MGram Seva launch in Lodhipur.
Meet the revenue collector of Lodhipur in Punjab, collecting water charges which will be
used by his Gram Panchayat to maintain the water supply infrastructure.
Pump operator collecting water charges from Lodhipur residents.
The app open on his phone is MGramSeva, an application built by eGov, which just went live
in 1 village in Punjab.
The backstory: Citizen services meets LEGO blocks
Earlier, information for Gram Panchayat water projects would be maintained in physical
registers. With lack of real time visibility, bills would pile up, leading to projects turning
revenue deficient and at times, even leading to possible fiscal and debt challenges.
With MGramSeva, the revenue and expenditure could be easily digitized and collection
simplified with all the necessary data converted into standard formats and made available
to the right stakeholders.
The MGramSeva application was built in just 4-5 months by assembling reusable building
blocks from eGov’s Digital Public Good, DIGIT (Digital Infrastructure for Governance, Impact
and Transformation). These reusable blocks around billing, payment, authentication and
more ensured that we could help the Department of Water and Sanitation quickly roll out
the application by reassembling just what was needed.
While this exemplar proved that the such a quick intervention could work in water projects,
the same approach could be applied for other departmental projects as well.
The future story:
This will get rolled out to over 8500+ water Gram Panchayats projects across Punjab and
that will in turn impact over 3M households. More communities can benefit. Back in the
Panchayat offices, the administrators can get the right information, at the right time and
take the right actions to help their communities.
Our dream of making government services as easy to access as an online delivery, goes one
step further with MGramSeva’s first rollout. Enabling this entire process is iFIX, our open
digital platform that makes public finance real-time and digital. This was also the first roll-
out for iFIX in a state. A big shout out to the entire team for driving this.