Project Title : eScholarship
Organisation: Social Justice & Special Assistance Department
Country : India
Website : www.mahaeschol.maharashtra.gov.in
Language: English, Marathi
Email: nikhil.pande@semt.maharashtra.gov.in

In August 2011, the Department of Social Justice and Special Assistance (Government of Maharashtra), rolled out an “e-Scholarship” solution in Maharashtra and enabled transformation of the delivery of scholarships to students across the state. The initiative was part of the Maharashtra state government’s effort to implement the national e-Governance Plan. Previously, the entire process of scholarship application by students, approval by colleges/welfare officer and disbursal was a manual process and there was no automation. Through the e-Scholarship solution, the process of application, approval and disbursal has been more or less automated except for manual intervention in specific stages. Under the scheme, students are required to have a zero-balance account in a nationalised bank where their maintenance allowance is credited directly. The tuition fees are credited directly to the accounts of the empanelled colleges. The system also provides the department with MIS to monitor and analyse the scholarship distribution and disbursement. In 2013-14 approximately 17.3 lakh applications were received from students which was a 5% increase over 2012-13. The applications came from students in approximately 13,000 colleges. The total funds disbursed were about Rs 2,800 crore. The automation has helped to bring down administrative costs while students are getting their scholarships on time.

Project Title : Jail Vaarta-Prisoner Video Conference with Relatives
Organisation: National Informatics Centre Himachal Pradesh State Centre
Country : India
Website : www.hpprisons.nic.in
Language: English
Email: sood.sandeep@nic.in

: In July 2013, Himachal Pradesh rolled out Jail Vaarta which enables prisoners and their relatives or visitors to interact visually with dignity through video conferencing. This, low cost, solution, having high impact among female users, uses NIC Vidyoportal software and PC with web cam connected to Internet for VC slot scheduling. Using this innovative and unique application, visitors/relatives can talk to the prisoner from their homes anywhere in the world. They don’t have to set up or install any local software for actual VC. The entire solution is provided online. The access could be directly from the home of a relative/visitor or from a LokMitra Kendra (Citizen Service Centre) which is located in any of the 3243 Gram Panchayats in the State and operational in about 2500 locations. The solution covers all 20 jails in the state. Since implementation, 489 VC requests have been received and 284 VCs have been conducted successfully. The number of VCs booked and arranged comes to more than 30% and 24% respectively of the total number of approximately 1400 prisoners in the state. This initiative is the first of its kind in India and second in the world next to Singapore which also allows online prisoner VC facility to the relatives of the prisoners. The initiative has reduced cost and hassles for prisoners, their relatives as well as the jail administration.

Project Title : Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana, Govt. of Maharashtra.
Organisation: Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana Society
Country : India
Website : www.jeevandayee.gov.in
Language: English
Email: dyceo@jeevandayee.gov.in

: The Maharashtra government has implemented since July 2012 an entirely ICT-enabled paperless health insurance scheme for economically weaker sections called the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana (RGJAY). The insurance policy/coverage under the RGJAY can be availed by eligible beneficiary families residing in all the 35 districts of Maharashtra. The scheme provides coverage for meeting all expenses relating to hospitalisation of beneficiary up to Rs 1.5 lakh per family per year in any of the empanelled hospitals subject to package rates on cashless basis. The scheme entails around 971 surgeries/therapies/procedures along with 121 follow up packages in 30 identified specialized categories. The beneficiary families are identified through the “Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Health Card” issued by the Government of Maharashtra or through the Yellow and Orange ration cards issued by Civil Supplies Department of the Maharashtra government. A total of 2.17 crore households in Maharashtra state are covered under the scheme. So far, more than 55 lakh health cards have been issued to beneficiary families, more than 3.5 lakh families and over 6 lakh individual beneficiaries have been enrolled in the scheme. In the three years since the implementation of the scheme, more than 4 lakh patients have been treated under the scheme while more than 3 lakh surgeries have been performed at an estimated optimised average cost of Rs 25000 funded by the government.

Project Title : Change.org India
Organisation:Change.org
Country : India
Website : www.change.org
Language: English
Email: venkatesh@change.org

: Change.org is the world’s largest petition platform. It is an open platform so that anybody wishing to bring about a change or get justice can start a petition, address it to a target, recruit people to sign and achieve victory. Change.org empowers users with a full range of tools to make such victories happen, both online and offline. Change.org users have won campaigns in local, national and international contexts. Some examples are (a) P. Karunakaran got the Tamil Nadu government to regulate auto rickshaw fares in Chennai, after a year-long campaign; (b) Sib Sankar Chowdhury from Kolkata, used the platform to get medicines for his son Arian, who suffers from a rare genetic disease, Hunter Syndrome one of the most expensive conditions to treat in the world; (c) R.P.S. Kohli used Change.org to win the right for Sikh players to wear the turban while representing India in international basketball games. People first began to use Change.org in India in 2011. Since then, the organisation has grown to 1.6 million (16 lakh) users from every part of the country.

Project Title : Effective and Concrete E-Governance Framework
Organisation: NATIONAL INFORMATICS CENTRE (NIC), AKOLA
Country : India
Website : www.akola.nic.in
Language: English
Email: nv.choudhari@nic.in, nitinvc@gmail.com

Nitin V. Choudhari, DIO, NIC, Akola, Maharashtra has developed a Readily Distributable Virtual Machine of Red Hat Linux Server and Windows Client for 7/12 as well as Property Card. He has been using it at the district as well as the tehsil levels in Akola district and this way has saved the server hardware for all the tehsils in Akola district for Property Card. Several other districts are also using the virtual machines developed by Choudhari. The innovation is basically aimed at optimising and making effective use of the hardware, software, network and human resources and technical efforts and exercises to achieve e-governance goals in targeted time.