Kerala chief secy to visit Gujarat to study CM dashboard for governance

The government issued an order on April 26 for the delegation, which includes IAS officer NSK Umesh, who is staff officer to the chief secretary, to travel to Gujarat.

The Dashboard allows the Gujarat CM to access data from all e-Governance applications in the state and monitor the same against defined key performance indicators. Using this data, the CMO can drill down to a granular level on the fly for red-flagged items and intervene through voice calls to administrative machinery at the village level. The application facilitates all of the above, thus creating a complex network of aggregation, visualisation, and enforcement. It performs collections of 3000+ indicators of 20 government sectors from various e-Governance applications on a daily basis, and integrates all the key stakeholders, i.e., all secretaries, on a single platform.

The decision to send a high-level delegation to Gujarat to study its “good governance tool” comes two weeks after the CPI(M) party congress decided to take the “Kerala model of development and governance” across the country.

In 2009, CPI(M) had expelled then party MP A P Abdullakutty on charges of praising then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. At the time, Abdullakutty had stated that Modi should be made the model for attracting private investments.

In 2013, when then labour minister and leader of Congress-led UDF Shibu Baby John had a courtesy call with Modi to discuss skill development and training, both CPI(M) and Congress had raised a hue and cry. Congress CM Oommen Chandy had even sought an explanation from Baby John for “learning about the Gujarat model of development”. Both Congress and then Opposition CPI(M) were of the opinion that the Gujarat model was not acceptable for Kerala.