All Kerala panchayats to have portals

All village panchayats in Kerala would soon have their own custom-made web portals with all the information relating to the panchayat in Malayalam.

Akshaya, a Kerala government initiative for cent percent e-literacy in the state, is all set to implement a pilot project to establish panchayat-level web portals with people's participation in select panchayats of Kannur district with financial and technical assistance from Unesco.

The panchayats that would get their very own web portals initially are Azheekode, Pinarayi, Muzhappilangad, Eramam-Kuttoor, Pappinissery, Sreekantapuram, Payam, Maloor and Vengad.

Besides, the Thalassery municipality and the Kannur district panchayat would get their own web portal as part of the pilot project.

The web portals would function from the Akshaya centres in each area. The portals of each panchayat would feature the local history, information about prominent individuals, organisations, institutions and places of special interest in the area, services provided by the local self government institution, farm information, list of enterprises and the products manufactured by them, employment opportunities available in the locality, information on availability of labour and local programmes. There would be periodic updates of the content of the portal.

T K Manzoor, director, Akshaya, said the project was being implemented with the objective of providing greater amount of information to the masses using new tools of information technology. The pilot project in Kannur would be extended to the rest of the state if found successful.

One of the core objectives of Akshaya is to provide information to the common people in Malayalam. The local level web portals are being set up with this objective, he said. He also said permission would be given for inclusion of local advertisement and Yellow Pages. A local level call centre facility to provide information relating to the locality is also planned.

The project would be fully funded by Unesco and would provide assistance in portal design, technical assistance, training, research and general guidelines. Local level information would be collected by community facilitators to be selected from the local level community groups and compiled by Akshaya entrepreneurs.

The information thus collected would be processed by content managers and content editors and transferred to the portal. The information to be included in the portal would be decided as recommended by the panchayat member in charge of IT-related issues.

The project is unique since it is for the first time in India that portals are being created to cater to the local-level needs of the people with people's participation.