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Panchayats take first steps towards digital empowerment- Anuja
-Live Mint


Even as India struggles in efforts to usher in transparency, some panchayats are offering a refreshing contrast

Chandana/Jind: Sometime last year, Surendra Singh got a call from a military outpost in Srinagar. The soldier had an urgent inquiry for the 31-year-old sarpanch of Chandana, a village in Haryana's Kaithal district. The man, who hailed from the village, had lost his voter ID card and needed a letter from the panchayat attesting that he was indeed a resident of Chandana.

Singh listened to him patiently, then told him to go online and look up Chandana and epanchayat. "I told him that our village now had a website which had the scanned copies of all the voter cards uploaded on it. All he had to do was to go online and get a printout of his identity card," Singh said. A 10-minute task as opposed to something that would have taken 10 days at the best of times, the sarpanch said.

While India struggles to ensure the effective implementation of transparency laws such as the Right to Information (RTI) Act and faces resistance on the part of officialdom over posting data in the public domain, Chandana and some other panchayats offer a refreshing contrast.

Some of India's smallest local self-governance units are taking their first steps towards promoting transparency through digital empowerment and showing how it can help. It helps that the two Haryana panchayats profiled here-Chandana and Bibipur- both have young, educated, tech-savvy leaders who are willing to make the extra effort to ensure that the digital strategy is meaningful.

However, for villages like these, any digital intervention is secondary to a robust system of governance. Panchayat members know full well that digital empowerment by itself does not ensure the effectiveness of gram sabhas and work needs to be done on the ground to get the full benefit of such initiatives.

The idea of creating a dedicated website for his village panchayat occurred to Singh, a graduate, even before he got elected to the post in 2010. "When I became the sarpanch, everyone told me that it would be too costly an affair and that the members may not agree to give panchayat funds for this work. However, I was convinced that even if I had to pay from my own pocket, I would get this done," he said.

Singh heads a 17-member panchayat in which all the other members are older and less educated than him. He was able to convince them that going online would work to the advantage of the village. The panchayat's digital initiative was supported by the New Delhi-based non-profit organization Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), which works towards creating economic and commercial viability by using information, communication and technology (ICT).

A success story

One of the main effects of digitizing panchayats is creating awareness about the Internet and digital literacy, said Osama Manzar, DEF's founder-director and a Mint columnist.

"It is only when members of panchayat in a village have a little idea about technology that they can look at the possibilities of what more can be done through it," said Manzar, part of a working group on Internet proliferation and governance at the ministry of communications and information technology.

While the government has taken several steps to help them on their way by laying optical fibre and developing software related to panchayat accounting, a lot more needs to be done. "We need to aim at a certain level of digital literacy, adaptation and creating a culture of internet connectivity," Manzar said.

For Chandana, the move also allowed its people to forge a bond with history. Panchayat members and the younger people in the village became engaged in finding out about their own past in a bid to generate content. All the information that was collected, apart from multimedia content such as photos, were sent to DEF, which then set up the website in 2011 and uploaded the content at no cost. The panchayat then took the project forward by scanning in documents and posting details about funds and meetings, keeping it relevant. Aside from serving as a psychological boost, going digital also means higher officials can easily access information about the village, resulting in the swifter clearing of, say, grants. The website ensures greater visibility for the village, said Sanjeev Kumar, a 21-year-old graduate student from Chandana who studies at a college in Kaithal. "People in my college are always keen to know about my village's website. I am sure that when higher officers see the work done in our village on the website, it would get us funds more easily," he said.

Some 70km away in Bibipur village in the Jind district of Haryana, digital empowerment allows sarpanch Sunil Jaglan, 30, to save time and money by chasing up demands with officials and making sure these are resolved by email. He stays back after panchayat meetings to see that all relevant documents are scanned and uploaded on the website, which boasts of Bibipur being the first "hi-tech gram panchayat" in the country.

Participatory governance

"The idea is to achieve transparency even without being asked for it. We are now in the process of scanning and uploading nearly 3,000 pages of official documents on our website to maximize the information available in the public domain," Jaglan said.

Bibipur is atypical in some other respects as well. The panchayat has trained its focus on female foeticide, which is significant given that it belongs to a state that holds the dubious record of having India's worst sex ratio in the country.

The panchayat got permission to hold a gram sabha on female foeticide, made it compulsory for the names of those who have not reported pregnancies in the family to be announced at gram sabhas and instituted the practice of asking mothers who have one girl child to inaugurate village functions.

The village was also one of the more than 80,000 entities that sent recommendations to the justice J.S. Verma committee that was set up to suggest ways in which India's laws could be strengthened to improve its awful record on women's safety. The committee itself was set up in response to widespread public protests against the violent rape of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi, who eventually died of her injuries. Bibipur sent its recommendations by email.

In Chandana and Bibipur, the online revolution is part of a bigger picture in which young, enlightened leaders want to make their villages a better place.

Having a younger, educated sarpanch has helped Chandana, said Tara Chand Beniwal, a 40-year-old farmer. "Earlier, the sarpanches were not so educated and so could not communicate very effectively. But if you are educated, you can just directly walk up to babus and ask for your work to be done."

Live Mint, 2 May, 2013, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/tz5RTCRoW8E4Ii75OyWYuI/Pa
nchayats-take-first-steps-towards-digital-empowerment.html