India's youngest sarpanch, MBA Chavvi Rajawat makes her village Soda India's 1st IT-enabled one

When Chavvi Rajawat tried to bring water to her parched village, she hit the bureaucratic wall of inefficiency.

 The young, jeans-clad sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan was told that she had already spent more than the funds allocated to her, and that the fresh water reservoir she wanted to construct was now out of the question.

But like any trained equestrian, Rajawat was not willing to give her ground. So she decided to raise the funds on her own.

Family and friends chipped in and Rajawat, who at 30 became India's youngest sarpanch and the only one holding an MBA degree, managed to collect Rs 20 lakh. But this was just a drop in the Rs 3.5 crore she needed to construct the reservoir.

That's when Rajawat asked the district headquarters in Tonk to provide a detailed account of the funds sanctioned to her village.

The file showed a calculation error. The error was fixed. But the episode left Rajawat disturbed over the lack of transparency and accountability that ails the administration. Keen to make a change, Rajawat decided to e-enable her village panchayat.

Soda village has now tied up with German software vendor SAP to develop an internet and intranet portal, complete with a technology education lab. The portal would give Soda's 10,000 inhabitants 24x7 accessibility to the funds sanctioned for the village.

It would also offer citizen services such as birth and death certificates, besides posting land records online. "A fire in Tonk had destroyed land records of many villages," says Rajawat. "This ERP (enterprise resource planning) application will have an electronic database, and store all land records in servers."

Rajawat, who represented India at a recent UN poverty summit, says she sees computerization lifting the veil of illiteracy from her village.

"Most youth in the village are unemployed, as they don't have higher education due to absence of a college. We want to change that with e-education," says she.

After taking over as sarpanch in February, Rajawat launched a website, www.soda-india.in, where she regularly posts funds allocated for projects such as a village bank, community centre for weddings and cataract surgery for the needy.

Though panchayats in Kolhapur district of Maharashtra, Ranchi in Jharkhand and Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh have websites, they maintain only basic information like the history of the village, names of the sarpanch and other sabha members, and basic demographics of the village.

Soda and SAP plan to link the portal with the state government's websites by the year-end, making Soda the first fully computerized Panchayat in India.

SAP's India managing director Peter Gartnerberg says he wants to take the initiative forward to his ancestral village in Tarn Taran in Punjab. "Panchayats is a large untapped business for us. We will take it to Punjab and other states in India once Soda gets its application portal and IT lab this year," says Gartenberg.

Gartneberg's grandfather lived in Tarn Taran before migrating to the US decades ago.

That Tonk borders Ajmer, a Lok Sabha constituency represented by minister of state for I-T and communications Sachin Pilot, is another plus.

Ajmer's Kanpura district was showcased by India to US President Barack Obama as the model IT district during his visit last year. Pilot is overseeing a programme to connect all 600,000 panchayats in the country with broadband, and eventually, with citizen e-applications.

The Central government last year sanctioned Rs 4,500 crore for the e-panchayat project. But it does not seek to offer visibility into fund allocation and project monitoring as envisaged by Rajawat.