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Vinson Kurian

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, April 17

THE Information Kerala Mission (IKM), an ambitious project to computerise and set up a wide area network (WAN) connecting 1,215 local bodies in the Government, would need to strengthen infrastructure in order to fulfil the obligations spelt out in the request for proposal (RFP) document structured by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The proposal submitted by the Kerala State IT Mission, the implementing agency, involves a five-year public-private partnership programme in the BOLT (build, own, lease, transfer) mode culminating in the transfer of equipment and systems after the project cycle.

A status paper on e-governance initiatives in the State said the primary responsibility of IKM as per the role definitions specified in the RFP document include maintaining a State Level Technical Call Centre for application software support and debugging.

This would in turn involve setting up high-speed connectivity, better storage systems, high-end servers and workstations along with tools for software engineering, data mining and documentation at a total investment of Rs 2 crore.

Since this investment would substantially determine the effectiveness of the private investment in hardware sourced through the BOLT mode, a special allocation to meet these expenses would be essential.

The IKM is in the final stages of implementation. After an extensive system study in urban and rural local-self government (LSG) institutions, the IKM team has evolved standardised protocols for every business and administrative process in local bodies and has developed 12 software packages for deployment.

Pilot rollout has taken place in four corporation areas and five panchayats in Thiruvananthapuram district. Transactional data, post-deployment, and to some extent legacy data have been captured into the database to power the application in these rollouts. However, due to poor systems in data maintenance, there have been many obvious data gaps.

A scaled up pilot has been tried out in Vellanad, near here, covering all the applications developed by IKM and with substantive investment made on filling up the data gaps using secondary sources of data and, in some cases, through primary data collection exercise. Moreover, protocols for identifying data gaps and bridging the same have been identified ensuring a structured approach during replication.

In Vellanad, IKM has structured a citizen database integrating the ration card database, electoral database etc and initiated a process for mapping the skill levels and overall profiling of the unemployed people. It has also integrated the Cadastral Information as well as details pertaining to utilities like electricity and water supply as a resource database.

Structuring a similar scalable model for replication in all local bodies can actually lead to a substantive resources database being readied in all the local bodies. This will be a major area of focus during the current year.

The origin of IKM can be traced to the erstwhile State-level Informatics System for Strengthening Decentralised Plan Implementation (SLIDE) conceived during 1997 with a view to creating an efficient and responsive mechanism for governance at the local level.

One of the unique features of the IKM project has been the extensive effort taken in systems documentation and overall emphasis on business process reengineering and development of an integrated services backend database.

This has given substantial strengths to the application development, testing of applications and implementation.

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