One thing was clear to the district administration think tanks led by District Collector K. Mohammed Y. Safirulla when they sat down to brainstorm ways to overcome the enormity of the reconstruction of houses in the wake of last year’s deluge. A run-of-the-mill system that moved at the pace of normal bureaucratic machinery would not do, as there was too little time for completing way too much work.
“The scale of work to be done in the district was too high. Hence, we planned and executed the work entirely on an end-to-end IT platform developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC). We developed a small mobile application for verifying and tracking beneficiaries while putting in place systems for verification in the back end. The deliverables could be monitored by the public over the portal ernakulam.nic.in,” said Mr. Safirulla.
The web portal launched using the software developed by NIC was hosted in the State Data Centre with separate logins created at the panchayat, village, taluk and collectorate levels. The village extension officers were also armed with a mobile application to upload pictures to the portal during field visits. Once the village extension officers completed the verification of the eligibility of beneficiaries through field visits with the help of PWD engineers and uploaded the details, the tahsildar initiated the initial payment.
“The progress of the work was verified by village extension officers and once they uploaded pictures of different stages of construction, tahsildars initiated payments corresponding to each stage,” said George Eapen, Additional District Informatics Officer, NIC.
The progress at each stage could be monitored by the beneficiaries, and they could complain with the authority concerned if the assistance due at each stage was delayed.
Accuracy, transparency and speed of decision-making at multiple levels were cited as the main advantages of the IT application, which Mr. Safirulla credited with having restored whatever level of normalcy that the district managed since the flood. The application was also adapted to a certain extent for the execution of post-flood rebuilding in Thrissur and Pathanamthitta districts.