Government & Citizen Engagement

Government & Citizen Engagement, Winners 2016

1. State Land Information and Management System (e-Slims)

ORGANISATION: Land Commissioner General’s Department

URL: www.eslims.gov.lk COUNTRY: Sri Lanka LANGUAGE: English

EMAIL: lasantha13@gmail.com

An Online Solution for Effective Management of State Lands

The Electronic State Land Information Management System (e-SLIM) has replaced the manual systems in Sri Lanka. Due to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the manual process, e-SLIMS was introduced in the country for using online solution for the management of state lands. Some of they key rols of the land commissioner general’s department are to issue land permits, land grants and long-term lease. Under the former manual system, the processes were time consuming, cost intensive and terribly unsatisfying for clients.

e-Slims, however, is an interconnected solution of information technology formulated to achieve the following objectives: to develop a solution which captures the entire process of land disposal; to provide status details of land release applications to applicants; to provide details regarding government land-related regulations and releasing processes; to maintain all records in electronic formats in relation to land alienation activities in textual or any graphical format; and to maintain up-to-date details of state lands.

This e-solution has been built with the thought that an easy access to information about government lands can support national development in a planned and efficient manner. The system, thus, maintains the information related to all government lands; usage of the land; selection and alienation or handing over of land for development. The application also provides an automatic intervention to take legal decisions in the land management process.

The website and Android application complement each other for land-detailed capturing while the system has an integrated SMS alert service for the public. The Android application comes integrated with capabilities to employ the use of digital camera, GPS device and mobile printing facility. This enables officers on-site inspections to capture land information on their mobile devices, obtain a print out and verify it to ensure the accuracy of the information entered into the system.

The user-friendly e-system minimises time consumption and saves cost. Even an officer with minimum computing knowledge, can work on the application confidently. Further, it offers hassle-free options for officers who are not competent in typing in Sinhala or familiar with the Sinhala keyboard.

2. Disease Control in Animals (Foot and Mouth Disease)

ORGANISATION: Animal Husbandry Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh

URL:: http://ahd.aponline.gov.in/AnimalHusbandry/Home.aspx COUNTRY: India

LANGUAGE: English EMAIL: fmdcpaphelp@gmail.com

Harnessing ICT for betterment of the animals

This is a first-of-its-kind initiative, aimed at capturing voluminous data on foot-and-mouth disease vaccination programmes for animals in Andhra Pradesh through the effective utilization of ICT on a real-time basis.

The foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) affects cattle and other cloven-footed animals that have huge economic significance globally. As part of the Foot-and-Mouth Disease Control Programme (FMDCP), an initiative of the Government of India, one crore bovine population in Andhra Pradesh is targeted to get vaccinated by XXXX, thus benefitting around 15 lakh farmers. Capturing the data of these vaccinations is essential for planning and monitoring purposes, which was done manually in registers for the past 10 years. Now, in its 22nd round of vaccination programme, ICT has been put to use effectively in the process for capturing the same data, which will include geo-tagged photos of the vaccinated animals, besides phone numbers and Aadhaar numbers of the farmers.

The Animal Husbandry Department diligently planned for this mammoth task by distributing 8,300 tablet phones and desktop among field functionaries who used the devices to capture data and feed it into Web and Android applications. The latter has been designed to work in offline mode as well, thus widening the reach of the app and enable it to penetrate into the nook and corners of the state where mobile network coverage might not be available or be weak. The real-time data is then made available on the project website (www.ahd.aponline.gov.in) and the state CM CORE Dashboard (www.core.ap.gov.in/CMDashBoard).

So far, close to 3,00,000 animals have been benefited. This project is visualised to make the vaccination programme a big success in the state as it targets the entire eligible population and protects the animals from contracting the foot-and-mouth disease, thus making the state of Andhra Pradesh FMD free.

The genesis of this application became a reality based on the thought that “while man can harness IT for their betterment, why not allow animals to reap its benefits as well” and this is an effort in that endeavour.

Special Mentions

Online e-Mutation Implementation under NLRMP for District Akola

ORGANISATION: National Informatics Centre, Akola

URL:: http://akola.nic.in/em.htm COUNTRY: India LANGUAGE: Marathi

EMAIL: nv.choudhari@nic.in

Technology Ushering in Effective Governance

The e-Mutation project in district Akola in Maharastra has been implemented with the intention to switch over from offline land records to online mutation process under the Computerisation of Land Records (CLR) scheme of the National Land Records Modernisation Programme (NLRMP).

Mutation is the process of changing the ownership details in Record of Rights (RoR). Ideally, after the completion of a land registration process, information has to be updated in the RoR, stating the name of the new owner of land (or as the case may be). Over a period of time, however, it was observed that there is a huge discrepancy between the number of registration cases and the number of mutation cases. While citizens were following the registration process, many often seemed to skip the tedious mutation process. To reduce the gap between registration and mutation, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) at Akola decided to introduce an online mutation service.

Under this service, the process of mutation is initiated at the same time as the registration of land. What makes this service successful is that all stakeholders related to the mutation process — land administrators, planning authorities and citizens — are connected to each other through a secure network so that the process can be completely in a timely and efficient manner.

Talathis (village accountants) and circle officers can initiate e-Mutation from anywhere and at any time via a secure DSC, registered user login, Sevaarth ID and VPN connectivity. The e-process eliminates the need to maintain manual records in registers; but ensures that land holders get an updated copy of ROR and other necessary documents as soon as the information is updated. The application is developed in Unicode with the option of Marathi language.

Since the process has moved from registers to computers, e-Mutation also allows the ease of backup and disaster recovery, besides the facilities to maintain & update records, feed data of surveys & settlement operations, and registration of immovable property of course.

Akola was the first district in the Indian state of Maharashtra to implement the e-Mutation process. Between February 2015 and July 2016, it was also the leading district in the state with 89,767 registered e-Mutations.