To understand the gap between the existing services offered and the additional services that can be offered by RDS kiosks and to evaluate the feasibility of these kiosks

Abstract

Government of Karnataka is a pioneer in using information technology for public use. One of the successful e-Governance initiatives of Govt. of Karnataka is “Bhoomi” which has enabled “over the counter” delivery of computerized land records to farmers. Though, the Bhoomi project had enabled faster delivery of land records to farmers, it was still centralized. Government felt a pressing need to decentralize Bhoomi and expand the distribution network of land records to villages. At the same time Govt. of Karnataka realized that the other services like issuance of various certificates should also be computerized and decentralized for faster and efficient delivery of these certificates, thereby minimizing the hassles which a rural person has to go through to get those certificates. Thus the need for computerization and decentralization of issuance of various certificates and land records catalyzed the development of “Rural Digital Services” program. The RDS kiosks presently offer limited services and could actually be used to offer many more services as the instances of interaction between the government and the rural people are much more. Currently, only the front end is computerized. The back end is still manual and time-consuming. The database of the customers is still not updated completely. These RDS kiosks will serve a dual purpose of offering the services to the public as well as a means of earning for the kiosk entrepreneurs. Our project is aimed at finding the feasibility of operating a kiosk. Since there are a number of certificates issued through RDS kiosks, we selected birth and death certificates and studied the issuance of these certificates in details. We used life event modeling for these events to come up with requirements specifications for these services. These requirements specifications will act as a check list for fully operational RDS in future. The life event modeling also helped us in finding out if other parts of the system (which would remain manual even after the RDS is fully operational) can be computerized for fast and efficient delivery of the certificates.