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Citizen-centric IT projects in Kerala

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Project Akshaya



The flagship citizen-centric initiative for Kerala currently is Project

Akshaya, around which many other projects and initiatives. Aimed at providing

one-stop utility bill payment and government-public interface system, all 14

districts of Kerala have 'Akshaya centers' — totaling up to 2200 centers, 80% of

which have been deliberately set up in rural areas, with the aim of rural Kerala

leveraging the most of IT. Currently, 15-20 services are being offered at these

centers, and the roadmap includes more B2C services. Each of these 2200 centers

is headed by an 'Entrepreneur' who, for all practical purposes is the

single-handed head for the particular center. It is his responsibility to try

and maximize the number of citizens in his locality who pay their bills in his

center. There are many e-governance projects planned by the state centered

around using Akshaya centers as nodal points.

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Insight



The software app, developed in house using open source trains visually

special citizens. The idea is to arm Akshaya centers with the software to enable

visually special citizens within the purview of the center to get trained in

basic skills to be employable in jobs that do not mandate eyesight. Research

reveals that visually special are much better at several tasks that the IT

industry can use for many tasks. This project is not dependent on scale since

visually special citizens in an area covered by a particular center might be

very small in number but hopes to make a difference to their lives. The

application would impart training as well as feature a feature 'Swaram' which

provides audio content for better understanding of the content and also general

news.

Sevana



Another interesting initiative taken up by one of the Government's 'IT

solution providers' — Information Kerala Mission, is a project to automate birth

and death registration. From the hospital where childbirth has taken place, an

electronic kiosk allows a citizen to feed basic information of village, district

etc, which is viewable at the respective panchayats or district offices and the

birth certificate can be collected within 48 hours. This reduces discrepancies

and especially for 'cause of death' issues, ensures transparency to a great

extent. Sevana also facilitates marriage registrations, and pension procurement.

All panchayats in Kerala (999) have IT hardware ready for Sevana of which 647

panchayats have connectivity. Of these, 345 provide the Sevana service to its

citizens. By the end of the current financial year, Kerala will have Sevana

implemented at all panchayat offices.

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The Government of Kerala has

carved out an action plan where the three big addresses for IT in the State

— Technopark, Infopark and Cyberpark — shall act as independent bodies, and

monitor the functioning of auxiliary tech parks that are going to be set up

in smaller towns like Koratty that will have huge cost advantages for

investors. In order to become the preferred state for IT, we have to give

cost advantages by attracting quality but affordable labor. We are planning

to do this by taking IT offices to smaller towns, and while at it, giving a

boost to the local and regional economies.

Mervin Alexander, CEO, Technopark

SPARK



In Kerala there are between 5 and 5.5 lac employees working as Government

servants. SPARK is an attempt to bring the payroll and finance related

activities of these employees within a single application. Besides efficient

dissemination of salary, loans, and other funds, SPARK also helps the Government

in training. On an average, training of some sort is administered to 50,000

employees every year, across 13,000 training programs. There was no mechanism to

monitor what training was given to which employee and what impact it finally

made. Currently, 9 departments are totally running all their HR on SPARK and

1,012 offices are using SPARK in some form or the other.

Vishnu Anand was hosted in Thiruvananthapuram by Govt of Kerala

Dr. Ajay

Kumar, IAS, Secretary (IT), Govt of Kerala Speaks
How Kerala is looking at IT

differently from others




Kerala seeks to be a model for other states by doing the same IT that it
expects its investors to do. It has begun efforts to convert as much 'work'

as possible to 'e-work'. Kerala also believes that 'Awareness' of

Information Technology should go hand in hand with 'Facilitation' of

processes. Service Delivery is the core of all IT that Kerala embarks on.

From an investors' point of view, Kerala's in-house IT is there for all to

see, and the Government's support can be experienced in more ways than one.

How Kerala positions itself as an ideal IT

destination



The social demographics of Kerala are very unique and different from the

rest of the country. Hundred percent of villages in Kerala have access to

broadband, and the three biggest components of social and economic

forwardness — health, education and telecommunications — are uniformly

spread across the length and breadth of Kerala. Mobile penetration is more

than 60% which is very high compared to the national average. What is unique

about Kerala is that unlike Karnataka, where socio-economic climate in

Bangalore differs vastly from a nearby district of Kolar, Kerala provides a

uniform ecosystem all along the state. Whether an investor plans to operate

from Kochi or Kozhikode, the availability of manpower, infrastructure and

overall climate for commerce is the same.

Projects to provide quality manpower for

IT



Highly qualified manpower is obviously the biggest prerequisite to climb

the IT value chain. An analysis that we did sometime back made us realize

that Kerala needed more BTech graduates to study further and get MTech

certifications and PhDs. Though there are a large number of jobs available

for BTech graduates in IT, the state realizes that in the long term, higher

qualification in IT education is extremely vital. For this, IT department of

Kerala embarked on a recession-proof project called Speed-IT — a special

postgraduate education scholarship program. At the cost of Rs 210 lacs, post

graduate students would be provided a e scholarship of Rs. 8000 a month and

PhD students would be provided a sum of Rs 14000-18000 a month.

On local language & IT



As part of Kerala's efforts to merge IT and the local spoken language,

we have started many Malayalam computing initiatives. As a starting point,

we have embarked on a mission to make all the websites of Government

departments to be bilingual. Currently, 12 Governments websites are already

bilingual. But the biggest proof of mass adoption of local language

computing can be evaluated through a project called 'Ende Gramam', which

translates to 'My village'. It is an online community portal in Malayalam

created and maintained by the citizens of each village. The Government

facilitated setting up of the portal and allows villagers to submit articles

which are edited by philanthropic editors who upload the articles on the

portal. Each village has its own space in the portal and the information

ranges from a catalog of 'useful services' from coconut tree climbers,

carpenters, and more along with their phone numbers and location where they

live.

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