E-governance projects in civic bodies have not been great success stories. Few of them have changed governance at the local level or improved government interface with citizens. But the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) is promising to change the way municipal bodies are administered with the launch of its digital initiative ?Geographical Information Systems for Dynamic Administration (GISDA) that it claims will be more efficient, transparent and citizen-centric.
For the first time, this kind of project has been developed on open source to find an economical solution for municipal administration. For this, PCMC has tied-up with the Science and Technology Park (STP), University of Pune. A joint team of 150 from the PCMC and STP worked to develop the tool. Rajendra P Jagdale, director general of the STP, said. ??It normally takes two to three years to build such a project, but we managed in a year thanks to the joint project management, not heard of in government projects,?? Jadgale said.
The beta version has been in circulation and has generated a lot of interest in the other urban local bodies. It comes with connectivity of 56 MPBS and 30 GB RAM, eight servers and dual processors, 60 BI storage devices. It is language independent as it uses Unicode and can carry out search in Marathi.
??The state government wants this model to be replicated in the other bodies. GIS has been made compulsory for urban civic bodies wanting funds under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).
For PCMC, this is a crucial addition to improve its revenue generation as it is looking for Rs 4,000 crore under the JNNURM for upgrading infrastructure, PCMC commissioner Dilip Band said.
PCMC is using a new way to manage this digital initiative. Band said a separate entity would be created for managing this at the front end while the back end work would be done by PCMC. ??This will enable us to overcome the problem of attracting and retailing high-end IT talent,?? he said. Jagdale said this model of managing was critical as often e-governance projects failed not because of technology but poor management.
With GISDA, web-based fully digital maps of the city survey, development plan for roads, city bus stops, electrical poles, drainage and water lines, schools, gardens, hospitals, fires stations, octroi post, municipal offices, commercial establishment and industries are now available.
Tedious and time-consuming processes, such as building permission, tendering, property and water revenue management and the asset and works management have been automated. It will also enable the corporation to have supervisory control and data acquisition for electricity, water supply and traffic management.
GISDA has about 80 layers of land-based information accurately mapped using high resolution Quick bird satellite images.