Article 2: April 2007

With the decline in employment avenues, the Department of Employment and Self Employment (E&SE), Government of Maharashtra (GoM) felt the need to disseminate information, guidance and advice to unemployed youth on self employment opportunities, available business avenues and the related training details. The Department has 4.5 million unemployed youth registered with 44 exchanges across 35 districts of Maharashtra . There has been no single point to disseminate this information.

The portal for Self Employment Guidance Activities of the Department of E&SE aims to be a comprehensive source of information on all Government schemes; agencies implementing these schemes along with their complete contact details; avenues for business; available professional courses and training facilities; and details of licences and permits required for establishing any business. The portal also contains areas for displaying ‘success’ stories of poorest of the poor who have benefited from the guidance provided by GoM and availed schemes offered by the government. Other features provided by the portal include a Bankers Corner to give advise on loans and related processes; details of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working in the area of self-employment; details of Seva (service) Societies registered with the employment exchanges; a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section with answers to queries of unemployed youth; news and events; and a facility for visitors to the website to provide feedback and suggestions. The portal also provides a Helpline to answer complaints and queries of visitors to the website.

Key features of the portal are that it is database driven thus making it dynamic and easy to replicate in any language; Unicode-based so no proprietary fonts are required to display the Devnagari ^[2] script; user-friendly to cater to unemployed youth with little education; and serves as a single point for all information pertaining to employment and self-employment.

Good governance is the right of the people and e-Governance is a tool for ‘Good Governance’. Multiple initiatives are being taken by the Government of India to facilitate and promote e-Government in various citizen centric areas. The purpose is to provide quality and prompt services to citizens and enhance transparency and efficiency in administration. However, it is seen that many of these solutions are for providing better services and facilities for the upper strata of society. E-governance solutions are meaningless if they don’t reach the masses at grass root level and address their basic needs. One of the gravest problems faced by developing countries like India is poverty and unemployment. Though the Government has initiated hundreds of employment generation schemes stressing the need of self-employment, the public at large is ignorant of such initiatives. This is due to the lack of co-ordination among the involved state and central level agencies and the absence of a one-stop shop for this kind of information. If information about employment schemes and programmes is available electronically on a single window platform, it not only widens the horizon of unemployed youth but also saves them from the hassles of collecting information from different quarters.

The Directorate of Employment and Self-Employment, Government of Maharashtra has 4.5 million unemployed youth registered with 45 exchanges across 35 districts of the state. Employment exchanges function as counseling and guidance centres to motivate the youth to take up self-employment ventures. Candidates had to queue up in front of the exchanges to register themselves. They needed to visit the exchange to renew their registration, update their qualifications and change their contact information. The department therefore embarked on preparing a portal called ‘RojgarWahini’ for providing guidance on employment and self-employment. Some of the regular activities of the employment exchanges such as registration were computerized. However, activities related to self-employment were not computerized. The Directorate issued small booklets listing government schemes and other self-employment opportunities. These booklets were sometimes inadequate in quantity and needed to be updated. No manual or computer based system was available which could disseminate such massive and collaborative information in a local language. In order to fill this gap, the Department of Employment and Self Employment (E&SE), Government of Maharashtra (GoM) asked National Informatics Centre (NIC) to prepare a comprehensive website which would encompass data and solutions related to self-employment.

The broad objective was to enable the target user groups to navigate the myriad steps through bureaucracy and banks to start small enterprises. The portal is built using simple colloquial and conversational Marathi ^[3]. The look of the site has been made friendly and attractive. Help has been provided on many subjects wherever found necessary. A user is guided through searches in three important areas:

In each category, numerous searches are provided to help users to zero in to their requirement. Interactive pages have been designed to answer questions of small entrepreneurs. A platform has been provided to enable small businesses to advertise their services and to send their requirements and suggestions to the portal administrators.

Before designing the portal, the implementers interacted with the target groups to understand their requirements. The learning thus gathered has been incorporated in the content and design of the site. Any useful feedback obtained from the user has also been incorporated in the site.

Utility of the portal goes beyond the stated user group. It does not simply cater to citizens but also to other government departments, development corporations and NGOs.

Besides the major modules of the portal described below, the portal also provides details of a) objectives, contributions collected, proposed activities and contact details of self-help groups b) loan beneficiaries and defaulters along with details pertaining to loan and repayment c) stages in loan application and sanction d) and other related and useful websites.

The portal is being designed to give information on all schemes of the Government of Maharashtra, based on category, gender, income, age, qualification and location. Details of the scheme along with the application form, required documents, no-objection certificates (NOCs) needed and addresses of the implementing agencies are displayed. The facilities provided to a visitor to the website are:

This section provides details of more than two hundred businesses avenues which require investment of 0.2 million or less. These business opportunities are categorized by sector and cost of establishing the business. Sample project reports for the businesses are available in Marathi and may be downloaded along with all relevant forms. These project reports have been obtained from Maharashtra Centre for Entrepreneur Development (MCED) and Maharashtra Industrial and Technical Consultancy Organisation (MITCON), both of which are autonomous bodies of the Government of Maharashtra engaged in entrepreneurial development and consultancy. The website also displays the NOCs required for establishing the business along with contact details of training facilities available, procedures and application forms. The features include:

A large number of professional courses are available in the state to encourage the unemployed to take up self-employment. Facilities for training provided by 102 organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, are listed in this section. The portal provides information on course duration, number of seats available, fee (if any), schedule of the application process, pre-requisites for the course, boarding and lodging facilities and stipend through a single point in a comprehensive manner. Courses can be searched on the basis of

This module displays all type of licences and permits required for establishing or expanding any business. It includes the following information about any licence or permit:

Portal displays stories and photographs of individuals who have benefited from the guidance provided by GoM and availed schemes offered by the government. Successful entrepreneurs can be searched on basis of location and nature of business.

This section displays queries and their answers on a variety of subjects like schemes, employment opportunities and training.

The most recent news is displayed on the home page whereas the ‘Archive’ section contains old news articles.

A visitor to the website can send feedback or queries in English or Devnagari. The portal administrator views and filters the feedback, takes appropriate action and responds to the sender. It is proposed to form a team of experts to answer the queries and provide guidance to users of the portal.

This section displays a write up on benefits of repayment of loans, schemes offered by major nationalized banks, EMI calculator, and post-loan sanction documents.

Seva Societies are co-operatives of unemployed youth in Maharashtra promoted by the Department of Employment and Self-Employment. This system keeps track of the working of Seva Societies and stores information on contact details of registered societies sorted by location, exchange and service; details of members; grants provided to the society; services performed by the society; and jobs received.

Searchable database of NGOs in Maharashtra working in the field of skill development, promotion of small entrepreneurs and assisting the self employed is maintained. NGO’s contact details are searchable on basis of location, activity and alphabet.

The portal is entirely database driven and hence replicable in other languages. It is also easily scalable as information can be added and modified at the district level. It provides for simple navigation with a user-friendly interface. The entire work has been done in-house by NIC, Pune and staff of the Directorate of Employment and Self-Employment.

The data on various schemes, agencies, trainings, NGOs, licences and permits is very complex, massive and dynamic. The consolidation of this data required a high degree of co-ordination and exchange of information amongst various departments.

Keeping in view the target audience of the system, the portal has been designed in the local language (using Devnagari script). A Unicode based design has been adopted so that no proprietary fonts are required to view the content. The site can be viewed from any platform without the need to download special fonts.

The design is such that the portal can be enabled for any language without any extra programming effort. Only the language of the content stored in the database needs to be changed to adapt the website to a particular language. All dynamic data is stored in the database while static information like labels, messages and help text is from a common source which can be translated into any required language.

Intention based design was adopted by organizing the information in a way that is logical and convenient to users. The content is organized around subjects like Schemes, Business and Training.

The portal can be accessed from service delivery points in rural areas. It has simple, easy to use, graphical user interfaces in local languages to service semi-literate and even illiterate people. Interaction with the portal is through mouse clicks with minimal usage of the keyboard. It has interactive guidance as users navigate through the pages making them simpler and quicker to use.

Numerous searches have been provided in each sub-site, to help the user to zero in to his requirement. Candidates can search for available vacancies, schemes suitable for them, bank loans, project reports, businesses matching their requirements, and training facilities. The criteria for searches have been built as per the requirements of the users.

Care has been taken to enable easy maintenance of the site by the user department. All information displayed on the website is from the database and privileges to add, update and delete data elements have been provided to authenticated users. Style sheets^[5] have been used to give a uniform look and feel to all pages and also facilitate easy maintainability.

To develop and implement this portal, the department experts were involved from the initial requirement study stage. A core group of about twenty experts was formed. For the self-employment module, it was found that the information was held by various agencies. The main task was to interact with these agencies and to collect and compile their information. The core team interacted with agencies, banks, successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs to gather information. This group met at regular intervals to approve specifications and test for usability of the portal. The portal was developed after gathering requirements from the users of the portal.

S. No.	Aspect	Volume in Numbers	Remarks
1.	Entities involved	6	Scheme, Training, Seva Society, Business, NGO, Banks
2.	Database tables	52	Including all reference tables
3.	Web pages	700	Including pages to maintain database
4.	PDF files	700	Including business details, business project reports, application forms for schemes, application forms for licences and permits
5.	Images	180	For user friendly display of web pages
6.	Project team	7	PM^[8], SA^[9], PL^[10], 3 Programmers (including graphic designer), 10 members of core group^[11], 5 members of various agencies, 3 data entry operators
7.	Time schedule	1.5 years	System requirements, Feasibility study, Design, Development, Testing, Tuning, Implementing

To a large extent, open source has been used to implement the portal. Three elements of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP) have been used in the system. DB2 has been used as the backend database as per the policy of the state government.

The launch of this portal is a milestone in the betterment of the unemployed youth by providing a direct interface between the government and the common man. This e-governance initiative is web-enabled to facilitate anytime, anywhere access to the common man through a one-stop-shop (integrated service delivery) thus ensuring efficiency, transparency and reliability.

[2]Devnagari is a script used to write several Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Marwari, Konkani, Bhojpuri, Nepali and sometimes Kashmiri. It is written and read from left to right. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

[3] Marathi is the local language spoken by large number of people in the state of Maharashtra . It also serves as the official language of the state.

[4] National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is an apex development bank in India . It is involved with matters concerning policy, planning and operations in the field of credit for agriculture and other economic activities in rural areas in India . Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABARD

[6] MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a widely used cryptographic function used in a variety of security applications to encrypt passwords. It is also commonly used to check the integrity of files. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

[7] SQL injection is a technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. The vulnerability is present when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literals embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and thereby unexpectedly executed. It can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection