BELLANDUR panchayat takes the It ROute to progress




Bangalore:: Bellandur Gram Panchayat in Karnataka has something new to talk about. It expects to play host to a Pakistani delegation visiting its offices and taking a look at the unique technical system built to meet the requirements of the people.

Already, the panchayat has attracted attention from different parts of the country. “Delegations from Kerala, West Bengal, and Lakshadweep have visited the panchayat and people from several districts in Karnataka have come to study the Bellandur model,” said K Jagannath, former Panchayat president and the man behind the computerisation initiative.

When Bellandur Gram Panchayat transformed itself into the first computerised panchayat office in the country in 1998, the biggest gain was transparency and speed of use. Today, the residents do not have to run around for weeks if they urgently need some legal documents from the panchayat office. Any information required by them is available within seconds.

All this is possible because of technology and the Internet. The online initiatives by the panchayat involves interaction with different government bodies and posting queries.

The technology measures have transformed the lives of the simple villagers. “Providing information and documents to villagers, correspondence to higher offices and such daily chores were time consuming and laborious for us. So in 1993, we started technology upgradation with a simple typewriter and moved on to a computer soon enough,” says Mr Jagannath.

Initially, it was just a means to store letters. But today, it holds a full-fledged database on the panchayat. This includes information on each of the residents along with all the minute details on land records, property tax records, birth and death records, ration card details, and voters lists. The five villages under the Bellandur panchayat have a total of 2,500 families.

The information and documents are available at a minimal service charge of Rs 50. These measures have increased the revenues of the panchayat from Rs 60,000 in 1993 to Rs 2.75 crore today, said Mr Jagannath.

Two major changes have taken place in the village in the recent past. One was the decision of the Bangalore Development Authority to build an outer ring road through the village and the other was to name the two sides of the ring road as the IT corridor. This has pushed up real estate prices and now a major share of the income of the villagers in Bellandur accrues from real estate and rents. According to Mr Jagannath, 150 new apartment complexes are coming up and 30 new families are moving into the area every month. In fact, Mr Jagannath hopes that the IT companies planning to set up shop on the IT Corridor will further the village’s technology adoption programme.

The panchayat’s information system is handled by young girl graduates who are residents of the village. Residents include software professionals who have migrated to the US, and those who own software companies in India.

The Bellandur Welfare Association provided the necessary funds for the computers and the training. The panchayat got Compusol, a city-based software company, to provide the software part to maintain accounts and other documentation. What is commendable is that the panchayat did the entire project on its own initiative, with no directive from the government.

The tampering of documents has come to an end, which Mr Jagannath believes is a major achievement. What is even better is that they are able to stop tax leakages to a great extent. “Property taxes could always be evaded by bribing a tax collector. Today with all the documents stored in the system, around 80 per cent of the tax leakage problem has been solved,” he says. There is still 20 per cent evasion, but that happens mainly in the case of NRIs, he adds.

Bellandur Panchayat also has the distinction of being the first panchayat in the country to beam the proceedings of the panchayat meetings and its AGMs to all its residents via television.

Currently, the panchayat members are working on ways and means to introduce a smart card for each resident. This will help in accessing any information required at any point of time, something that not even the citizens of Bangalore can boast of. “We are talking to a couple of companies regarding this,” says Mr Jagannath.

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