Sikkim: Technology at the Core of Village Administration

Sikkim is India’s least populous state. Located in the north-east, Sikkim reported a population of 6,10,577 in 2011. Sikkim is also the second-smallest state in India after Goa in terms of land area. The state is spread over 7,096 square kilometres. The GSDP of Sikkim for 2012-13 was R9,957 crore. The mountainous terrain and the highly dispersed population greatly add to the costs of providing social services and infrastructure. Again, because of its small size, the state enjoys practically no economies of scale. Almost all types of construction material need to be brought in from outside the state. Transportation is not only difficult and hazardous, but also adds substantially to costs of production of goods and services. Similarly, establishing systems of support, supervision and performance monitoring become complicated and expensive, as people need additional resources and time to travel for many days to visit remote areas. The state was conferred an Award and SKOCH Order-of-Merit in the e-Governance category.

Key Achievements

The Order-of-Merit was won by the state in the e-Governance category for the Department of Information Technology, Government of Sikkim project on Cyber Village. The project aims at providing support to the basic administrative unit, i.e., “Village Administration” to enable content development of G2C services. The GPU (Gram Panchayat Unit) is the primary front-end for service delivery. The Cyber Village project involves integrated and seamless delivery of citizen services by GPU administration through automation of workflow, back end digitisation, integration and process redesigning across participating sections/departments for providing services in an efficient manner to the citizens. Each citizen is given a photo ID plastic card with barcode giving them a unique identification number (either Aadhaar UID or GPU ID). This has resulted in significant cost savings to citizens as it reduces / eliminates travel. On an average Citizen has to visit multiple department multiple times to avail Service, which is now available at the cost of single SMS.