Many Indian states find themselves faced with difficulties in delivering effective services to citizens due to limited resources and outreach, low literacy levels and geographical factors. To go beyond incremental improvements, the Government of India has approved a National e-Governance plan (NeGP) with a vision to ‘make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man’.
Here is how Mindtree helped the Rajasthan state government provide Government-to-Citizen (G2C) and Government-to-Business (G2B) services leveraging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to allow effective and efficient delivery.
The challenge
Manual processes related to provisioning government services were leading to inefficiencies, errors, dissatisfaction on the part of citizens and high delivery costs. The Rajasthan state government therefore embarked on a major initiative named e-Mitra (electronic-friend) to provide public services to citizens in a convenient and effective way. One key objective of this endeavor was to provide current, up-to-date and relevant information to all stakeholders through multiple interlinked e-enabled service delivery systems including the Internet, e-Mitra kiosks and other platforms.
Realizing this vision required the assistance of a highly skilled technology partner to design, architect, develop and maintain the e-Mitra platform. In 2006, Mindtree was selected through techno-commercial bidding to perform this challenging role. Specific objectives included:
- Automating manual processes to reduce lengthy administrative work flows
- Delivering a consistent and reliable platform to citizens to avail government services from any part of the state
- Delivering online accessibility in rural areas
- Developing features to upload and download government bulletins and publications on the state portal
Our solution
Mindtree collaborated with the state government to develop a transparent framework for direct delivery of e-governance services as well as social development activities to citizens in Rajasthan. Part of this involved creating a dynamic application―based on open-source technology―to generate real-time content, allowing users to set up new departmental / private / public services without external assistance. We ensured that application owners could assign rights easily to different stakeholders by defining their roles and responsibilities.
The team then worked to support online service integration for all the 33 districts in the state of Rajasthan; and to integrate with banks for online transfer of funds as well as with any third party Web services seamlessly. Following this we linked the e-Mitra portal with portals of Service Centre Agencies (SCAs). End-to-end delivery of digitally signed certificates for items such as land records, and caste, income and solvency records made certain that the need for manual intervention in service delivery was completely done away with.
As a result of Mindtree's work, citizens now enjoy a best-in-class e-governance framework. The project has won numerous awards including the eIndia Public Choice Award under ‘End-to-end Delivery of Digitally Signed Certificates’ Project’; and National Award for e-Governance for ‘Outstanding performance in Citizen-Centric Service Delivery’.
Business impact
- Helped increase transaction rate 40% through an online payment gateway
- Enabled approximately 22.4 million citizens to avail online services in 2011-12 alone
- Supported the collection of approximately Rs.20.59 billion in revenue
- Served over 1 million applicants through Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) portal
- Issued over 550,000 digitally signed certificates in a short period of 11 months
- Supported approximately 5435 kiosks delivering government services throughout urban and rural Rajasthan
Customer testimonial
‘MindTree has contributed significantly in developing a transparent framework for e-Mitra by virtue of its design and creating a transparent platform for direct delivery of e-governance services as well as social development activities to the consumer. (A) deep understanding of the processes and willingness to adapt their existing processes to align with our needs has helped to develop a robust, real-time system’.
Joint Director, Department of IT and Communications, Government of Rajasthan.
