A completed road.
A functional water system.
What’s common between these? Often, it’s the invisible layer of Public Finance that brings these projects to completion. Public Finance looks at the entire journey of how government at different levels makes its policy decisions, allocates budges across various initiatives and urban local bodies, collects money from services and then accounts and audits for the correct usage of funds.
It’s a complex and multi-dimensional process. And the cost of failure is high. And much more visible.
A high-built road.
An unfinished school.
Many times, these are the actually failures of public finance because the money did not reach the right person at the right time.
What complicates it further is the fact that the information is spread across various systems from state government to central government and across vendor systems. Hence, people with the best of intentions find it difficult to solve the problem since they do not know where the right information is.
At eGov, this is an area we are working on, as part of our mission to enable ease of living for every person. And the best way to solve this, we realized, is to take a platform approach to it. A platform that can provide real-time visibility to the relevant stakeholders that will enable data-driven and more efficient deployment of public funds and policy making. This would help States become more agile and adaptive in deploying funds to meets their priorities and development goals.
At eGov, this is what we built through our fiscal exchange platform, iFix. From the budget allocations to the bills being raised, iFix provides on-time visibility which is based on need, and which can drive a performance and data based approach to financial planning across different levels of government from Gram Panchayat to States and Central Governments. In order to test that this works to solve the identified problems, we worked with the Water and Sanitation Department in Lodhipur, Punjab, to roll out an application for digitizing water collection charges (MGram Seva) with the real-time data and dashboards being updated, on iFix for the relevant stakeholders.
