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Purushothaman and Valliammal are two of 860 pensioners of the Kerala State services in Paravur municipality, near Aluva, Ernakulam district. On June 4, Local Self-Government Minister Paloli Mohammed Kutty presented them with special `health cards' - which has details relating to their health parameters - and assured them hassle-free care at any government health centre or hospital within the municipal limits.
They were the first recipients of the card that is central to the Kerala government's plans to ensure easy, accessible and quality care for all its citizens - to start with, senior citizens. Within a few days, volunteers were handing out similar cards to all State government pensioners in Paravur - the first municipality in Kerala to document completely the health status of its pensioners.
The health card is an initiative of Information Kerala Mission (IKM), the flagship of the State's e-governance programmes. The `customers' of IKM are Kerala's five municipal corporations, 53 municipalities, 14 district panchayats, 152 block panchayats and 999 gram panchayats - over 1,200 local bodies to whom, in a path-breaking initiative, the State devolved 30 per cent of its Plan funds.
IKM's Executive Chairman and Director is M.K. Prasad, former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Calicut University, and a globally respected environmentalist and lifelong associate of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad. For over a year now, Prasad has stamped the initiatives of IKM with his people-centric approach to planning.
IKM's projects for self-governing bodies range from sevana (a software to manage births, marriages and death), sevana (a pension tool), saankhya and sahatha (daily revenue statement generation), sulekha (consolidation of monthly statements), sthapana (pay bill generation), soochika (inward, outward register) and five other `s' tools.
Initially tried out in Kumarakom gram panchayat in Kottayam district, the model was replicated in other local bodies and by end 2007 will have percolated to all the 1,200-plus local bodies. The five municipal corporations have already installed touch screen information devices to help local citizens with basic information search. Tools like these became central to the State's vision of a totally decentralised planning process - substantially achieved within a decade.
Kerala is possibly the only State where every panchayat, municipality and municipal corporation has its own website. (http://www.localgovkerala.net/htm/main.asp?intID=1 and http://www.localgovkerala.net/htm/website.asp)
IKM has helped create over 60 janasevana kendrams or public service centres across the State for easy access to birth and death records and other civic services. It has helped government hospitals to set up self-service kiosks to get such certificates in a day.
IT AT School
Kerala is also one of the few Indian States where every child leaves school with a basic knowledge of computer technology. Launched five years ago, the IT@School project has now permeated nearly 3,000 high schools in the State. Each computer lab can boast between five and 50 computers. the scheme has helped e-nable the examination system - an online examination is now part of the computer exam paper - and has resulted in the development of a CD-based resource of all subject texts and related student material for Class 10 in Malayalam, English, Kannada and Tamil, the four languages of instruction in the State.
M. Sivasankar, the Director of Public Instruction (DPI), is a veteran of IT-enabled initiatives in the State. He was the unseen but key mover of the Akshaya e-literacy programme, a challenge he could take to fruition in Malappuram district where he subsequently returned as Collector. Today he is additionally an Executive Mission Director at IKM.
"We now have a whole cadre of teachers with adequate experience in imparting training in computer applications," he said. "But we have not yet made IT part of the teaching process. We have tried to leverage available e-learning resources in the public domain - but we have some way to go in making it percolate to our school teaching process."
He is also modest in stating the case for the way tools like the satellite-based Edusat have been harnessed in Kerala (though observers have generally found the State to be a frontrunner in linking dozens of centres with two-way audio and video instructional networks). "Remote learning and reaching the underprivileged is a challenge that we are still addressing," he said.
A curriculum revision is on, and as an early adapter of IT at school level and one of the pioneer users of Edusat, Kerala might yet teach the rest of the country a thing or two about how to harness technology for education in a painless, non-intrusive way.
Institute with a difference
The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K) is unusual for its development-oriented focus of teaching and research. "Our aim is to build an institute that transforms and facilitates individuals and communities into leaders who drive the emerging knowledge-driven economy," said Director K.R. Srivathsan.
According to him, the IIITM-K is ahead of the IT industry in some areas like ICT (information and communications technology) applications for the community, agriculture, education and next generation e-governance. The institute has innovated, developed and now runs the only free computational portal in sciences in the country for students, scientists, scholars and professionals in chemistry. A significant percentage of the students' projects go into some of its portals. Here, the semantics of web applications get new meaning, Srivathsan added. The following links, according to him, give a feel of what IIITM-K is all about: (i) Institute Portal: www.iiitmk.ac.in; (ii) Education Grid: www.edugrid.in; (iii) Karshaka Information Systems, Services and Networking: www.kissankerala.net; (iv) Thiruvananthapuram City Police for Community Interaction: www.tvmcitypolice.org; (v) Virtual University for Agricultural Trade: www.vuatkerala.org; (vi) Agriculture Trade Facilitation Portal: www.e-krishi.org; (vii) Computational Chemistry Portal: www.compchem.in.
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