Abstract

Government and government bodies across the world are facing various challenges in their effort to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness and transparency of their operations, thereby enhancing the quality of life of citizens and reducing cost of governance. In order to ensure that these objectives are met, it is essential that governments share information with citizens and at the same time, citizens be provided a public grievance redressal mechanism to give feedback to the Government on governance issues such as  implementation of development schemes and utilization of public funds.

The Janchetna project was implemented in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh, India in January 2005. It is an effective e-governance tool to bring the administration closer to citizens through kiosks run by private entrepreneurs under a Public-Private Partnership arrangement. It is one success story, which with minimal investment from the government and zero recurring expenses has been successfully implemented, executed and continuously enhanced over a period of four years.  These unique features of the project ensure sustainability of revenue for the kiosk owners, who in turn ensure implementation in the way envisaged. In order to increase access to services, a call center has also been established for people to access information on phone. This project has led to greater transparency and accountability in the grievance redressal system.

The success of the Janchetna project is clearly visible from the fact that it has been adopted by thousands of villagers across the length and breadth of Hardoi, which is a traditionally backward district of UP with very low levels of literacy. Janchetna and its public grievance portal – “Lokvani” have become synonymous with responsibility and accountability amongst people of Hardoi and have revolutionized the way citizens interact with Government.

Background of the Project

Janchetna was launched with an objective of making Government systems simpler for citizens. It was observed that about 150-200 citizens used to visit the Collector and District Magistrate offices daily for various kinds of grievances. Most of the grievances related to land disputes or demands for facilities like hand pumps under developmental schemes, housing, pensions, scholarships, roads, electricity etc. In the manual system, basic information with regard to the service desired by the citizens was often not available with the collector and invariably, he would mark the grievance to the concerned department for a reply. The replies used to come after 10-15 days when the complainant was not available to provide feedback. Therefore, the quality of disposal of the grievance by the department could not be examined. At times, the same complainant would appear before the collector again after a few days, but given the large number of complaints, it was not possible to retrieve the concerned department’s reply, thus leaving the citizen without a reply. In this case the citizen would be required to file a fresh complaint with the department and the same cycle would repeat. Over and above, in many cases, the citizens found it difficult to even meet the collector who would be mostly busy in meetings and field visits. In such cases nobody knew what happened to the complaints that were submitted at his office.

In view of this, it was felt that basic development data and information with regard to schemes and programs of all departments should be made available online on the district website, developed jointly by Janchetna and NIC, so that citizens could access the information through the internet or kiosks which were set up by private entrepreneurs. At the same time, access to basic information on beneficiary schemes would be available to the Collector who could help the citizens when they approached him. Availability of information on the website of the district with regard to the Public Distribution System (PDS), arms licenses, fund allocation to various villages, developmental projects of various departments and land records information guaranteed the citizen’s right to information.  

In addition, as part of the Janchetna project, a public grievance module called “Lokvani”, similar to what had been implemented in the neighboring district of Sitapur in November 2004, was implemented.  This ensured a governance system, which utilized ICT tools for not only providing information but also a way for citizens to interact with the government. Thus, Janchetna is a single window, self-sustaining e-governance solution providing transparent, accountable and responsive administration for grievance handling, as well as a one stop information portal with regard to Government schemes and programs, land record information and maintenance.  

Application Context

The Janchetna project is a public-private partnership e-governance project implemented by the district administration of Hardoi with technical support from the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The project was conceived in December 2004 and launched on January 26, 2005. Additional services were regularly added and by December 2005, the project had reached out to more than 100,000 users. It covers all the 19 blocks, 5 subdivisions and 1101 village panchayats[i] of the district. It has been implemented by a society called Janchetna (meaning ‘public consciousness’) in an autonomous manner. The society is headed by the District Magistrate and has powers to raise resources, mainly from registration of kiosks and membership fees, for implementation of the project. Software development and hosting services were provided by NIC, which did not require any resource.

Objectives of the Project

§      To use ICT tools to facilitate information sharing between government and citizens.

§      To ensure greater transparency and accountability transparency in developmental schemes and projects by making the entire gamut of developmental processes and information relevant to citizens available on the district’s website.

§      To streamline the public grievance redressal system by allowing citizens to lodge and track their grievances through the Internet.

§      Establishment of a call center for effective communication with public.

 Scope of the Project

The project covers the entire gamut of the government’s developmental processes and citizen specific services like arms licenses, public distribution system, Panchayat elections and public grievance redressal. It not only provides access to information to citizens but also provides them a mechanism to file grievances online and obtain information with regard to the action taken. The project also offers a tool to the Collector to monitor the citizen grievance redressal process and performance of various officers. 

Services Delivered

The key services delivered through the Janchetna project are:

a.   Information on Development Schemes & Projects: All information with regard to developmental projects (such as the National Food for Work Programme[ii], funds released by the Panchayat department and the Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan[iii]), sanctions accorded along with physical and financial progress has been indicated on the district website.

b.    Public Grievance Redressal: Citizens can file their grievances through the kiosks in a prescribed format. On filing their grievances, complainants get a unique complaint number with the help of which they can track the action taken on their complaint through the website or the call center. All complaints that are filed in a day are marked to concerned officers and departments for redressal by the Collector every evening. The Collector also sets the time limit for disposal depending on the nature of the complaint. Details of action taken are entered at the Lokvani control room.

c.    Monitoring of Public Grievances: At any given time, the status of all complaints is available to the Collector so that he knows which officer/department is lagging in disposal of grievances. The Collector reviews the performance of officers every Tuesday and action is taken on defaulters who have not disposed complaints in time and with prescribed quality. Citizens who are not satisfied with disposals can also meet the Collector and apprise him of the situation. This gives a very effective tool in the hands of the Collector in ensuring that various departments and officers do complaint redressal with promptness and with quality.

d.    Status of Arms Licenses: Around 30-40% of the people who meet the Collector every day come for obtaining arms licenses. Since the system of issuing arms licenses is very complicated, there was a lot of corruption in the manual system in giving even basic information to applicants. The status of the application (whether a verification report has been received from the police and Sub–Divisional Magistrate) can be accessed by applicants with the help of their respective file numbers.

e.    Online Land Records: Land Records of the entire district have been made available on the website of the district and citizens can access them at the Janchetna kiosks. Special counters have been set up at all sub division headquarters for issue of copies of records of rights on payment of Rs 15/-.

f.     Online information on guidelines and provisions of various schemes of government departments; tenders put up by departments; government notifications pertaining to reservation of seats, reservation rosters and results of elections to all village panchayats, block panchayats and district panchayats; status of crediting of old age and widow pensions to beneficiaries’ accounts; general providend fund details of teachers; application forms for various government services such as arms licenses, pensions and scholarships.

 Stakeholder Consultation

The project stakeholders comprise of the government departments, public or the users of the services, and the kiosk owners. Janchetna project was developed with the simple objective of improving governance at the district level. It was supposed to be a tool which to begin with, provides information to the Collector on his computer, and to people for access through the kiosks. In order to make this happen, stakeholder consultation was a necessity as the government departments had to come up with information that is relevant and useful for the people. Considering the poor levels of access to computers in the district, the services were offered through kiosks. Existing Public Call Office (PCO) owners, computer operators doing text processing and photocopy operators were called and the concept explained in order to convince them to set up kiosks. Initially, stakeholder consultation was primarily done with government departments and kiosk operators in order to develop the project and implement it. 3-4 months after the launch, more services and information were added based on the feedback received from citizens.

Major Challenges Faced

The greatest challenge that the project faced was in convincing the Government departments to share information online with people. Until then, such information was primarily restricted within the domain of government offices, files and with the government officers (babus). Most departments were not comfortable with the idea of putting it on the website and opening it up to public scrutiny. Some departments came up with excuses such as requiring permissions from the department head in the state capital or that information was not up to date or computerised. However, all the departments that had relevant information required by citizens were forced to digitize it and publish it on the website.

The next challenge was in setting up the kiosks. Hardoi district has a low computer literacy level. However, this did not prove to be a deterrent to the project as the kiosks were used as an interface between the systems and the citizens. A few volunteers were encouraged to set up kiosks and the launch of each kiosk was made into a public affair with the Collector inaugurating it, thus ensuring that the launch received sufficient publicity. Some of the kiosks were even inaugurated by the local minister to demonstrate political support for the project.

With regard to the public grievance module, a major challenge was in ensuring the quality of disposal and that redressal was done by the departments within the specified time limit. To make sure that this was done, the Collector conducted weekly meetings with defaulting departments. At the same time, randomly chosen complaints were cross-checked by field officers to ensure quality disposals.

Change management was identified as the toughest task for this project due to lack of inclination of officers for learning new technology. Therefore, it was necessary to have a programmatic approach to change management in order to ensure an effective implementation of the system.

Business Model

The project is an outstanding example of a highly cost-efficient, economically self-reliant and user financed community network. The conversion of existing cyber cafes/computer training institutes/PCOs into Janchetna centers was a key factor driving the financial success. This step ensured that extraneous capital was not a vital requirement for the solution. The Janchetna society signed agreements with existing local entrepreneurs’ who were primarily PCO, cyber Café operators or owners of computer training institutes for the purpose of registering them as Janchetna franchisees with a nominal annual fee of five hundred rupees. The IT entrepreneurs running the kiosks are given adequate training to access the services available through the website. A typical kiosk has an Internet enabled PC, a printer and a CD-ROM drive. Some of them also have provisions for power backup. These kiosks earn revenue through the service fee paid by citizens for obtaining various services of Janchetna. In addition, the kiosks can also generate extra revenue by providing disparate facilities and services like computer education, computer typing, digital photography, and internet access. The management of the kiosk is the complete responsibility of the kiosk owner who makes his own investment for computers, printers and space. Thus, this project has been implemented with no Government financing and the sustenance of the project depends on the amount of relevant and useful information put on the website and the quality of disposal of grievances.

Revenue Model

The project has a limited revenue model in the sense that registered kiosks are authorized to charge citizens pre determined rates for access to information. Similarly complaints can be lodged at a cost of Rs 10 and information on disposal and action taken can be obtained on payment of Rs 10. This ensures a regular income for the kiosk owners.

Communication and Publicity Strategy Used

Since the project was implemented locally in District Hardoi and the very nature of the project was such that not much resource could be spared for publicity, it was decided that the performance of the project would bring in publicity and acceptability. Information related to government departments and their services is a much sought after commodity. When it was published in the papers that information with regard to the Public Distribution System and other departments would be put online, a lot of public interest was generated. Kiosk owners did their own publicity and inauguration of kiosks by the Collector and other VIPs also made news. News of weekly meetings for monitoring grievances and actions taken also made news. All this generated ample publicity for the project.

Technology, Infrastructure and Application Software

This was a project with very limited resources and time, so very high end technology was not used. The front end of the application uses Active Server Pages to generate dynamic text while the database resides on SQL Server. The software has been developed by NIC and the web portal is hosted on NIC’s server located in Delhi but administered remotely by the Hardoi NIC district center. Kiosks access the portal through dial up Internet access.

Impact Assessment of the Project

Citizens are the key beneficiaries of the Janchetna system. Within 18 months of its launch, more then 60,000 people had accessed the website for various kinds of information and about 30,000 complaints were filed by the people through the public grievance module. More than 90% of these complaints were resolved amicably. Usage of the project by people has increased over time and this has led to the launch of around 32 kiosks. When information with regard to reservations of seats for Panchayat elections was put on the website, there was a huge increase in the people accessing the website through the kiosks. One kiosk even sold 1,500 copies of the reservation chart in a single day. For the government, this project improved its image and service delivery.

Conclusion

Janchetna project is a self-sustainable solution that efficiently and effectively meets the needs of its three key stakeholders: (a) citizens, (b) the district administration and government departments, and (c) the kiosks operators/ private entrepreneurs. Self-sustainability of Janchetna is assured through its innovative operational model whereby existing cyber cafes and PCOs were leveraged to act as franchisees of the project. Such a strategy ensured that there was no need for investments and operational support from the government to set up and run such kiosks. Besides, the project generates its own funds from the citizens and contributes to the earnings of the kiosk operators.

Another dimension of sustainability is provided by the transparency created by the system which has allowed citizens access to key information and local media and press to take up issues related to administrative efficacy. This has created tremendous public pressure which will ensure that the system continues to exist even when the champions of the system move out. Initially there was a fear amongst most people that the system would collapse once the IT savvy Collector who introduced the system was transferred. However, the project has continued and even improved six months after his departure.

The citizens are obviously the key beneficiaries from the solution. This is evident from the increasing number of citizens accessing information from the website, the number of petitions being filed per day and the efficiency with which they are now being resolved. The system has also made government more approachable to the ordinary citizen who had to earlier forego wages to stand in a queue to merely file a petition. Clearly, the citizen is now able to put his or her time to more productive use, which definitely adds up to his income.  

The Janchetna system has also helped the administration in streamlining its operations and highlighted internal process bottlenecks. It has also helped in workload rationalization as the system is able to identify the workload of each officer. It has also helped in putting public pressure on non-performing officers whose indifference to petitions and grievances is made obvious from the outstanding petitions that the officer has.  

The kiosk operators have benefited from this system as it has led to enhancement of their income. This project has also created employment for the educated unemployed, many of whom have setup successful kiosks. The Janchetna project has successfully showcased a paradigm that can be incorporated by other administrative organizations. It has also proved that a low literacy rate and financial constraints are not barriers for implementing successful e-governance projects. A key learning from this solution is that word of mouth is the most effective and efficient mechanism for generating awareness among rural and semi-urban citizens that have low literacy rates.  

Janchetna has brought about a well appreciated transparency to the working of the administration. People were unaware of their rights as well the possible support provided by the government under various schemes. Widespread awareness as well as a strongly formulated public opinion can go a long way in the fight against corruption. Thus Janchetna is indeed Public Consciousness.