National Panchayat Portal

(http://panchayat.nic.in)

Managing Content for Local

Governance

National Informatics Centre

 Background
 73rd Amendment Act enacted in 1992 to enhance the democratic set up by
establishing the third-tier of the government, the Panchayati Raj Insitutions
(PRIs)

 PRIs work below the level of state at district, block and village level

 Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR), Government of India formed in 2004 to work

for the effective implementation of Panchayati Raj or local self governance in the
country

 There are about

 31 State Panchayat Raj Departments

 536 District Panchayats or Zilla Parishads (ZPs)

 6096 Block Panchayats/Intermediate Panchayats (BPs/IPs)

 2,40,000 Gram panchayats/Village Panchayats (GPs/VPs)

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 Challenges of Information Dissemination
& Management
 The sheer no. of portals to be created & maintained is mind boggling

 Maintenance of the web site

 Lack of technical skills to manage and maintain web sites
 Lack of proper review and approval mechanism,
 Inconsistency in the information published through different media

 Linguistic diversity

 Remoteness of the institutions

 Poor Network Connectivity

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 The National Panchayat Portal (NPP)
 A collaborative, dynamic portal generation and content
management & exchange framework

 Offers a unique identity and presence to each PRI in the

country including MoPR and State PR Departments

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 NPP – Collaborative Portal Generation
 Dynamically generates portals for Ministry of Panchayati Raj, all 35 State
Panchayati Raj departments, all 560 district panchayats, 6096 intermediate
panchayats and 2,40,000 village panchayats in the country

 Portal site acts as a window to information & services provided by the

respective PRI

 Portals tailored for the respective PRI in terms of

 Page Layout
 Content Presentation
 Language
 Visual Theme

 The portals can collaborate with one another to share the resources of the
framework such as content, page layout, visual theme, etc.

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 NPP – Content Presentation & Organization

 Portal Pages
 A PRI portal site may present content in more than one web page
format called portal page to cater to different sections of the citizen or
different focus areas of the community. For eg., Farmer’s page, Health
Page, Student’s Page


Portlets
 Each portal page is divided up into sections called portlets
 Content Portlets – which may display full or part of the content. Rules can
be defined which will determine what content to display in terms of subject
area, type, the publisher node etc.
 Navigation Portlets – where content could be organized by subject area,
content type, local categorization scheme or a combination of all of these
 Opinion Portlets

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 Portlet organized by Content
Type

Portlet that displays only

News and Events

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 NPP – Language Support
 Each PRI portal site could use one or more languages used by its
community

 UNICODE standards-based
 Hindi, English and other regional languages (which have been UNICODE
enabled)

Easier to mix languages, share with others

 Multiple language support on each portal site

 Easy switching to another language supported by the site without

disconnecting from the site

 User-friendly screens to add or customize a language version as per

local needs

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 NPP – Powerful Search Facility

 Simple Search: by word or phrase (exact or any word)

 Metadata-based search: based on Dublin-Core metadata tags used

to define the content such as subject, author, date published or
status etc.

 Search in title, abstract, typed text or attached files (doc, pdf,ppt

etc.) of the content item

 Search across multiple languages supported by the site

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 NPP – Visual Themes
 A visual theme defines the colour scheme, header images,
logos etc.

 Each PRI can define its own theme

 The theme for a PRI portal site can be set simply by selecting a
theme for the site

 PRIs can exchange themes amongst themselves

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 User Management
 Role-based Privileges
 Viewer
 Contributor
 Editor
 Content Manager
 Site Designer
 User Manager
 System Administrator

 NPP provides two user

groups by default: citizen,
operator & manager
 Each PRI could use the
default user groups or
create their own user
groups as per their need

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NPP - Authentication
 General public need not login to browse the information provided
by the portal site

 General public can, however, self-register as citizens to take

advantage of facilities provided by portal site for authenticated
users such as messaging facility

 PRI officials must login if they want to do more than just browse
the site.

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 NPP – Content Management
 Content Creation

 Content can be created in any UNICODE supported language in

which the PRI desires to work

 Content can be tagged with appropriate metadata to

 enhance search capabilities
 Automatically organize content
 and share content among PRIs

 Content can be classified by subject areas relevant to PRIs and the

type of content

 Content may be either typed in or may be in the form of external

sources such as URL or attached files (audio, video files).

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 NPP – Content Management
 Content Editing & Versioning
 Content created may be selectively edited by authorized users
 Editors may be authorized to add more information
 Versions of content can be maintained (if the same content is being used by other sites)

 Content Publishing
 Content may be automatically published or may be moderated/reviewed before it is published on the
portal site

 Content Indexing
 Any newly created or edited content is automatically indexed to enable easy searching, sharing and
organizing of content

 Garbage Management
 Content may be archived either manually or automatically
 Rejected or deleted content are auotmatically removed from the system

 Content Flow Management

 The framework could be set up to ensure that content flows in the desired fashion
 Different users can contribute different information to the content
 The workflow itself may be defined within a single site or across distributed sites in different systems

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 NPP – Collaborative Content Management within a Site

 Each site could be configured to

Publish
allow content flow across various
users to ensure that the content
is appropriately edited, approved
and then published.
Content
 Currently, each site has two
types of users: operator and
manager
Manager
 Operator can create and edit
content
 Manager can edit content
Edit/ Approve
created by operators as well
as self
 Only managers can publish
content

Operator
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 NPP - Messaging
 Provides message facility to send 'mails' between users of
different PRI sites.

 This could be used by citizens to send messages to one another

as well as to PRI officials and vice versa, without a need to access
an e-mail server and Internet

 Users may belong to different PRI portal sites which may be

distributed across systems

 Similar to e.g. Yahoo mail, but works without Internet.

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 NPP – Future Directions
 NPP – A semantic Web Portal

 Already, NPP captures metadata related to content.

 Further, some basic common classification has been achieved by

standardizing on subject areas and types of content (which are same
for all government agencies). This gives capability to search across
languages in a given subject area or type of content

 It is proposed to semantically enhance the current search capability of

NPP by linking it to domain ontology

 This would enable users to query for information or services across

portal sites and across languages using any domain-specific concept

 Further, it is proposed to enhance the portal framework as an ontology-

building tool

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 Open eNRICH v4.0 - The engine that powers NPP
 An Open Source software developed by NIC, in collaboration with OneWorld International
Foundation, an international NGO based in London and UNESCO

 Available in public domain

 Runs on both Windows (XP, 2000 Professional and Server) as well as Linux platform

 Can be viewed through Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6 and Opera

 Designed to deliver high performance in a minimum infrastructure environment as well as in

a high-access intensive environment

 Designed to be used as community portal by rural communities with minimum/poor

infrastructure as well as by collaborating government agencies as an e-Governance portal
framework

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 Potential Uses of Open eNRICH
v4.0
 Open eNRICH v4.0 is going to be used to create

 A network of Community Portals – The Open Knowledge Network (OKN), a UN-

G8 Initiative will be powered by Open eNRICH v4.0
 Likely to be used in Mission 2007 project sites

 Open eNRICH v4.0 can be used to create

 A National Government Portal Network – National Panchayat Portal would be the

biggest government network in the world
 Intra Department portal to cater to the needs of the employees

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Thank You

National Informatics Centre