Bhoomi Project : e-Governance helping Indian farmers.

One of the first e-Governance projects that was taken up in Karnataka on a war-footing has just reached a definitive phase. Bhoomi ('Earth' in Kannada language) project was kicked off at the turn of the millennium with the gargantuan task of computerizing all agricultural land records in the state. Six years of existence have driven away all fears and the state's farmers have ungrudgingly embraced this move. The success has been so high that the Central government has adopted the Bhoomi model as the official model to be adopted across all states in India for computerization of land records. What is so unique about this model that it has met with such resounding success. We need to delve a little deeper The whole project involved setting up kiosks across the various taluks (counties) in the state. With 203 kiosks set up all over the state, farmers were invited by the government to submit their records for computerization. With lot of publicity about how this would ease life for farmers, the bargain paid off. 20 million (2 crore) land records of 6.7 million(67 lakh) land owners were computerized with farmer contributing Rs. 61.94 crore rupees as service fees to the exchequer. However life has been much easier for them ever since the kiosks appeared. Why so? Retrieval of land records by farmers is a child' play. They go to the nearest kiosk, pay Rs 15 as service charge and within 2 minutes they are handed over a printed copy of their land record. Simple as it may seem, old timers recall that this routine task used to take up to 30 days before the implementation of the Bhoomi project. Farmers can also have title changes done in just 35 days as against the previous 200 days that it used to take. Each kiosk has touch screens that allow farmers to keep track of how services requested by them are progressing. In case services take longer, the farmer is entitled to directly go to the taluk head and demand an immediate look into the cause. Land records are also frequently used by farmers as collateral to raise bank loans and credit lines. With the Bhoomi project, a farmer can directly ask the banks to link his land record online with the credit link extended to him. This ensures that he can work up bank loans within 5 days. The same holds true with the courts. Land litigation cases take lesser time to resolve with computerized records. Overcoming bureaucracy and doing away with the regular palm greasing that had to be done to the village officials to get the land records earlier has removed the smirk from the farmer's face. Even on the security front, Bhoomi scores several points. Bhoomi has a biometric fingerprint system built in for security. Any major service like a title change requested by a farmer requires key official in the upper echelons of the system to validate it via their finger prints. This ensures that the system is virtually tamper proof. What has the government gained from it? Lots, one might even go tot the extent of saying that the government and not the farmers are the project's biggest beneficiaries. With the biometric security enabled Bhoomi project, the government has totally done away with losses incurred due to land record tampering. 2500 crores was the total loss in Bangalore alone due to land record tampering before 2000. That should put things in perspective. The other gain is the ease with which the government can regulate land revenue, bring about changes in laws that regulate land revenue. The software also enables the administrators to generate various reports based on type of soil, land holding size, type of crops grown etc. This information would enable administrators to take informed policy decision. No wonder then the Bhoomi project won the Silver Icon at the 7th National e-Governance Conference, the Silver at the CommonWealth Innovation Awards in 2002 and was the finalist at the Stockholm Challenge Awards, 2002. Latest Indian IT News - Click for details Technorati Tags: e-governance, egovernance, India, IT, karnataka, land, Bhoomi, computerization, Bangalore

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Karnataka Assembly Goes Online

Monday will be the opening of another chapter in e-Governance in Karnataka. The Karnataka government has decided to publish online, the recordings of the daily proceedings at the Assembly, for the sake of citizens. This means that the editing and reporting branch of the Vidhana Soudha would go in for an overhaul. Once fully setup, the branch will be equipped with facilities that will enable the online editing of the session proceedings; compilation of daily deliberations at the house in both Kannada and English linking of question posed by members to the government and the answers provided by government members live coverage of key debates on the web conversion of all audio tapes to CD format completely digitize the archived proceedings of the house of the last 50 years. All the output from these activities would be available to the common citizen at the official website of the Karnataka government. Latest Indian IT News - Click for details Technorati Tags: Karnataka, IT, India, government, e-governance, assembly, digitization, Bangalore

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Demands of Globalization - Innovate, Educate & Convince

Two newsitems caught my attention in the Sunday morning edition of the Times of India. Both spoke of how India needs to gear up to the demands of globalization, that according to the New York Times famed columnist Mr. Thomas L Friedman, has created a level playing field for people and nations across the world Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh who had been in Bangalore yesterday to inaugurate the construction of Metro Rail, showered a few words of praise on the city's residents. "You have become the symbol of a new India, an India on the move, rising to fulfill its destiny on the world map. The success of IT revolution has placed the state on the world map. This is not an isolated success of a few people who work behind walls and inside air-conditioned rooms. This success has been made possible by the toil and commitment of millions of people. You also need to reinvent for the future if you have to maintain your lead. You need to invest looking the needs two decades from now. You need to keep the costs of living, working and doing business in Bangalore low" Another TOI headline screamed "Indian firms creating more jobs for Americans" Here are some excerpts... "American public should be educated about the role played by Indian companies in creating thousands of jobs as they expand their operations in the US to counter the impression that outsourcing was taking jobs to India", Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath has said. "Indian companies are also helping to turn around American firms facing financial difficulties and US companies are getting a lot of business from India", Nath said launching the 'India Business Forum' here on Friday. The first item clearly drives home the point that Indian Inc honchos have been trying to drill through for 2-3 years now. Innovate, innovate and innovate, for that is the only thing that differentiates companies today. Today's customer is so materialistic in his approach that he is easily bored by even a short term monotony in products or services. He is always looking out for that extra something that will pep up his experience of the service he has subscribed to or has added some zing to the product he plans to buy. Innovation and globalization are linked too. Jay Dwivedi hits the hammer on the head when he says that innovation has to be part of a company's DNA from day one and can be managed literally in real time. The days when you could make a plastic bottle, fill it with water, sit back, and see the sales grow each year, are long gone. Today, companies have figured out to make plastic bottles in China, ship empty bottles to Italy, fill them up with water from the Italian Alps, and then sell them at your local supermarket for half the price. Only an innovative company can thrive in this environment. The rest simply file for Chapter 11. Companies going global have all the more reason to constantly innovate not just to cater to the ever changing tastes of the consumer, but also to reach out to as many varied markets as possible. John Stark speaks on the importance of innovation in the industry and what happens when you stop innovating. The second part touches on how it is necessary to have the guts to tell the people, who have brushed against the wrong side of globalization, about the long term benefits of having embraced globalism. Globalism might have ignored them in the first wave, but nobody will be ignored for long, for globalization gives back what it takes, albeit in a different form. While American IT companies are making a beeline to hire the best talent at cheap prices in India, Indian companies are hiring domain experts from Europe and North America to penetrate these markets. In the process Indian companies are giving a fresh lease of life to ailing companies in these countries by acquiring them and saving the jobs of the employees of these companies. With Indian companies having survived the initial foray into going international and having quite proven that they have in them what it takes to succeed at the global level, it is now all about innovating to stay ahead and convincing hostile governments (and foreign, local media) that they do have nothing to lose by allowing Indian companies to operate from their own turf. Latest Indian IT News - Click for details Technorati Tags: innovate, globalization, India, IT, Friedman, Bangalore

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India IT News Capsule - June 2006, Issue 9

AMD powered PCs exclusive shop set up at Bangalore: Vertex Techno Solutions Pvt. Ltd has opened AMD exclusive multi-brand computing devices store at President Chambers on Hayes Road, Bangalore, which will showcase all major brands including HP, Lenovo, Acer, Fujitsu, etc. exclusively based on the AMD platform. BusinessWeek Infotech Top 100 contains 6 Indian firms: BusinessWeek has released its top 100 global Infotech firms and the list contains 6 Indian firms. Within the top 25 came Infosys(10), TCS(12), Bharti TeleVentures(19) and Wipro(23). Cognizant(32) and Satyam(85) were two other Indian companies. Government steps in to regulate sales of GenX technologies to Indian companies: The Indian government has made it mandatory that all GenX technologies sold by international companies to Indian operators must be approved by the government. The logic behind it is to ensure that the international companies completely work with the Indian buyers to address all setup & security issues before making the sales. This ruling comes in the wake of Qualcomm's Push-To-Talk technology that was sold to Tata Teleservices and had to be later withdrawn as the government pointed out that the security systems were not in place to protect consumer interests. Birlas buy Canadian BPO firm: The Aditya Birla group has moved forward to acquire Canadian based BPO firm Minacs through its subsidiary TransWorks. The deal is expected to be finalized at 125 million USD. TCS to invest 1100 Crore rupees in Karnataka: TCS, the Indian IT giant has evinced interest in investing Rs 1100 crores in Karnataka. It has asked the Karnataka government to allot land for this purpose in Tier 2 cities that Karnataka has been planning. Previous News Capsule

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Social Bookmarking Catching up in India

Ever felt the need to be able to access your bookmarks while surfing the Internet from a PC other than your regular home or office PC/laptop? Necessity led to the advent of online book marking sites which allow you to bookmark a website or a specific page online instead of your browser. So whenever you travel, you just need to remember the name of the online bookmarking site and all your bookmarks accompany you. However the story does not end there. When I can store my bookmarks online, why not share them with friends? If so with friends, why not with common interest groups. Social Bookmarking was born. Web sites started offering netizens not only online storage for their bookmarks but also an opportunity to share and view other people's favorite bookmarks. Among the most popular ones today on the Internet are Del.icio.us (read it as delicious), Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, Blink, Furl, Spurl, Sphere, etc. The few common services that all these websites allow are Bookmark your favorite web sites or URLs. Have your bookmarks thrown open to the public and get them to vote for your bookmark in case they like it. You can add friends and constantly keep track of new bookmarks that they add. More the votes on your bookmark, the more likely it is to appear on the homepages of these web sites. That will mean more and more people will view the bookmark and hence more votes. Tag your bookmarks with key words that enable users searching on those key terms to locate your bookmark. Tag Clouds that give an idea of what keywords are currently the most popular among users. Plugins for Firefox, Google Desktop, Opera, etc allow you to access your bookmarks and earmark new ones to these sites directly, without having to actually browse to these web sites. The Indian Scene Of recent I have been witnessing a slew of Indian social bookmarking sites that have sprung up. Indiagram, HumDigg, IndianPad, ForumsofIndia are four that I have come across. While this post does not intend to review each of them in detail and point out their shortcomings, it definitely is an attempt to point out the uniqueness of each of these sites and leave it to the Indian IT Pulse reader to choose his/her favorite. The idea is to highlight the social bookmarking trend that is catching the fancy of netizens in India and the scenario in the Indian webscape. So here goes: Indiagram: One of the first Indian social bookmarking sites I came across. The most refreshing feature in Indiagram is the User Cloud on the home page. Based on a rating system that takes into account the number of bookmarks added, the rating obtained for one's bookmarks based on voting by other users, etc the most popular user is indicated on a higher sized font in the cloud of names. Less popular users are assigned lower font sizes. Though other sites too rank users, a user cloud acts as a quick reference to home in on the most popular bookmarker. HumDigg: A clone of Digg, this has provided me some very interesting material to read. Guess, the initial adopters of HumDigg have turned out to be quite Internet savvy people. URLs are also browsable category wise which is one cool feature here. Categories range from technology, movies to sports and science. IndianPad: A flurry of interesting innovations make this website a must visit, even if you are not a registered user. In addition to the usual links, the site also allows users to add music bookmarks and rate music. The tag cloud too is user tweakable to view popular tags in the last 48 hours, 7 days, 30 days , 1 year or for all time. Some things though failed to impress me. There is a section called Livecast that gives a live preview of URLs being posted real time, though I must say, I could not fathom why it would interest anybody. URLs too have been divided into 3 sections. General Stories, Audio and Adult. Seems rather bizarre and I could only gather that it must have been done with a commercial intent rather than provide for any meaningful browsing. Forums of India: A new kid on the block, with run-of-the-mill features. Though I did not find anything out of the ordinary, I plan to keep a watch to see if this site has some ace up its sleeve, something fresh and innovative. I must add though that when I came across this site, it gave me the impetus to get this post from draft to publish status. :-) One major grouse I have of all Indian bookmarking sites is that all of them promise to give you India specific content, but fall short by miles. Indiagram says "Stay current and informed with India", IndianPad shouts, "My Country, My views , My vote!" . Quite understandable that users cannot be restricted to submit only URLs restricted to Indian web sites and doing so would make the sites less popular. However, I would love to at least see a section that displays only the India specific URLs filtered from the rest of the URLs. This might be done say via an automatic filtering by filterbot followed by a review from an editorial board. At the time of writing this post, I am sure none of the web sites have reached a critical mass of users. To get more users registering at these sites, the site promoters need to convince users the need to start bookmarking. To start bookmarking, users need lots of good content to read. With blogging rapidly catching the fancy of the Indians, lot of desi content is sure to drive traffic to these sites. Meanwhile, until that happens, these sites would have to rely, first, on their current users recycling bookmarks stumbled upon on the international bookmarking sites and second, their ability to innovate. Innovation would be crucial to survive the bloodbath that is gonna happen sooner or later to drive traffic and maintain sustainable revenue streams flowing. Latest Indian IT News - Click for details Technorati Tags: india, IT, social, bookmarking, bookmark, Indiagram, humdigg, forums of india, indianpad

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IT Czar Speaks Up on Success

Rediff recently interviewed Narayana Murthy, the czar of Indian IT emergence. Speaking on a host of subjects that ranged from the start of his company Infosys to globalization, Indian economy, reduced cycle times for big projects, his retirement as executive chairman from Infosys and 5 elements that he says defintely lead to success, the man provides a beautiful insight into his though process. Here below are the 5 principles that form the cornerstones of success according to Narayana Murthy Openness to Learn: Openness to subordinate your ego to take ideas from others. Meritocracy: The best ideas are adopted and implemented using data to arrive at the best decision. Speed: Assuring you do things faster compared to yesterday and last quarter. Imagination: You continually bring better ideas and better innovation to the table. Excellence in Execution: That is implementation of these great ideas with a higher level of excellence today than yesterday. Food for thought, I would say. Latest Indian IT News - Click for details Technorati Tags: narayana murthy, infosys, success, rediff, india, globalization, IT

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