Just Press Enter

A village where children talk of Windows 95 and of how they'll be chatting on the Net soon? Where at the click of a mouse you can get information on land documents, ration cards or whatever you want? Unreal it may sound, but it is happenning at Bellandur, a village 30 minutes away from Bangalore. In a departure from babucr-acy, the gram panchayat here has dispensed with sloppy operations and inducted computers for administration. Remarkably, this has been done on the panchayat's own initiative, with a modest corpus of Rs 70,000 it managed to raise within the village.

Press a key, and two computers at the pan-chayat office display data on land holdings of each family, taxes due from them, as also the haves and have-nots covered under various housing and employment schemes. Fresh pleas for power and water connections or ration cards can also be accessed and approved of at the monthly meetings here. Details are available for each of the five villages which fall within the precincts of Bellandur.

Not only has this streamlined administration, it's also helped the pancha-yat clamp down on fraudulent takeovers and prevent leakages in tax collections. "Our collectors and other staff now attend to other tasks like dealing with local problems in water supply or leaking sanitary pipes. They don't have to sit in office to write out tax or cess receipts, nor do people have to wait for them for hours. The receipts are given by the computer operator," says K. Jag-anath, 36, chairman of the panchayat.

He is also the brain behind the venture. The gram panchayat is to be elevated to a mandal panchayat soon, which is when Jaganath plans to expand the network across 20 villages. "Some donors have come forward to give us computers for these villages. We'll use the internet to communicate with these villages and solve their problems with the staff available there," he says.

Once known for its superior quality horticultural produce and famous for one of Bangalore's largest lakes—a sprawling 950-acre water body—the civic, financial and environmental problems of this village had been ignored by successive governments. With sewage flowing into the lake, the quality of vegetables, coconuts and paddy deteriorated. And farmers complained of blisters on their hands whenever they came in contact with the lake's water. Even the mosquitoes swarming aircraft every evening at the Bangalor e airport did not provoke the government into cleaning up the lake.

TILL Jaganath stepped in and stepped up the collection of taxes and cess (for street lights and library) besides capitalising on the real estate boom to rake in funds for development. Revenue increased from Rs 60,000 in '93 to Rs 25 lakh now. His campaign for restoration of the lake also met with success, with the high court directing the Banga-lore Water Supply and Sewage Board (BWSSB) to prevent the flow of sewage into lakes around the city. Jaganath himself plans to put up a sewage treatment plant and an efficient garbage disposal system, again from resources raised locally.

Interestingly, the software for the Bellandur experiment has been developed by COMPU-SOL, a Bangalore-based company, as a pilot project for proving the feasibility of Net-based administration. "We call it the BFA or the Bellandur Financial Accounting project. It helps the local administration in financial accounting, provides an updated voters list, land records, ration cards and other administrative records," says CEO Subramanya R. Jois.

In addition, says Jois, this software would help knit together villages in remote areas through an inexpensive communication network. Once the cluster of 20 villages around Bellandur get connected through the Net, the mandal would be way ahead of the government's plans in India's own silicon valley, Karnataka, to introduce e-governance. The state government, according to M.N. Vijaykumar, director of the Karnataka Government Computer Centre, is preparing the ground for such a system following cabinet approval. The announcement of polls and some technological changes have currently put the venture on hold.

Meanwhile, Bellandur has floated its own website complete with details of the gram panchayat, its sprawling lake with immense potential for water sports, and the e-mail addresses of its IT-savvy panchayat members. They've set an example for the other villages to follow. Will they take the lead?