing rural development projects is not enough,  a good monitoring also matters. Can information and communication technology tools play a role in this process?

The Madhya Pradesh government cottoned on to the technology path in 2003. With e-Gram Suvidha, a G2G project to help users in government avail of geomatics-based systems across five districts. The e-Gram Suvidha was deployed as a successful pilot at the zila panchayat in Chattarpur district. The concept has its roots in the NIC's 11-Point Program, which envisioned MIS for monitoring of departmental activities in rural habitations on the back of manual retrieval of data and analysis. The monthly data would be prepared on the basis of monthly surveys carried out by government officials.

Before the e-Gram Suvidha facility, the process of manually retrieving information and planning were time consuming and had high error margins because decision makers had to deal with hordes of numbers and figures. As planning and management of facilities got more complex with increased emphasis on spatial dimensions, the NIC homed in on a geomatics-based system to add a new dimension to the process of  data acquisition, organization, classification and analysis.

The geomatics-based system would deal with two versions of data: spatial data, comprising digitized Survey of India maps of villages, blocks, districts, road and rail networks, and non-spatial data related to findings of the monthly surveys under the 11-Point Program. The e-Gram Suvidha project was thus born. Users at the district level downward can today query independent and offline systems that are replete with monthly data, and figure out the most economical and feasible solutions for infrastructure projects.

"Without transparency and presentation of proper data,  political or bureaucratic factors  can influence decisions to deploy new amenities," says M. Vinayak Rao, senior technical director and state informatics officer, NIC-Madhya Pradesh. "Now, since we have the geo-presentation software, we can fire a query. The findings help administration take valid, rational and well-informed decisions so that right infrastructure can be created at the right place to be used by the right people," he explains. The presence of the system also increases the pressure on administrators to act promptly.

The facility management information system has been developed on a Visual Basic platform and  based on SPANS (Spatial Analysis GIS Software) from PCI Geomatics, a geomatics software solution provider. It runs on a Windows-based Pentium IV desktop using MS Access for non-spatial data.

The features are superimposed with secondary spatial and non-spatial information for analysis and generation of thematic maps for facility planning. This digitized map information is stored as layers in the GIS database. The non-spatial database consists of data from the 11-Point Program, population census and requirements of the district panchayat that delve into the status of the functioning of village amenities and accessibility to services such as post offices and telephones.

One of the unique features about its implementation has been that it incorporated the inputs of its stakeholders across the five districts. During the initial phases, the NIC made several presentations to officials in rural local bodies. This helped in spreading awareness of the technology and also in gathering their inputs prior to the period when the project was approved.

In order to further automate the decision making process and enable a faster turnaround time. A more refined version of data survey and collection format is being envisioned under an advanced program of basic amenities and services. The scope of the program is expected to increase substantially to include many more facilities and services, and increase the granularity of information being collected.