Describe the E Panchayt and various fucntions

The vast majority of India’s population lives in the villages and the Panchayats (village level governance units also known as Panchayat Raj Institutions(PRIs) ) represent the face of the governance for these villagers. To improve the quality of governance of these PRIs including 0.235 million Gram Panchayats, 6094 Block Panchayats and 633 Zilla Panchayats, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR),Government of India (GOI) has initiated the e-governance scheme known as ePanchayats               

During 2004, the MoPR organized several Round Table meetings of State Ministers of Panchayati Raj. The focus was to implement Part IX (Panchayat) of the Constitution and PESA Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996. During the 7th Round Table meeting, the issue of Information Technology for Panchayats was discussed, and the usage of IT in Panchayats was recommended on several counts. In 2005, the National Advisory Council (NAC) suggested to the Government to take up a "National IT for Panchayati Raj Programme[2]", “which would include setting up a nationally networked/ computerised system including Treasuries to monitor fund flows/facilitate devolution. It had recommended that the Union Government ought to launch a Fund for this and operationalise this recommendation in one year. It had also urged providing back-end support at all levels of PRIs/ PR Departments for operationalising the computerization of services.” A year later, the National e-Governance Plan was approved by the Cabinet and the ePanchayats project was one of them

The Commissioner Panchayati Raj and Rural Employment has initiated ePanchayat ,a Flagship project, for Computerization of Gram Panchayats. After a detailed system study by NIC, the department prioritized the applications to be automated for gram Panchayats. The application areas are Birth & Death Registrations, House Tax assessment and Demand Collections and Trade Licences. The applications were developed and implemented in 475 Gram Panchayats identified by department.

The software is web enabled and hosted on NIC Central servers. The capacity building had been taken up at various levels by conducting state & district level workshops and 5-day intensive training programme on the application usage and general awareness on computers .The ePanchayat project was initiated by Commissioner PR&RE in 2005,while the pilot was running in Ramachandrapuram gram Panchayat since 2003.

With ICT proving successful at Gram Panchayat level , the department requested NIC Hyderabad to take up Computerisation of all the 3-tiers of PRIs i.e Zilla Praja Parishad , Mandal Praja Parishad(Block) and Gram Panchayats and to submit the report. NIC APSC has conducted a detailed System Study of PRIs and submitted the report to the department.

The Commissioner PR&RE constituted a Domain Committee to review the study report. The committee prioritized the application areas common to all the three tiers of PRIs for computerization, based on which the department issued a letter of request to NIC for computerization of the following functional areas.An MIS portal of ePanchayat is launched to enable middle and top management to monitor and follow up.

·         RTI Act

·         Auctions

·         Elected Representatives

·         Personal Information of Employees

·         Meetings and Resolutions

·         Court Cases

·         Audit

·         Grievance Redressal

·         Periodicals (MIS Reports)

·         Inspections

·         Disciplinary Cases

·         Works & Schemes