Partha Pratim Sarker, July 2003

"A knowledge worker would derive power not from his position but by virtue of his intellect and understanding about the issues related to people," said Sanjay Jaju, the collector and district magistrate of India's West Godavari district. If one is to transform the relationship between the government and citizen from benefactor/beneficiary to principle/client, he explained, every government servant must share this vision and attitude.

Jaju put his ideas to work a few years ago when he became commissioner of India's Visakhapatnam Municipal Corp., making changes in how municipal services were delivered. The Saukaryam project was one result.

The Saukaryam project provides a networked system of hassle-free payment of all municipal dues as well as the issue of birth and death registration certificates, approval of building plans, response to grievances, etc., in a convenient and integrated manner.

Citizens can access the Saukaryam through the Web site or by going to the civic center or by conducting transactions through a network of banks that partnered with the VMC for accepting payment of various municipal dues. Within this dense network of private-sector organizations (such as banks, ISPs etc.), government offices and infrastructure, VMC paid only Rs. 40 lukhs (US $ 87,000) out of a total cost of Rs. 3 crore (US$ 650,000) and other partners carried the remaining costs.

"The project Saukaryam was a public-private partnership effort and we decided to enter into partnerships with ... stake-holders to do the financial and technological gap filling," said Jaju. "It was originally thought of due to financial necessity but later on became a great blessing in disguise for ensuring the sustainability of the project."

"We realized that the most of the banks have good infrastructure in terms of computer hardware, working space, manpower and there is no need for us replicate the same and incur additional costs. On the other hand, the banks are always in need of funds and working capital from the government organizations. This then led us to structure a relationship that could be win-win for both the stakeholders. We then created a network between the Municipal Corporation and the banks for the citizens to approach them and make their payments. Besides this, the networking also was a public-private partnership effort with the ISP who already had the infrastructure in place and could lend the same to us at minimal costs and in turn could develop a relationship with the Municipal Corporation for sustaining its own business interests."

This model of public-private cooperation has created good sustainability, Jaju said. "The project is marching successfully without any problems even after my exit from this project for almost 8 months now," he said. "I would attribute this sustainability to a couple of important reasons. One, the project evolved from the demand [rather] than the supply side and therefore the citizens themselves have become the catalysts ensuring that the project runs because they won't settle for any service being delivered at a level lesser than what it was during the project.

"Second, the project was an in-house effort and could create ownership amongst the internal team that still continues in the project and ensures its sustenance and development. Besides this the presence of stakeholders especially those who had put in money is another important factor for it being sustained."

Overcoming Obstacles
Challenges often arise to oppose automation, many from vested groups. In many developing countries, these groups are often very powerful and feel threatened as soon as government services become more open and interactive.

"While taking up the projects of this size," said Jaju, "it is important that there is a clear mandate from the top that ... the empowerment of citizens would be achieved at all costs and all roadblocks ... would be cleared. Once this kind of message goes down, the initial resistance from the vested interests spills away. As soon as the project gets a critical mass and starts giving benefits to the citizens this resistance gets further countered and Newton's first law makes it sail through. However, it is true that mere automation alone would not help things and what would be required is to have an attitude change and one would have to lobby one's position effectively and assertively for achieving the same."

Though municipal bodies in India are local self-governing organizations and have a lot of independence and flexibility in implementing projects, said Jaju, "Required support from the provincial government is essential to ensure that the projects of this type are integrated into the overall architecture and do not remain as stand-alone projects ... When we decided to branch out and include other organizations like the Electricity Dept. etc., for creating an integrated payment window, we could get the desired support and move forward."

Jaju is understandably enthusiastic about the Saukaryam project. "The results have been stupendous," he said. "Ever since the project has been commissioned, the work has become a talk of the town. The citizens are surprised and enthused by the ease with which their needs are getting attended to without running from pillar to post as before ... A small complaint like abrupt drinking water supply or non-functional streetlight that used to take months to float into the system gets attended in no time. This is seen by the number of hits that the site is attracting every day and the number of registered users increasing day by day."

The project's success has attracted growing attention . "The project has been covered in the national and provincial media and has been adopted as a model to replicate elsewhere," he said. "Over 2,500 people make use of this facility every day either through the banking network or through the city civic center or through the Internet. There are over 25,000 registered users for the corporation Web site while the civic center receives over 200 citizens every day."

"Unfortunately Information technology in the administrative parlance has been simply equated to computerization," said Jaju, "resulting in myriads of computers with absolutely no accent on the Information part of IT ... most of the computers lying with various organizations are relegated to being used as typewriters," he said. "More than 90 percent of their processing and storing capacities are unutilized."

E-Seva
The active journey of Sanjay Jaju does not end with the Saukaryam project. As the collector and district magistrate of West Godavari District, he is planning similar projects in his current area of jurisdiction. His most recent project E-seva in the rural areas of West Godavari District is aimed at delivering various G2C and C2C services to rural citizens. The project has opened Web-enabled rural kiosks termed e-seva kendrams.

"The fully computerized e-seva kendrams are on a district-wide network connected through the dial up circuits and interact with the district server acting as a remote access server," said Jaju. "The e-seva kendram runs a district portal that allows access to various citizen-centric services. These services range from the issuance of various certificates to getting information about various programs and also go to the extent of networking citizens to each other and allow them the flexibility and convenience of mutually beneficial transactions ... One unique thing about this experiment is that all these kendrams are run by the women self-help groups, a movement that has been gaining ground by the day in this district. The project would thus provide information leadership to these groups and would help them act as change agents and would make it possible for them to grow in strength and stature with the project."

Though the E-seva project is still in pilot mode, good results are being achieved and more are yet to be built. "Most of the centers are functioning very effectively and providing great ease to the citizens to access various government services," he said. "We have already completed more than 200,000 transactions so far confirming the popular acceptability for these kind of projects. More than 3,000 complaints pertaining to various departments have been addressed in real time allowing us to provide accountable and transparent administration. However we are still improving upon this project to add more services and to expand the project territorially. We have also got our first distinction by bagging the National IT award for the year 2003 of the Computer Society of India," said Jaju.

"It is my duty to disseminate the knowledge and information that I have with my team members so as to improve upon the systems and processes that govern them," said Jaju. "I feel that the acts and non-acts of government servants can affect the development of the entire civilization."

Partha Pratim Sarker is co-editor of Bytes for All, and GTI's Asia correspondent.