Rajeev Chawla,

Secretary, E-governance, the Government of Karnataka, spoke to Government Connect to

share ongoing IT projects and road map for e-governance in the state.

How is Karnataka

taking its e-governance initiatives to its people?

Karnataka's

IT policy focuses on using e-governance as a tool and delivering a government

that is more pro-active and responsive to its citizens. The government's

Millennium IT policy, Mahithi,

emphasizes the importance of taking IT to the common man. Several efforts for

implementing government projects using electronic means are being carried out,

under its IT policy.

The

state has implemented and will be implementing several e-governance projects and

actions. The various departments of the state government are also introducing

electronic means to computerize their activities and take IT to the masses. Each

government department has conducted several departmental activities in

e-governance.

What

has been the experience of Karnataka in handling e-governance projects,

including Bhoomi for years? What are the new projects in the pipeline?

Bhoomi

has been recognized as a successful e-governance project in India. It has also

earned recognition outside the country. The success can be attributed to 10,000

village accountants and more than 2,000 officials in the Revenue Department, who

worked over a period of four year tirelessly to digitize 20 million manual

records. The digitization of manual records was a very tough process. That is

the only process, which no other state has been able to do such a systematic

manner, making Bhoomi the only experiment in India, which has been so

successful.

Apart

from that its business model was put in place. The training of the officials,

who run the system in the talukas , the political leadership and

their support for the program, are among the things to which its success is

attributed.

We

are initiating several e-governance projects in Karnataka. The first and

foremost is Wide Area Network (WAN) and the estimated cost of the project is Rs.

170-crore and the Centre is expected to extend its support to the project. We

are also working on BangaloreOne, the citizen integrated services centers in

Karnataka. This is must more advanced version of eSeva. We are going to launch

the service very soon and with this service, people can use a number of services

online anywhere anytime.

We

are also working on Rural Digital Services (RDS) to offer value-added services,

including videoconference, to citizens across the state by charging minimal

costs and also set up VSAT-based network across the state. STPI, Bangalore is

being appointed as IT consultant for setting up VSAT network.

What

is the status of Bhoomi today? What are the extended features in the project for

farmers?

In

the final phase of Bhoomi, we are in the process of creating a State Data Center

(SDC) where the records of all the 700,000 agriculture farmers are available.

This database can be shared with the franchises, who would provide the land

records of farmers in various villages directly by setting up village kiosks.

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AR-SA">Once the SDC is available, online connectivity would be provided to

financial banks, judiciary courts and even to franchisees, which would be

available in most of the villages by private sector . We would be

able to update some of the non-critical Bhoomi database right from the village,

which would ensure that the updating process is more or less hassle-free and

takes place in real time. That activity is . The SDC, which will

be up and running in one or two months, would the final phase of Bhoomi,

actually revolutionizing the way people access information. The process will

benefit to access information anytime anywhere. By November 1,

2004, the SDC is expected to be ready for functioning.