The foundation, which was started eight months back with the personal funds of CEO of Infosys Nandan Nilekani, implemented its eGovern platform and property tax application in the Bangalore municipal corporation in October 2003. "We followed this up by working on a prototype at Byatrayanapura which could be replicated more accurately across other cities. This was inaugurated in November 2003," said managing trustee of eGovernment Foundation Srikanth Nadhamuni. The organization will duplicate this module across the planned 56 cities of the state. The project, named Nirmala Nagara Project, is valued at Rs 40 crore and funded by the Asian Development Bank. "The modules will include property tax, public grievance and redressal, birth/death certification, ward works management, water tax and trade licenses application. eGovern GIS application, which goes a long way in capturing, storing and analyzing geographic data and is a necessity in the smaller cities where property records are ill maintained, will be implemented in 18 of these cities," he said. He also claimed that the modules would help in better revenue generation for the state and that just property tax collections alone can easily double just by accounting for existing property accurately. The eGovern platform is based on a 3-tier web native architecture and is developed over a J2EE application server. It supports Linux and MS windows OS on the server. "Our platform and applications already offer local language support and data can be entered in both English and Kannada. Software development happens from Bangalore with around a dozen software engineers. The organization works mostly with volunteers of which we have a little more than hundred," said Nadhamuni.
He also said that though several other states had approached the foundation, it had put them on hold due to lack of volunteers and the fear of biting off more than it can chew. "We would be glad to find some kind of implementation partners for our solution while we stick to the R&D alone. We might also be interested in a partnership that provides us PDA devices since that would help us in data collection and updation," said Nadhamuni. He also put in a fervent plea to relegate at least fractions of the software talent we dedicate to exports to develop our own country. The organization is debating on several ways to make itself self-sustaining including selling its products and services to clients in the US.
(CyberMedia News Service)
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