Other Finalists : Government of Kerala : Akshaya ePay

Akshaya e Pay collections have crossed Rs 66 crores... Monthly collection is
about Rs 3.7 crores from 1,01,219 lakh transactions. We congratulate every
entrepreneur in this endeavor. If you wish to join ePay service network and take
important Government services to citizens please contact Akshaya Project office
in your district, or send us an email now.

This is the message that greets visitors to the website of Kerala's
computerized bill payment facility (e-kendra.org). Citizens of Kerala have paid
more than 100,000 bills at 'Akshaya Centers', one-stop bill payment shops spread
across all 14 districts of the state. Aimed at giving citizens — rural and
urban, the option of making payments at their convenience, and not having to go
individually to the offices of various civic services, and to bring the bill
counters closer to the people, Akshaya e-pay, in each center is headed by an
Akshaya entrepreneur and every month, a list of top transacting centers along
with the name of the entrepreneur who heads it, is displayed on the website. In
addition, the website also displays month-on-month, the transaction volume and
value on the site, along with email addresses of the best performing
entrepreneurs. The government makes an interesting claim that the number of
utility bill defaulters has come down considerably after the initiative kicked
off. The bouquet of bills that you can pay are quite basic with electricity,
water, property tax and BSNL bills et al, but blanketing each and every district
with an IT backbone to directly impact citizens is an impressive feat.

With an investment of Rs 57.4 lakhs, the deployment includes modest IT
infrastructure: two IBM X Series servers powered by Windows Server 2.3, Visual
Studio .NET, and SQL Server. The project has been carried out by the Center for
Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT), based at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.