While Andhra Pradesh (AP) was the first Indian state to take to e-governance projects in a big way, Karnataka has played catch-up with aplomb. Projects such as Bhoomi and Khajane demonstrate the Karnataka government’s commitment to e-governance. Akhtar Pasha looks at Karnataka’s many e-governance projects and at AP’s eCOPS project that helps the AP police department track crimes

Khajane: Linking treasuries
In the good old days of the Maharajas, ‘Bhandaris’ and ‘Khajanchands’ used to manage treasuries. Today, thanks to technology, all payments made by the Government of Karnataka (GoK) can be tracked and monitored, as payments are made online. The GoK has computerised 27 district treasuries and an additional treasury at Hubli that is the biggest of the bunch. The project called Khajane also encompasses 184 sub-treasuries, pension payment, State Huzur and stamps treasuries.

Altogether there are 215 treasuries in Karnataka and every rupee spent is going to be accounted for by the treasuries department through this system that will help in real-time payment clearance to civil pensioners, NGOs and all treasuries. As a bonus, it will also capture online data and help eliminate fraud.

M Prabhakara, director of Treasuries in the Government of Karnataka says, “The treasuries department was facing numerous problems that led to the idea of computerising all the treasuries in Karnataka. We found a number of frauds and loopholes in the system—in places where there are only six staff members on the rolls, departments were drawing salaries for ten to twelve employees. Sometimes, allocated money for specific projects was overdrawn.”

The district treasury was computerised to compile accounts on a trial basis in 1997. When that succeeded, government officials recommended comprehensive computerisation of all the treasuries. In 1999, GoK approved ‘online transactions for all treasuries’. A procedural manual was prepared in November 1999 and by January 2001 an agreement was signed between GoK, STPI and CMC. CMC was asked to develop the Khajane software, set up the hardware and software, conduct training and facilities management for five years. STPI’s role was to arrange for the network equipment, networking software, providing V-SAT connectivity and maintain the network set-up for that period.

A C Ashok Kumar, the deputy general manager—CS at CMC says, “Initially, HCL won the bidding but it was unable to fulfil the contract. NIIT too was unable to meet GoK’s requirement. We bagged the contract in January 2001 and the total size of the contract was Rs 23.4 crore (Rs 17.11 crore for application development and systems and another Rs 6.8 crore for facilities management for five years).

A pilot was undertaken in November 2001 in the four districts of Tumkur, Bangalore Urban, Gubbi and Shiggaon. Prabhakara adds, “After the successful pilot, we decided to roll out Version 2 of the Khajane software in March 2002 across all treasuries.”

Every district treasury was networked using an IBM xSeries server running SCO Unix using hardware-based RAID storage. At each location there are several client PCs—IBM NetVista 2169 H4A machines running Windows 98. Each sub-treasury has an IBM NetVista 2169 KPA-7 server running Windows 2000. Sub-treasuries use the same client PCs as district treasuries. The database is on Oracle.

According to Prabhakara, 212 treasuries are connected to the Network Management Centre (NMC) located in Khanija Bhavan, Bangalore via VSAT links. Since the volume of transactions is high, GoK has a disaster recovery (DR) site in Dharwad. “We back the data to NMC and to the DR site via VSATs every half hour. Sun’s UltraSPARC Enterprise 450 servers are deployed at the NMC and DR site. We wanted a reliable and secure operating system, hence we have used Solaris as the OS and Oracle as the database,” adds Prabhakara.

Mahesh B who is the joint director at STPI Bangalore says, “STPI has installed 203 Gilat VSATs networked to a single hub (NMC) out of the required total of 215 VSATs. HCL Comnet has provided the VSAT hardware. For the entire project we are using an INSAT 3B 18 MHz transponder that will give 4 Mbps outbound bandwidth (hub to remote location) and 10 x 307 Kbps inbound bandwidth (remote location to hub).”

CMC played a key role in training staff at all state treasuries. Kumar of CMC says, “Each treasury official has been trained by CMC. About 2,000 employees were given basic computer training. Another 600 were given training on hardware and application software. In addition to this 75 were trained in system administration.”

Project Status: 212 treasuries have been networked and the remaining three treasuries will be online by end of October 2002.

Total cost of the project: Rs 32 to 35 crore.

Benefits: Prabhakara says, “Khajane software is a smart application. It can track bills and pinpoint where a bill is pending and who is the officer in-charge. For instance, a bill reaching the Bidar treasury takes only nine seconds and a subsequent bill takes four seconds to reach the Bangalore treasury. Earlier this used to take several days.” Earlier the treasuries used to pay pensioners and NGOs once in two months. This implementation will help make payments on a monthly basis.

The system also checks for overdrawing of payment by performing a test of 671 parameters before allowing a payment to be processed. These will be monitored from the NMC. The system’s benefits also include:

Signatures of all the 27,100 drawing and disposing officers are captured online.

Total control of the budget for all government departments, 4,500 zilla panchayats, taluk panchayats, gram panchayats and municipal corporations.

• Elimination of fraud.
• Central database is created.
• The bill is traced using a unique ID number, throughout the system.
• Online verification provided.
• Online expenditure details.
• Staff strength check.
• Financial control.

Rajeev Chawla says that the revenue department has generated Rs 9 crore in revenues from the ‘Bhoomi’ project

Bhoomi—liberating land records
The objective behind the Karnataka Government’s ‘Bhoomi’ project for computerisation of land records was to fight corruption and increase transparency in land record administration. Implemented by the Revenue Department, this project has led to the computerisation of the centuries-old system of handwritten rural land records. Better yet, it has now turned into a money-spinner for the department. Seventy lakh villagers living in 30,000 villages will benefit from the Bhoomi project. Through this system, the revenue department has done away with the corruption-ridden system that involved bribing village accountants to procure land records; records of right, tenancy and cultivation certificates (RTCs).

Bhoomi in action: A farmer can walk into the nearest taluk office and ask for a computer printout of his land record certificate for Rs 15. He can also check details of land records on a touch-screen kiosk by inserting a two-rupee coin. These kiosks, installed at the taluk office, will provide the public with a convenient interface to the land records centre.

The project was kicked off in mid-1999 under the centrally sponsored scheme of ‘computerisation of land records’. This scheme was considered a low-cost project, as the estimated total expenditure was between Rs 18 to 20 crore. The central government has provided assistance to the tune of Rs 12 crore, while Karnataka has contributed the remainder, mainly to set up land record booths and install kiosks at each taluk. “Since the launch of Bhoomi in March 2002, the revenue department has generated Rs 9 crore in revenues from this project. Each month, on an average, the department is receiving a crore in revenues. From this we estimate that roughly seven lakh farmers are using this facility,” says a jubilant Rajeev Chawla, the additional secretary of the Revenue Department in the Karnataka government.

Implementing the entire process was not easy. Chawla says, “It was a mammoth task. Karnataka has 70 lakh farmers living in 30,000 villages. The challenge before us was to convert 20 million land records, each containing 45 fields. We had to digitise one billion data fields for which we made use of the services of 17 data entry agencies over 20,000 man-months.”

The software for this project, Bhoomi Software, was designed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bangalore. Initial data entry was done at the taluk level through private agencies after which printouts were taken and validated through comparison with the original land record books. The data was then ported to Bhoomi. The software runs on Windows NT, Microsoft SQL Server is the back-end database. The front-end was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.

Chawla says, “There were three reasons for choosing Microsoft’s solution for the entire project. Firstly, we wanted a system that was familiar and commonly used. Microsoft’s local support in rural areas was a plus point. Oracle does not provide support in rural areas and its solution would have ended up costing more than Rs 60,000 for a five-user licence. But we got SQL Server for a price of Rs 22,000 and Windows NT at Rs 15,000 when NT was selling at Rs 30,000, bringing down the total cost of investment. Besides, Microsoft’s consulting team has helped us solve security problems and improve the performance of applications that were not running to spec.”

He added that since the system does not involve real-time online transactions, the Revenue Department has not gone in for high-end servers. Each kiosk runs on a Compaq ProLiant PL 400 with 128 MB RAM. In total, there are 177 Compaq PCs being used. Each PC has two 18.2 GB hard drives with data being mirrored across both. Each kiosk is equipped with a Wipro LA1050 dot matrix printer. To prevent misuse, the software incorporates a fingerprint reader from Compaq for foolproof authentication.

Chawla says, “In the current fiscal we are planning to set up a disaster recovery (DR) site as the database is huge. We are yet to finalise on a location. For DR we are talking to STPI, we want to use their VPN solution for this purpose. In addition to this, we are also talking to BSNL for a leased line solution, but that may prove to be an expensive solution.” He hints that in all likelihood, STPI will come through as they have sufficient bandwidth. Besides DR, the Revenue Department is also planning to expand Bhoomi to sub-taluks. Chawla adds, “There are 750 sub-taluks in Karnataka and we are planning to connect 200 sub-taluks in 2003-04.”

Earlier, before Bhoomi, the revenue department used to charge an official fee of Rs 2 for procuring a land record. Even that paltry amount never reached the department. Sources say that earlier farmers used to pay close to Rs 500-600 to get land records from village accountants. Post-Bhoomi, farmers are happy to pay a little more (Rs 15 in place of the earlier official amount of Rs 2) to get their land records swiftly without having to bribe middlemen to get what is rightfully theirs.