LinuxAsia Conference & Expo 2006

Projects participating in the GOV.IN Pavilion at LinuxAsia 2006 are listed below.

Gram Panchayat Management & Accounting System

Department of Panchayat & Rural Development (P&RD), West Bengal

This web-based Gram Panchayat (GP) based application has been developed to cater to the efficient and effective management needs of a GP. The application addresses the accounting needs of the GP office. It also provides accounting solutions for the schemes run by the P&RD Department.

The package provides master entry and update for collection & expenditure heads, bank details, scheme details, creation of ledger heads, part details, etc. The accounting component handles collection & expenditure entry, bank deposits, withdrawals and bank adjustments.

The application has a citizen centric interface and supports the following services:

Birth, Death & Trade Registration and issue of the same
Preparation of Beneficiary List - (by Scheme)
Collection of various taxes and issue of receipts
Reports
- A. Preparation of Ledger Book, Main Cash Book
- B. Income-Expenditure Report, Cheque Register
- C. Generation of Bank Pass book, General Cash Book
- D. Collection & Expenditure Report

The software developed using open source software (LAMP) has been appreciated by Joint Secy. And other senior officials of P&RD Department .It has been decided to implement in Mogra G.P. of Hooghly District as a Pilot Project within Jan, 2006.

Live-CD based Multilingual Distribution of Linux - Abhigyan

C-DAC, Noida

Many efforts are being put to reduce digital divide in India. There are many parallel efforts from academics, research community, private players as well as government agencies.

"Abhigyan" is an effort initiated by C-DAC, Noida centre to provide local language support on Linux for everyone. This project has used open source technology as well as CDAC's research activities in the field of Natural language technology. The product is based on Knoppix and provides language interfaces for Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Tamil. The product provides KDE desktop environment and OpenOffice support. Various language fonts released by GoI are also embedded in "Abhgyan".

National Resource Centre for Free & Open Source Software (NRCFOSS)

AU-KBC Research Centre, Chennai

NRCFOSS aims to:

Initiate and implement appropriate programs for skilled manpower generation in FOSS
Promote development, deployment and adoption of FOSS products and solutions
Support and promote Localisation and Indian Language Computing activities using FOSS
Help to develop entrepreneurship and business models in FOSS area
Support Networking and Community building, and evolve policies related to FOSS

NRCFOSS activities and programs towards the realization of its aims:

FOSS courses and project work in the formal curricula of Engineering Education programs
Develop GNU/Linux distributions with applications specific to domains such as E-Governance and Technical Education
Identify and evaluate FOSS alternatives, e.g., in technical education
Understand the requirements for Localisation and Indian Languages technologies of specific user segments and developing FOSS based solutions for the same
Hold dialogs with industry developer groups, R&D communities and user groups to match products with requirements

NRCFOSS has been promoted by the Dept. of Information Technology, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Govt. of India, to understand and promote the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement in the Indian context, and to explore how FOSS can help to bridge the digital divide and also strengthen the Indian software industry. NRCFOSS is jointly implemented by the AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University and the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chennai.

Open Source Initiatives in Kerala

NIC, Kerala

Various Open Source initiatives have been taken by NIC Kerala for effective use of open source for online applications. These solutions have been implemented in various application areas such as:

E-Collectorate
Online Counseling for engineering/medical/legal/MCA
Lok Ayukta
Treasury
Dairy development board
PIB news
KV schools
Secretariat Knowledge Management system

Solutions to be showcased have been developed using LAMP and Java technologies.

Shidhaa: Rationcard Digitisation Application

C-DAC, Mumbai for the Govt of Maharastra

'shidhaa' is a sofware application developed for the Food and Civil Supplies Dept., Govt of Maharashtra, for digitisation of rationing cards. The software has been developed by Janabhaaratii team using free/open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP with a localised Marathi language interface. This application is a complete solution for data entry of ration card forms either using paper forms or using scanned forms and creates all databases localised in Marathi using Unicode.

The application also has many innovative features such as:

Autocompletion for names using the reduced set of names from the voterlist in any area
Connection of voterlist with the rationcard which finds out whether the names given in rationcard form appear in the voterlist or not using a similar sounding search engine (vl2) on the voterlist database in PostgreSQL.

This application is intended to create a common citizen database which will combine various data sources used by various govt departments. The entire source code for the application has been released under GNU GPL v2 or later and can be downloaded free from http://203.199.16.202. The software will be used for a pilot project in Solapur district where more than 200000 (2 lacs) rationcard forms will be digitised using this software.

Reference Web sites:

GOV.IN Pavilion