Helping to Bridge the Digital Divide:
Government agencies across the world are realizing the power of IT and adopting new solutions to make their governance more effective in response to public needs. Praxis is already the preferred IT partner for Grameen Sanchar Society (GRASSO), which is an NGO, based in the state of West Bengal, India, and is fully geared to serve other Government agencies like Ministry of Panchayat & Rural Development (PNRD) and various Municipal Corporations in West Bengal.
Our solution bouquet comprises of an Enterprise-wide E-Application Integration Framework on .Net and on J2EE platforms and a G2C E-Governance Application Integration Framework with Localization Support for MS-Windows environment. The Localization Enabled G2C Portal Framework from Praxis is expected to set de facto benchmarks in making national government programs work more efficiently, facilitate social inclusion and enable citizen-centric governance involving the policy makers and the common man. We are using this framework to develop a Municipal Portal for G2C-based Citizen-centric Municipal Services.
GRASSO Portal – Integrated with Bank Payment Gateway:
The following functionalities were delivered by the G2C portal for an NGO in West Bengal (India):
User Registration
- New registration
- Edit registration details
- Renew registration
- Approve/Reject membership
- Cancel registration
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Bill Payment
- Pay Bill
- Deposit Bills to Providers
- View Bill Payment
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Rural Employment
- Post Resume / View Resume
- Post Job / Withdraw Job
- List of Applicants
- Apply for Job
- Search for Suitable Job
- Contact with Employer
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Matrimonial Section
- Register Profile / Update Profile
- View Profile by ID
- List of Desired Partners
- Contact Your Partner
- Maintain Contact History
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TRORG – Web-based Training Organizer:
As a part of our e-governance initiatives, we have developed an application known as the Training Organizer (TRORG). TRORG provides all the features to manage a large-scale distributed training program, where geographically spread training centers work under the supervision of a controlling agency that acts as facilitator to ensure training quality while such centers conduct actual training.
We have partnered with NASSCOM Foundation to develop TRORG. [NASSCOM Foundation, a trustee body with a vision to transform the lives of the underserved by promoting social development through application of ICT, is conducting various training courses all over India with the help of their franchisees.]
TRORG has been developed keeping its global usage in mind. A generic approach has been taken to define the underlying processes, so that it can be used for any distributed training program. As the work-flow typically required for any such distributed training environment comes pre-built with the system, it can act as an efficient tool for monitoring and control of any distributed training program. This application is:
- Unicode compliant and has adequate data-level security for each user to maintain her portion of data
- Provides support for various Indian languages (Bengali and Hindi are already available), in addition to English
- Provides industry-standard user authorization and authentication.
NREGS (for National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme):
NREGS is a web-based application having multi-lingual support. Apart from English, it is currently available in Indian languages like Bengali and Hindi, with provision for supporting other ones. Not only does the user interface (screens and reports) support Indian language scripts, but the database allows storing captured data in these Indian languages. Hence it is expected that it will be more acceptable and usable for a much larger cross-section of the Indian citizens, including the rural / semi-urban ones.
Since a single data store is used by all the parties concerned, it helps reducing replication of data and paper movement across various governmental bodies, including the Panchayat & Rural Development (PNRD) ministry. This data store can be accessed from Gram Panchayats (GP), Citizen Information Service Centers (CISC) and other browser-enabled access points, provided they have proper access rights to the system. Being a web-based application that needs simply a browser to access it, running / maintenance / upgrade costs will be significantly reduced.
This NREGS application helps efficient supervision and monitoring at all levels – Village, Block, District and State; thus it serves the rural people in an effective manner. Here are a few examples of how it can help to quickly find out work for the registered villagers thereby implementing this social welfare scheme more effectively.
For the villagers:
- On-line Registration, Request for Work and Issue of Job Card after proper verification, are possible through CISC / GP.
- Ability to see the Status of their Request at any point of time through CISC / GP.
- Registering their Grievance through CISC / GP etc and viewing the corresponding Status.
For the concerned authorities (PNRD):
- Ability to Register each work with adequate planning detail, and subsequently Track progress of each such work.
- Support for automatic computation and timely Disbursement of Wages and Unemployment Allowances.
- Tracking / Monitoring of each Grievance by concerned officials for taking appropriate actions in time resulting in better satisfaction of villagers.
- Generation of all the Statutory Reports needed by the various agencies from the common data source, minimizing discrepancies and reconciliation effort for the different reports.
