World Bank Funded Projects for e – governance in Uttarakhand :

e-Governance is the buzzword of ICT that seeks to improve public service delivery.  It enables the citizen to avail various services at their doorsteps, which is really the need of time. There are only limited examples of successful e-Governance projects. However, the efforts are on and various state governments in India have initiated a variety of e-Governance projects.  The Government of Uttarakhand (GoU) has also planned several projects,  with the assistance from World bank . These are following :

1. e Class : 

Use of multimedia in enhancing the learning with school students is a universal knowledge. Course curriculum taught with the help of multimedia immensely improves the productivity of students. Course taught with multimedia support have shown much higher percentage of pass results. Retention-rate of students in classes taught with multimedia has been much higher and dropout rates have come down.

Keeping the above facts in mind, GoUA has embarked upon the task of creating multimedia course content for Mathematics & Science subjects for classes from 9th to 12th. The core concept is to make such a multimedia content available to all schools within the state for day-to-day learning. The project targets all Inter Colleges of Uttarakhand. A substantial number of which is in interiors. There are a number of CBSE and CISCE schools in public and private sectors.

Objectives: The objective of the project is as follows:

• "Procure, develop, supply and install interactive IT enabled Course Curriculum contents covering Science (Physics, Chemistry and Biology) and Mathematics, in both English and Hindi language. The contents should cover the combined syllabus prescribed by Government of Uttarakhand’s Board, CBSE and CISE, for the school students of Uttarakhand studying in class 9th to 12th."
• The Government of Uttarakhand has received a Grant from the International Development Agency, being administered by the World Bank, towards the cost of “e-Class” Development of IT enabled course curriculum in Science and Mathematics for class 9th to 12th Project.
•  The objective of the project is to utilize the available technology for creating audio-visual and interactively based course curriculum as an effective edge to teaching as well as up-gradation of teachers among population in the rural/urban areas of Uttarakhand State in India (the Project Area).

2. Human Resource Management System :

In 2004, Government of Uttarakhand has identified the board strategic direction and included measurable goals and key performance indicators for the Human Resources Department. This department contributes to the government’s mandate by ensuring HR issues are consistently addressed on a timely basis. The HR responsibilities include such things as:

• Maintaining comprehensive, up-to-date employment and personal records for employees of the government, whether permanent or contractual
• Providing orientation for all new employees or contractual employees
• Maintaining employee training information
• Overseeing HR programs, such as performance development, wellness, ergonomics and employee assistance
• Processing grievances, negotiating collective agreements and other labor relations issues.
• Developing and continually ensuring consistent and fair recruitment procedures and practices by not only ensuring better compliance to existing sets of rules and regulations but also making required policy changes and streamlining processes and procedures.

Objectives: The primary objectives with this project are to satisfy the following requirements:

• Create a comprehensive data base pertaining to variety of information which is and has to be maintained for employees of the government. This will require that vendor will conduct a comprehensive system study and come out with a detailed list of fields for which employee information has to be collected. Here care has to be taken that a detailed study of Treasury and Payroll Application of the state, which is running successfully in the state, is conducted carefully. This is vital in order to seamlessly integrate with integrated Treasury and Payroll application. There can be some fields for which data is already there in the present database, and just need to be picked up as and when need be, also there might be need of creating composite keys for establishing proper relationship between the databases. Since employees will be given access to the database, there should be strong mechanisms built into the solution for authentication, authorization and audit trails.
• Integrate information related to payroll, benefits, attendance and all other HR programs.
• Provide improved method of accessing, analyzing and exploring HR information
• Providing the ability to present data to be efficiently used for strategic planning and trend analysis purposes.

3. Social welfare :

The Government of Uttarakhand (GoU) has undertaken the development of a State Portal under the "Pro-poor IT initiative" program. Taking this further, the government, is launching the computerization of key departments to enable the provisioning of online services.

GoU is now launching a program to computerize Social Welfare Department for better delivery of services to the people to enhance the effectiveness, transparency and accountability in the process of the government / departments (Ref. Annexure-1) . At this point of time GoU is looking at Application development, testing and implementation at selection location, whereas down- streaming work has to be carried out by other resources later. The government has receive a Credit – N-045 IN, from the International Development Association (IDA) and intends to apply a portion of this loan to eligible payments under this Contract.

4. Agriculture :

The Government of Uttrakhand has undertaken the development of a unified Agriculture Portal for the benefits of the farmers comprising of entire life cycle of the crops, animal husbandry, fisheries, poultry including department applications and call centre to facilitate information to farmers. Taking further, the government has already launched the computerization of key departments to enable the provisioning of online services.

Objectives: The ultimate goal of the Portal is to integrate agricultural community together for

• Better production planning for farmers and other agricultural producers (cultured fish, poultry, etc,)
• Providing solutions to Farmers for the Various problems they are facing with crops etc. (this can be online Video chat with the Pant Nagar University Professors/ can also be Email based call centre, or voice based call center) Advisory services through using IT Initiatives
• Establishing a platform for commerce on the Internet to promote the regional economy and commerce.
• Increasing regional sales by enabling local producers to reach out to other states in India (Domestic Market)
• Greater investment throughout the economic area.
• Creation of an Information platform for agriculture.

5. UDD :

The Department of Urban Development, Government of Uttarakhand offers a multitude of services to the citizens. Since all the services offered by the Department are vital for Urban dwelling and fundamental in nature, the department has decentralized itself into various divisions for efficiency, effectiveness and better management namely Jal Sansthan for Water & Sewerage Services), Nagar Nigam (for sanitation, Streetlights, Roads & Footpaths, House tax), Mussoorie Dehradun Development Authority- MDDA (for granting permission to citizens for construction of houses, institutions and development of civic infrastructure like parks, roads, community centers etc), Uttarakhand Power Corporation Limited (for electricity) and State Urban Development Authority & District Urban Development Authority for the betterment of the living standards of urban slum dwellers). 

6. Teacher Student Portal :

Since the formation of the State, the Government has veen consciously focucing on evolving a strategy for improvements in primary and secondary education system. One of the specific initiatives launched by GoU is the Aarohi programe. This program seeks to provide computer education for all levels of the schools and presently covers 1600+ schools. As a result of aarohi(computer aided education programme), there has been a sharp increase in government school results. The pass percentage has risen from 45% to 64% for the intermediate and from 35% to 50% at the high school level. The success of the Aarohi program provides the needed impetus to take up other initiatives to take this programe to the next levels.

The GoU now proposes to setup Teacher Student Portal to harness the benefits of various islands of excellence created by the computereization project. to share the expertise, knowledge, experiences and collaborate and facilitate interaction between the four stakeholders viz Teacher, Students, Parents and Education Department. This project of TS portals is conceived. This portal is also supposed to act as one of the delivery channel for the educational content being developed under a different project. it is envisaged that this portal would be an important step in the right direction for evolving an efficient and effective education system.

7. Public Works Department

The Government of Uttarakhand has got developed a state of the art,  based with service oriented architecture and single sign on portal for the state. This portal is envisaged to be the entry point for any one who is seeking interaction with any of the Government Departments in the State. The logical next step here is to computerize the backend i.e. workflow computerization and automation along with process reengineering to serve the citizens better. 

Objective :

• The objective of the project is to effectively use IT infrastructure and Technology to develop and deploy Project Management Application and Management Information System to consolidate the activities and functioning of the Department. The Department plans to achieve4 the following;
• Replacing discretion based decision making with a transparent, objective, effective and efficient process of decision making.
• Reducing the cycle time of processes resulting in reduced turnaround time and faster delivery of services thus benefiting the citizen ultimately.
• Reduction of cost, effort and time spent by the Government in the delivery of services.
• Reducing paper work and bureaucratic procedures.
• Consolidation of variety of data sources and channel length for improved quality of information.
• Developing a comprehensive Decision Support System and Management Information System
• Comprehensive data capturing at the point of generation itself to avoid an duplicity of efforts

The Governmentof Uttarakhand intends to harness the full power of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for improving the quality of life of its citizens, bring in accelerated social and economic development, ensure transparency in the Government decisions, accelerate the IT adoption amongst various user segments – all leading to an ideal e-society model through efficient, Service oriented, cost-effective, information networked, eco-conscious, and with year-on-year growth approach.