Case Study of Samiksha – an ambitious e-Governance initiative of PWD West Bengal

‘SAMIKSHA’ Project Progress Monitoring System is an ambitious e-Governance initiative of PWD West Bengal where a web and mobile-based software application was built to monitor the progress of various construction & maintenance projects for Roads, Bridges, and Buildings throughout the state. The initial application was implemented in June 2016 which helped 5000+ users of the department with consistent project monitoring and successful completion of more than 6000+ projects in the past 3 years.
For transforming the monitoring and management system of the Public Works Department, ‘Samiksha’ PPMS succeeded in bringing about digitally enabled, real-time and interactive modes of tracking projects. This led to a sea change in the performance of the department and made the department much more responsive, transparent, and performance-oriented.
After implementation of SAMIKSHA, planned expenditure of the department jumped from Rs. 2767.00 crore in the year of 2016-17 to Rs. 3608.00 crore during the year 2017- 18 and Rs. 4702.07 crore during the year 2018–19.

Project Requirement

• Development and Implementation of Project Monitoring System ‘SAMIKSHA’
• GIS Survey & Mapping of Entire PWD Road Network & Integration with PPMS
• Development of WebGIS on top of Geomedia Web map Server
• Implementation of Hardware Infrastructure for hosting the entire solution
• Implementation of Backup Solution
• Implementation of Key-based Security Solution
• Onsite posting of Manpower Support for Handholding Support to the Department
• Onsite posting of Manpower Support Maintenance of the Hardware Infrastructure

Project Details

‘Samiksha’ Portal consists of 3 Major Components:

• PPMS Web Portal
• PPMS Mobile App
• PPMS Data Collector App

Major Modules of Web Portal:

Dashboard: The application has a dynamic 1page dashboard that gets automatically refreshed at regular intervals. The dashboard provides information like

• Ongoing Projects
• Completed Projects
• Delayed Projects
• Top 20 Projects with unused fund
• District wise Project Inspection Status etc.

Map View: The Map view module consists of a GIS application that contains the following:

• Administrative Boundaries
• Project Location
• Road Network
• Bridges
• Stack Yards
• Major PWD & Government Offices

New Project Entry: Details of Project, Administrative Approval, Tender, Execution Agency, Commencement Date, Completion Date, Funding and the Latitude longitude, etc. of the project are captured here.

Projects can be filtered based on Ongoing, Completed & Closed, and color-coded based on their status.

Project Monitoring:

• Inspection reports are available here including photographs and videos and attribute data like Physical progress, Financial Progress, Demand, any field-related problem, etc.
• All Project-related inspections over a period can be viewed from here which provides a snapshot idea of how the project has been progressing.
• Survey Approval: Whenever an inspection report comes from the field the corresponding Executive Engineer has to provide approval or rejection to the inspection report. This was done to prevent the system from junk data
• All Inspection locations can be viewed on the GIS Map. Since the data coming from a mobile app is geo-fenced, and data coming outside the project location are shown separately with an Alert.
• All of these Information are available on both PPMS Mobile App and PPMS Web Application.

Project Progress Tracking:

• A Color-Coded 1 Page Dashboard helps the senior officials of the department in tracking the Project Progress and Milestone.
• Projects which are running behind their scheduled completion date or stalled are colored differently.
• Based on the Project Type the Project Duration is broken into smaller milestones and based on the Physical progress the same is tracked.
• If a milestone is missed mail alerts and mobile notifications are sent to stakeholders.

Video Comparison:

• Capturing of Geo-tagged videos using PPMS Data Collector App.
• Tagging the video frame-wise with the project line or project point.
• Play multiple videos at a time on a single screen.
• Compare the video’s side by side, showing the project progress.
• Storing of multiple videos project wise for future references.

Demand Management:

• Executive Engineers are authorized to raise a demand against a project.
• Based on Department Hierarchy the demand request travels through multiple senior officials.
• Any officer can raise a query or ask for clarification regarding the Demand through the application only.
• Once the demand is raised and accepted Notification and alerts are sent to all stake owners.

Administrative Approval:

• Executive Engineers are authorized to request Administrative Approval for a Project
• Based on Department Hierarchy the request travels through multiple senior officials
• Once the approval is given Administrative Approval number with Date is automatically generated.
• A draft copy of the Administrative Approval letter is also auto-generated by the system which can be sent via email or can be printed for physical delivery.

Court Case Management

• This module stores all Court case-related information for any project.
• Executive Engineers can access the cases under them using this module.
• The status of every case with documents and important dates is stored here.
• Automatic alerts are sent to respective officials before hearing dates.

PPMS Data Collector App:

• The App allows Field officials to collect project-related data like Photographs, Videos, Latitude Longitude of the Project Location, Physical Progress, etc.
• The App is equipped to store data in offline mode and syncs as the device come in contact with the Internet or Wi-Fi.
• The App is geofenced. The user will only be able to submit his data if he is nearby to the project location.
• The app supports multiple forms which allow the field officials to collect multiple kinds of data as and when required.
• The app can be used on both Android and iOS platforms.

PPMS Mobile App:

• All key features of the PPMS Web app are present in the PPMS Mobile App.
• The Application supports Rule and Role-based Login.
• Graphical Representation of Projects through Dashboard
• View Project Status through Physical and Financial progress of all with Photograph
• Geotagged Video Comparison for progress analysis
• The app also allows Executive Engineers to approve/disapprove Inspection data sent by the field officials.
• The app also allows officials to locate Nearby Projects from their current location and Navigate to the project site using Google Maps.
• The App allows Report Generation in PDF and Excel Format and dispatch
• The App also supports Offline Data Storage
• Push Notifications are sent to stake owners as and when required.
• The App can be used in both android and iOS Formats.

Key Benefits from SAMIKSHA:

• After implementation of SAMIKSHA, Plan expenditure has jumped from Rs. 2767.00 crore in the year of 2016-17 to Rs. 3608.00 crore during the year 2017- 18 and Rs. 4702.07 crore during the year 2018–19.
• The numbers of completed projects jumped from 200 in the year 2016–17 to 800 in the year 2017 – 18 and 1500 in the year 2018–19.
• After the introduction of Samiksha, PWD, West Bengal has been able to show courage to take up 3000+ Projects amounting to around Rs. 18000 Crore in a single year. Before the introduction of Samiksha, it was not imaginable.
• Disposal of problems has also jumped enormously. Every project and its difficulties are now at the fingertips of Departmental Authorities. Not only this, the activity of Field Engineers and their inspection report are also available with the Departmental Authorities via SAMIKSHA Mobile App.
• Due to the introduction of Samiksha, all District Magistrates and Departmental Secretaries are constantly updated about PWD’s project status. Now they can easily communicate to their people about the time from when they will start to get benefits from the development works.