Water pipeline projects in Jharkhand could be in a shambles for varied reasons however irrespective of this the Drinking Water & Sanitation department is bringing innovative ideas and concept to bolster the delivery mechanism which in anyway is needed for the success of projects. In the endeavour to put up a mechanism the department is likely to introduce mobile governance for effective monitoring of projects through elected representatives in rural areas.
Mobile-Governance or m-Governance, as put by the Project Management Unit (PMU) of DWSD, will work on bottom-up approach with representatives of Panchayati Raj Institutions at one end (bottom) of the spectrum and the DWSD department at the other (top). The continuously evolving telecommunication landscape offers the best opportunity to the department to reach out to people through their elected representatives.
“The mobile system is continuously upgraded and that is why we need to upgrade the existing system,” said Chief Engineer PMU, DWSD, Samir Kumar Da.
The m-governance will be implemented in two parts beginning from the Out Bound Dialer (OBD) system that will make random calls to a Mukhiya or Jal Sahiya until the automated system gets response from the person concerned. The role of district coordinator will be important in the system as he will decide the group—Mukhiya or Jal Sahiya-- to contact for obtaining information about a project at panchayat level. The department incidentally maintains a database of Mukhiya in all panchayats that will be entered in the automated system for making calls. The other part —Interactive Voice Response —will be implemented in later phase.
“The objective of m-governance is to expedite functioning of the system by putting in place an effective complaint redressal system. Moreover, the system will be of immense help in project planning also,” said Assistant State Coordinator (Publicity & Documentation), PMU, DWSD, Ashish Kumar Saurav.
Interestingly, through OBD the department will contact PRIs to ascertain funds provided for a particular project, amount of budget spent on a project, programmes running besides repair and maintenance works needed in a panchayat. The information will be pooled in a database that will be segregated division wise for the ease of dissemination to the concerned Executive Engineer for addressing problems in their division.
“The system will ask the person to enter details by pressing a specific button. As and when a button will be pressed the system will capture the details. We can do a better budget analysis, planning and make complains reach the concerned Executive Engineer in a more organized manner through m-governance,” added State Coordinator, PMU, DWSD, Nitin Kumar.
Meanwhile, the department is also preparing another system of monitoring which envisages assigning unique code to all handpumps in the State. The code once entered through an SMS-gateway will fetch names of official to contact in the event of any fault in a handpump.