PicoPeta's Bhoomi-Suggi project is a part of a much larger (and much celebrated) effort by the Karnataka Government to automate the process of land records procurement. Bhoomi-Suggi (literally: "Land-Harvest" in Kannada) involves the collection of data about crops being cultivated by farmers in the state.
The data collection system in existance prior to Bhoomi-Suggi has a turnaround time of about a year. That is, data about crops cultivated this year will be known to the Government of Karnataka only next year. The objective of project Bhoomi-Suggi is to greatly reduce this turnaround time to about a month. Currently deployed in the districts of Bagalkot, Belgaum, Raichur, Gulbarga and Bijapur, Bhoomi-Suggi may be extended to other parts of the country.
THE DATA COLLECTION PROCESS
All cultivable land in the state of Karntaka is registered at the Land Records office of the Government. Each plot of the cultivable land is registered with a survey number with certain key identifiers like District Code, Taluk Code, Hobli Code and Village Code.
The data collection itself is done by village accountants, each of whom is responsible for activity in several villages. When a village accountant visits a village, he carries with him a hardcopy of the previous year's records. His task is to visit each plot in the village and validate/change the cultivation on it. Further, he collects additional information like cultivator's name, type of land, source of irrigation, primary and secondary crops etc.
Data collected by village accountants is saved on the Simputer. Once they gets back to the Taluk Office, they use a PC-based application (also written by PicoPeta) to easily transfer the collected data to the Government's servers, for analysis and archival.
NOTABLE TECHNICAL FEATURES
- The data collection interface is completely in Kannada, as most village accountants can read only that language.
- Icon-based interfaces, menus and visual computing ensure that there is almost NO text-entry required.
- As data security is an important consideration, village accountants have to authenticate themselves using SmartCards: an elegant method that does not require cumbersome login procedures using usernames and passwords.
- The Simputer's radical simplity ensured that the village accountants (who had no prior computing experience) were fully conversant with the application within 2 days of training
SHOWCASE PROJECTS IN OTHER BUSINESS DOMAINS
- Microfinance
- Office Administration
- Science & Technology
