E-despatch: Moving government files,the e-way

How long does it take for a file to move from one table in a government office to the next? Months,realised Rabindra Nath Dash...

How long does it take for a file to move from one table in a government office to the next? Months,realised Rabindra Nath Dash,commissioner-cum-secretary in Orissas panchayati raj department,when he was reviewing NREGS works in Bisoyi,a gram panchayat in Mayurbhanj district,in August 2007.

When Dash asked the gram panchayat officer why no work had been done even after money had been transferred to the bank account specified for NREGS,the officer said he did not have the guidelines on NREGS expenditure. But I had issued the circular in April 2007,four months ago. I then found out that the circular sent from the panchayati raj department in Bhubaneswar was lying on the table of an official in the dispatch section of the Mayurbhanj District Rural Development Agency. It had not even landed on the table of the project director who sat in the same office, says Dash,now retired from government service and pursuing his Ph.D in Information Technology.

Thats when Dash realised that there was no point drawing up big pro-poor schemes unless the official letter,crucial to day-to-day governance,went down to the ground level in real-time.

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Thus was born e-despatch,an Internet-based letter-dispatch system. The system,started by Orissas panchayati raj department in 2007 and which has now been adopted by 17 of the 35 State departments,won the Nasscom award for social innovation in February this year.

Through the e-despatch scheme,Das and his team linked all the 30 districts collectors,30 project directors of DRDAs and 314 blocks development officers in the State.

How it works

Every letter sent by the department from its head office in Bhubaneswar to all the block offices and the gram panchayats is scanned,saved in PDF format and sent through the server to a dedicated mailbox called e-space thats assigned to every official in the department.

The system generates an auto letter number and assigns the address and mode of despatch for each letter. A computer operator in the department sends every letter to the respective e-space. The moment a letter lands in the mailboxes of the respective BDO or Collector,they get an SMS. The same letters are also sent by fax and post to the collectors and BDOs.

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But when he started,Dash had to deal with a lot of scepticism. When someone pointed out the danger of posting every letter of the department,Saswat Mishra,then director (special projects) in the department,closed the discussion saying,After the RTI Act,there is nothing secret in government.

After the success of the e-despatch scheme,17 state departments,including the housing and urban development department and health and family welfare department,are using the system to send letters.