United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

Expeditious delivery of G2C services, in terms of regularity, accessibility, availability and efficacy, to the rural poor has always been a challenge for district administration in India. Despite efforts aimed at democratic decentralization, a vast array of basic G2C services – say demand for installation of a hand pump in a village -can still be availed of only at the district headquarters. This means that people from remote, rural villages have to travel anywhere up to 50 kms for a service as basic as obtaining a ration card. Since a majority of the rural poor are engaged in farm labor or work as daily wage earners, a single trip to the district headquarters entails a day’s wages or work on the fields as the opportunity cost. Service delivery is still not assured. One often has to undertake several such trips before a simple task- say obtaining the copy of record-of-rights, the basic land record document, is accomplished. Further, inadequacy of monitoring mechanisms makes it difficult for the Collector (chief administrator of the district) to ensure the on field availability of key field functionaries. Field staff in vital social sectors like health and education- say an auxiliary nurse and midwife (ANM) working in a remote sub health centre or a primary school teacher posted at a remote hamlet would often remain absent for long periods from their workplaces and district heads would not have any monitoring mechanisms to check such truancy on the part of field level functionaries. Such absence would essentially have a deleterious impact on the service delivery efficacy of vital line departments. Serious flaws in service delivery at the field would in turn compel the rural poor, who are hit the hardest by the same, to throng district offices for grievance remediation. Thus the demand load from rural citizens would be highest on the top of the hierarchy, i.e. at the district headquarters while lower down, enforcing accountability for performance would become a difficult task in the absence of rigorous and intelligent monitoring mechanisms. Such state of affairs prevailed till late August, 2009 in the Gwalior district of Madhya Pradesh, India. Essentially, the interests of the rural poor were most seriously affected by this state of affairs and in general, administrative machinery was perceived as quite rigid; difficult, costly and time consuming in terms of access .Poor on field presence of field staff was a serious cause of concern for the district departmental heads on one hand and a monumental grievance for the rural citizens on the other. Janmitra was conceptualized, designed and implemented as a localized innovation in administration with the aim of placing citizen at the focal point of governance.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The primary achievement has been in terms of decentralization of the governmental interface to the level of Gram Panchayat – the grass root level people’s representative institution. A basket of 65 services, selected in a participative framework by the village Panchayats are now being provided through 12 Janmitra centers running in select Gram Panchayat offices in development block Barai, District Gwalior. Each centre caters to an average of 5 village Panchayats (each Panchayat has an average population of 1500).Field level functionaries of 12 departments register their daily presence via biometric fingerprint identification technology at these centres in accordance with an attendance roster finalized for the same. An average of 250 applications are being received daily at these centres (each centre caters to a population of 7500 on an average) and the disposal rate has all along been more than 90%.An important fact that needs mention here is that time limits have been assigned for the delivery of each service and these limits have been compressed to as much as 50 % as against those provided in the relevant departmental Citizen Charters. High rate of disposal is doable even with these reworked time limits as decentralized service delivery and reengineered processes have remarkably cut down the number of levels up and down the hierarchy that an application has to ordinarily move in a business as usual scenario. On field availability of field staff has improved remarkably as salary cuts are effected to the extent of a day’s salary for absence/more than 4 hours of delay in reporting at the centre. Attendance registered at the centres as well as details of applications received, stage of processing and disposals per centre are transmitted from these centres real time via a broadband link and compiled at the district headquarters where the District Collector personally monitors the field activity with Janmitra centres as his eyes. Daily monitoring and availability of full and accurate information with the departmental heads and the District Collector, who in particular, keeps a close eye on defaulting employees and delayed disposals immensely facilitating the process of monitoring and performance evaluation of departments as well as individual employees. The impact has been quite evident in the form of less crowded district offices as the rural population now has a delivery interface much closer to their lives and essentially intertwined as a part of their day-to-day existence. The accessibility, availability and efficacy of governmental service delivery mechanisms has significantly improved for the rural population of Barai block and the same has been verified in an independent impact assessment study of the project undertaken by Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
While the concept, basic programme design and leadership in implementation were provided by the Collector and District Magistrate Gwalior, Mr. Akash Tripathi; every stage in the execution process, from design to implementation involved extensive and multi layered consultations with eclectic stakeholders who contributed immensely to the successful execution of the project. The most important role in the identification of services to be delivered at the centres was played by Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) namely the Gram Panchayats. Proposals were drafted by each of the 59 Gram Panchayats in development block Barai recommending a cluster of services central to the requirements of the village dwellers. These proposals were duly sorted and processed department wise at the level of District Panchayat and eventually, the Collector who has been the prime mover of the project gave a final shape to the consolidated proposals. The Collector also co-ordinated with the 12 participating line departments at the district level, guiding them through analysis and re-engineering of their service delivery processes and in the preparation of their departmental attendance rosters. The department heads played a pivotal role, in not only liasioning with the district administration for the necessary groundwork in a constructive manner but more so, in leading at their respective levels, the initiative to re-engineer processes that were detrimental to expeditious delivery of services and in motivating the field level functionaries to accept, own and run the proposed system. The IEC campaigns as well as training for the programme were conducted in active collaboration with the local NGOs and media. IEC campaign was primarily aimed at informing inhabitants of remote villages of the wide array of services they could avail of at the centers. Local media, both electronic as well as print, played a pivotal role in informing the public about the initiative. HCL Infosystems Limited supplied hardware solutions for the centres which the entire software design, development and interfacing was done in house by National Informatics Centre, Gwalior. The task of MIS data entry was outsourced to Jyoti Infotech Limited that meticulously selected and trained qualified local youth as computer operators for the centers. Physical infrastructure up gradation of the Gram Panchayat offices as Janmitra centers was wholly delegated to Panchayats which executed the task efficiently with local people’s active participation.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
Experience in implementing myriads of government programmes, monitoring the performance of key line departments in different capacities and having extensively interacted with the citizens in the context of their problems, Collector Gwalior had identified two key objectives while conceptualizing the project- one, ensuring timely, regular and efficient availability of basic G2C services through field functionaries in vital social sectors and two, bringing administration closer to the citizens, i.e., improving access by placing the governmental interface as close to the citizens as possible. The core strategy adopted by the project team that included the Collector as the head, Chief Executive Officer, Zila Panchayat and other departmental heads was that of extensive, participative and multi-stakeholder based consultations at the project design stage in a bottom to up stream. While the process of services selection was wholly executed by the PRIs so as to be effective and reflective of the real needs of the rural poor, the team worked cohesively in doing detailed analyses of service delivery processes and in re-engineering them so as to make service delivery faster, easier, more economical and more local. Suggestions of field level staff themselves were most useful in delineating the re-engineered processes. In the framework that emerged, every employee involved in the authoritative disbursement of each of the 65 selected services had an attendance schedule fixed up in the Janmitra centre falling within her/his territorial jurisdiction. Such detailed attendance rosters were prepared for each employee in each department for each of the 12 centres. Throughout the process, open channels of communication across the hierarchies facilitated emergence of realistic and highly effective solutions that were thoroughly rooted in field experience. Once the design had been finalized, the task of software design and development was taken up by National Informatics Centre, Gwalior. With Biometric Fingerprint Identification Technology as the platform, fingerprint templates of more than 1000 employees were generated, stored and locked to preclude the possibility of tampering with fingerprint data. Open competitive tender route was adopted for the procurement of system hardware. The issue of legal validity of certain services( for instance a copy of the record-of-rights which by law was hitherto issued only at the tehsil level) was resolved by delegating to the Janmitra center supervisors, the authority vested in the associated tehsil level functionary under the State Land Revenue Code. Finally, intensive capacity building exercises were designed and executed to train computer operators, employees, center supervisors as well as field staff.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
Since the initiative primarily involved decentralization of the governmental interface to the village Panchayat level, it entailed crucial co-ordination between eclectic stakeholders – from departmental hierarchies to district administration; from people’s representative institutions to private companies. As mentioned earlier, project design commenced with the selection of services which was done in a participative manner by the village Panchayats. This exercise commenced in the first week on July, 2009 and by August 9, 2009, the final list of 65 services had been drawn up. The biggest challenge before the team was to co-ordinate the activities of a large number of departments and to get all of them to come to a common platform through Janmitra. For this, periodic meetings were organized, starting the 3rd of August, to begin with department wise, wherein field staff brainstormed with their line heads to devise process solutions with their extensive field experience. This was followed by inter-departmental brain storming sessions chaired by the Collector in which detailed modalities for implementation were worked out. Valuable contributions came in these meetings from the PRIs which provided an extra-departmental and often, a more responsive perspective to service delivery. By August 29, re-engineered processes as well as attendance schedules of all 12 participating departments had been finalized. While software development for the attendance monitoring module had commenced by the beginning of July, service delivery module was designed only by the end of August as it entailed generation of specific, citizen friendly form formats in the local language for each of the 65 services, reporting, monitoring and evaluation formats as well as interlinking with relevant departmental software for performance appraisal of their departmental employees. Hardware procurement process commenced on August 17, only after decisions regarding power solution for the centres had been taken and was completed by September 12.On site installation of procured hardware commenced thereafter in a block of 7 days. Once the modalities for both the modules had been fine-tuned, a block of 15 days (August 25 to September 9) and thereafter another of 7 days (September 12 to September 19) were modeled as capacity building modules for the computer operators as well as the field staff and center supervisors. Simultaneously, a 25 minute long awareness building film directed by a respectable local NGO was screened across the 59 Panchayats in Barai block during the evenings for IEC activities. The project was inaugurated at the Janmitra centre situated within the premises of Gram Panchayat office, Simariya Tanka village on September 24,2009. As on December 29, 10,742 applications have been received so far at these 12 centres and the disposal rate is 93% while remaining applications are being processed strictly within the time limits.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The main obstacle in the successful operationalization of the centres was the abysmal power situation in the rural areas. The block chosen for the test pilot is not only predominantly tribal, dacoit infested and remote but also wholly connected to the rural feeder which supplies 4-5 hours of power mostly between 1 AM to 5 AM in a day. This meant a power back up solution that would run the Janmitra machines – a computer system, a printer, 2 tube lights and a fan for 7 hours during the day time (Janmitra centres are open from 10:30 AM to 5:30 PM) when there is no power supply in the villages. The power situation was worse in some of the more remote villages where one could expect only 2-3 hours of supply in the dead of night. The technical team studied a number of alternative solutions- using solar panels powered systems as complete stand alone power systems or generators/inverters only to provide the required back up. Expensive power solutions were not thought to be feasible as the locals feared thefts, quite common in the area. Solar systems would need constant servicing and careful handling in the extremely rugged and dusty environment of Barai. Generators would be beyond the project’s budget and the operating cost too would be high. Finally, the team zeroed on sine wave inverters with parallel batteries that alone would back-up for 8 hours and would still be within the project budget. Laptops which are low on power consumption would adjunct inverters to serve the purpose. Further, one had to grapple with a scenario in which the end users i.e. the rural poor, the field staff, the centre supervisors and the computer operators themselves were not well acquainted with computer systems and associated technology which made psychological gearing up as well as capacity building for the change all the more vital. As age old processes were modified in a decentralized delivery mode, attitudinal change took quite an effort, constructive communication and hand holding at all levels, led by the District Collector. Legal issues too had to be resolved. Laws provided for the delivery of certain services, especially those of the land revenue department, in a centralized mode. Legal validity had to be accorded to copies of several land record documents proposed to be provided through Janmitra centres to make them admissible in courts of law.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
A self-sustainable user fee based service delivery centre called ‘Samadhan Ek Divas’ has been in service at the district headquarters for quite some time now. Funds were available in the district as profits from this project. This corpus of Rs 10 lakh was utilized, for the purchase of hardware while village Panchayats allocated a chunk of their untied funds for physical infrastructure up gradation of their offices remodeling them as centres. As software development was done in house, it did not entail any financial investment. The revenue model of the project was operationally designed to be self sustainable with a user fee fixed for each service. ‘Below the Poverty Line’ (BPL) applicants are however charged 50% of the user fee. Revenue generated at each centre is ploughed back to meet the operating costs. (Stationery, maintenance etc). On an average, revenue up to Rs 6000 per month is being generated per centre which is sufficient to meet the operating costs as well as build up an investment corpus for meeting the future up gradation needs of the centre. Hence no external financing is now required for the project. The key human resources employed in the project are computer operators who’ve been carefully selected from amongst the qualified local youth in Gwalior by Jyotishree InfoTech Limited. Systematic pre as well as post implementation training and hands on experience have equipped these personnel in efficacious management of the computer systems and software. In a short span of time, the operators have been able to successfully commence the task of decentralized MIS data entry for National Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship wage employment scheme of the Union Government at the Janmitra centres. The centre supervisors have emerged as responsible, responsive and accountable centre coordinators who have successfully managed to guide visiting field staff, center operators and most importantly, the citizens visiting the centre to their satisfaction. The success and popularity of Janmitra centres in the villages arises, in part, also from the on field availability of field employees in a manner not experienced before. The manner in which field employees of the 12 departments have responded to the initiative is no less overwhelming. The percentage attendance recorded at the centres has been above 95% in every month since the time of its commencement. Software developers at National Informatics Centre, Gwalior as well as the service staff of hardware suppliers have provided remarkable handholding support and guidance to the centre operators and supervisors.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
Janmitra has been a demand driven initiative in which Panchayat Raj Institutions have taken the lead in remediation of some of the quandaries that were thwarting effectiveness of governance in the rural areas of Gwalior. As such the roots of this demand run deep, intertwined with the lives of rural poor who have been the principal beneficiaries of the project. A number of volunteers, primarily youth in these villages have suo motu taken upon themselves the task of reporting absence, delays etc as for the first time, they can see the systems running the way they want through the instrumentality of Janmitra. Hence its sustainability in terms of its relevance and centrality to effective G2C service delivery is assured. Financially, as mentioned before, the project has been designed to have a revenue model that is self sustainable as it operates on the ‘user pays’ concept. As on date, each of the 12 centres is already a profit centre- something quite antithetical to the standard refrain regarding financial unviability of service delivery in rural areas. As an adjunct to each centre, a depot has been created which acts as a nodal point of distribution of important items – agriculture and veterinary department’s farmer kits, social welfare department’s equipments and aids for the disabled, drugs etc to the village population. In the first 3 months of its commencement, each centre has already emerged as the hub of socio-economic activity- a village centre where people can find whichever government functionary they intend to meet and whichever service they wish to avail of in a time bound fashion. It acts as a super centre for all field functionaries within a radius of 10kms who have to compulsorily attend these centres and it is this centrality of Janmitra that has encouraged a number of private service providers who now intend to route their B2C services in the villages through the Janmitra modality.23 key B2C services are proposed to be rolled out by eclectic service providers through Janmitra by the end of February 2010. As reporting, monitoring, evaluation and timely remedial action are key to the effectiveness of the project, a monitoring cell has been created at the National Informatics Centre, Gwalior which reports directly to the Collector, Mr. Akash Tripathi. The Impact Assessment study of the project conducted by IIITM has found that the project ‘is not only effective in terms of impact it has had on the routines, propensities and attitudes of ‘bottom of the pyramid’ staff, a good level of transparency has been maintained in the delivery of services and the corruption levels as perceived by the users are appreciably low.’. It adds that ‘in the long term, initiatives like this are eminently sustainable provided that the monitoring and evaluation continues to be as constructive as it has been so far. Institutionalization of the project led by the state government is hence highly recommended’. While the process of scaling up the initiative to cover the remaining three blocks in the district is on, the state government of Madhya Pradesh is keen to implement it as a state wide e- governance project.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The most patent impact of the initiative has been on the accessibility and effectiveness of the delivery mechanisms for the rural poor. The far-flung rural hinterlands of Barai development block in the district are today flush with on field activity-with field functionaries like health workers, doctors, school teachers, extension officers, Anganwadi workers( in charge of mother and child care in a village) etc attending to their field of responsibility daily under effective top level monitoring through the instrumentality of the Janmitra centre. Sub Health Centres (SHCs), the basic health care unit in a village, had till sometime back, the dubious and unenviable reputation of opening only during inspections of district officers in the village. Today daily attendance of each sub health centre in the 60 Panchayats in Barai is being personally monitored by the District Collector as the field staff can now be found serving at the SHCs. Such is the rush of activity at the Janmitra centre in a village that citizens in Barai now call it the ‘Mini Collectorate’ (Collectorate being the office of the District Collector in Gwalior city).Details of the impact in terms of reduction in the costs, number of trips, distance travelled etc for a user has been brought out cogently in the impact assessment study of the project conducted by IIITM. Quantitative tools have been used in the study to present the impact of biometric technology based attendance monitoring systems over a geographically dispersed territorial area with a diverse and eclectic field staff, which is quite unlike the scenario in a conventional office space, where such attendance systems are most routinely used. The study sums up that ‘contrary to initial apprehensions, the attendance monitoring module in Janmitra is yielding encouraging results – the perceived field presence of 9 out of 12 participating departments has improved appreciably’. The service delivery module is ‘perceived not only as extremely useful, at the same time the corruption levels are also perceived to be low’. While prompt follow up and intensive monitoring at the initial stage followed by ‘monitoring by exception’ now has been vital to the success of the initiative, the roles being played by the centre supervisors as well as the computer operators have been unparalled. Their contribution at all stages of the project implementation has been crucial to the success of the project.The essence of /Janmitra lies in an appropriate blending of technology with human skills to provide a basket of G2C services in a time bound, decentralized and citizen friendly manner and at monitoring the presence of field level functionaries with a view to improving public service delivery in crucial sectors of public importance. The innovations sought to be implemented through Janmitra are novel, experience based and grounded in field realities. As the systems so established get well entrenched, incremental innovations are being made to improve the utility and value of the Janmitra Kendra to the life of an ordinary citizen.


Institution Name:		O/O The District Collector & DM, Gwalior
Institution Type:		Government Department
Contact Person:		Akash Tripathi
Title:		District Collector & DM
Telephone/ Fax:		919425046228
Institution's / Project's Website:		0751-2373301
E-mail:		akashtripathi@hotmail.com
Address:		District Collector & DM
Postal Code:		474001
City:		Gwalior
State/Province:		M.P.
Country:		India

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information