Agriculture to e-culture

TWO buffaloes ambling down the brick-lined lane lead you to the sub-tehsil office at Barwala. The L-shaped rows of rooms with mossy walls lo...

TWO buffaloes ambling down the brick-lined lane lead you to the sub-tehsil office at Barwala. The L-shaped rows of rooms with mossy walls look like a relic from the pre-Independence era. But inch past the queue of villagers, and you’ll do a double take. For sitting there in that hole-in-the-wall room is a computer, laser printer, webcam … the works. It is Tuesday and Jyoti Dutta, the steno, is busy registering land deals on the computer.

The rustic town of Barwala may have more cattle than people but when it comes to e-governance it’s as good as any other in Haryana, which was recently adjudged the ‘Best e-Governed State (Young)’ at the Computer Society of India-Nihilent e-Governance Awards 2003-04.

Baru Singh, a farmer, is all for it. ‘‘You can’t deny a transaction registered on computer because they also have your photograph,’’ he explains.

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Naib Tehsildar Narinder S Chauhan agrees. ‘‘Introduced on November 2, 2001, HARIS (Haryana Registration Information System) has helped in culling fraudulent deals besides reducing our workload,’’ he grins.

Haryana’s tryst with e-governance began in 2000 when it formulated its IT policy and tied up with Reliance and a subsidiary of Himachal Futuristics to link 56 towns of the state with fibre-optic cables. Dr Harbakhsh Singh, head honcho of the state’s IT department, says the aim was to make IT a way of life by training the staff and fixing tangible goals.

The state seems to have achieved these, given the way IT has percolated down to the grassroots, be it for keeping land records, registering property, making revenue transactions, issuing pensions, driving licences and even passports.

Ghanshyam Bansal, State Informatics Officer appointed by National Informatics Centre, who works closely with the Haryana IT department, is quite proud of the state’s progress. ‘‘It’s the only state where the treasury is linked with banks, and where house tax is automatically deducted in the property registration programme,’’ he says.

But he admits that more than anything it’s the government’s systematic approach to e-governance which is paying off. ‘‘Keep it simple is their mantra. Every IT action plan is discussed by the technical panel with a sprinkling of experts from outside. This minimises the chances of failure.’’

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Grassroots officials like Sudesh Jain, assistant treasury officer at Barwala, agree. Jain, who’s been in service for 34 years, says the shift from paper to computers didn’t take her and her three colleagues more than a month. ‘‘Now right from keeping an account of the bills to disbursing pension, everything is computerised, and we’ve error-free records,’’ she smiles.

Of course, there are minor glitches, mostly due to truant electricity, and inadequate maintenance staff, but Jain manages.

E-governance is also about being up to date. Right now, NIC scientists are working on a project to link HALRIS (Haryana Land Records Information System) with HARIS. ‘‘With this marriage, we’ll be able to find out the current status of any land/property at the touch of a button,’’ explains Ganesh Dutt, District Informatic Officer at Panchkula, who got a commendation for making Web Enabled Electoral Rolls (WEER) wherein all the data for MC elections in Panchkula was transferred on the Net.

Now, that’s e-governance for you.