CM PATEL’S DIGITAL RAP
The Gujarat chief minister’s office is getting a more digital arsenal to improve governance. After the assembly election win in December 2022, chief minister Bhupendra Patel launched a WhatsApp bot in January and then the Urban Grievance Redressal Monitoring System (UGRMS). The bot allows people to directly connect with the CM. In late April, the CMO also celebrated the 20year anniversary of the ‘Swagat’ grievance redressal system where the CM personally interacts with complainants via video conferencing on the fourth Thursday of every month. And at the end of the chintan shivir in midMay, health minister Rushikesh Patel said they were thinking of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into administrative functioning.
The UGRMS, meanwhile, is a mechanism to monitor in real time the status of complaints made in eight municipal corporations of the state. It is plugged into a fiveyear old system called the CM Dashboard that allows Bhupendra’s office (CMO) to digitally monitor the implementation of schemes in real time.
After three decades in power in Gujarat, one of the key reasons attributed to the BJP government’s success are its schemes and benefits for people. Scheme beneficiaries or labharthis are now emerging as a vote bank to reckon with. Effective implementation of government schemes is an evolving challenge. The development of the CM Dashboard was initiated in 2018, with help from the central National Informatics Centre (NIC). The dashboard is a visual insight of more than 4,500 indicators of 20 sectors of all the state government departments consolidated under a single umbrella. The dashboard also integrates all the key stakeholders, like the secretaries, HoDs, collectors, DDOs (district development officers) and SPs (police superintendents) on a single platform. The dashboard accesses data through more than 50,000 data points and 187 egovernance applications of 26 departments. All flagship schemes of the Centre and state government are monitored.
“It was a mammoth task to monitor government schemes and performance on realtime basis,” a senior officer in the CMO explains. “In May 2018, we started with 41 nodal and subnodal officers. Progressively, the CM Dashboard covered the entire administration of 33 districts, 248 talukas and 18,000plus villages.” This involves 401 nodal and subnodal officers monitoring over 125 schemes on a regular basis. More than 80 per cent of the data is received through automated web services.
The dashboard is linked with 750 web services of all departments through various APIs (application programming interfaces). Given that it deals with highsecurity information, it has been set up at the CM’s residence. Realtime feedback is obtained by the dashboard team every day by random calling scheme beneficiaries. So far, over 900,000 calls have been made through this ‘jan samvad’ in the past five years. This data is
THE CM’S DASHBOARD HELPS IN DIGITAL MONITORING OF GOVERNMENT SCHEMES’ IMPLEMENTATION IN REAL TIME
analysed by a team of professionals. “It completes the cycle, from collecting data to monitoring to ensuring timely disposal of cases, and also ranks officers for their performance. The analysis report prepared by the dashboard team has become an important point of discussion in the committee of secretaries (CoS) meeting every week,” the officer adds. In August 2022, CM Patel even monitored the law and order situation in the state during the 145th Jagannath rath yatra using the CM’s Dashboard.
Integration and collection of data is one part of the CM Dashboard. This basic framework is further integrated with the respective officers—secretaries, collectors, DDOs, municipal commissioners—for performance monitoring. The realtime monitoring system is unique to the CM Dashboard. “The command and control unit— through which the monitoring happens—gives a macro level picture of the state with performance of each district. It shows which ones are leading and which are laggards,” the officer in the CMO explains.
Meanwhile, the WhatsApp bot is used as a tool to make the CM ‘accessible’ to people on their handheld devices. It gives automated closeended responses that are delivered to the CM’s inbox, which is meticulously monitored by officers on special duty (OSDs) in the CMO. People can ‘Write to CM’ for direct complaints or suggestions, or even send a season’s greetings message. Other functions include making an appointment for Swagat, fixing an appointment with the CM as well as applying for benefits under the CM’s relief fund.
In the three months since the launch in January 2023, 43,068 messages had been received till April 30, of which 33.4 per cent were to convey a greeting to the CM or pass on a suggestion. “We construe this as a sign of the people connecting with the CM personally,” says the officer in the CMO. The second highest number of requests (17 per cent) have come for an appointment with the CM. “The request goes to the CM’s appointment desk, where the SOP (standard operating procedure) for granting appointments is followed,” the officer adds.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who kicked off the digitisation initiative in 2003 during his first term as the CM of Gujarat, also addressed officers during the anniversary celebration of Swagat in the last week of April. “Governance is not static, it has to innovate to employ the latest methods and technology for the benefit of the people. It has to have empathy. A government’s complaint redressal system is the most important benchmark of democracy,” he reiterated. The legacy endures. ■
As the cheetahs—translocated from Namibia and South Africa to India where they have been functionally extinct since the country’s independence— flounder and die in unfamiliar terrain, the furious debate on the wisdom (questionable) of the move is reignited. While Divyabhanusinh makes a case for their reintroduction, it is not the focus of this timely, glorious and gripping account of the history of Asiatic cheetahs in the subcontinent, and beyond.
An important update on his remarkable work The End of a Trail: The Cheetah in India (1995), this one deliberates on other issues that surround this contentious cat—or ‘dogcat’, as per the belief in olden times due to its likeness with hounds. The author emphasises the cheetah’s ‘Indianness’, elegantly rubbishing claims of it being an ‘exotic alien’, including in a book coauthored by conservationist Valmik Thapar.
All of which makes for a lively discussion, but the real meat of this classic lies in the account of the cheetah’s journey from prehistoric to contemporary times and its slide into extinction. The author’s research is meticulous and exhaustive, and with his passionate telling and instinct for interesting nuggets, The Story of India’s Cheetahs makes for an engrossing read. The book traces neolithic cave paintings of the cheetah in presentday Madhya Pradesh, evidence in Sanskrit text and the Sultanate period to utterly fascinating records from the Mughal era.
Cheetahs were favoured royal pets as they were used for hunting swift game like blackbuck. References to coursing with the cheetahs dates back to the 12th century in India, while in Egypt they were domesticated as early as 1700 BC. Akbar is notoriously said to have possessed some 9,000 cheetahs in his menagerie over his lifetime, but who knew of the Mughal emperor’s earnest—and failed—attempts to get them “to couple in the garden”! Lest there is a flurry to lay the blame of extinction on the Mughals, this peculiar penchant for collecting cheetahs extended to royalty of all hues, including the Maharajahs of Kolhapur, Bhavnagar and Baroda.
Records of its capture—usually by laying pits on wellworn paths of the cat—and the hunts paint an astonishing picture of India’s historic expanse of forests and the cheetah’s wide range across the country. For instance, the Palam site of Delhi’s old airport was once a hunting ground where a “great number of antelope gathered”. Training the cheetahs was a fine art, and there existed treatises on their care and schooling. Specialised keepers were employed and illustrations depict them as bedfellows of the big cat, with a close bond between the two. The text is richly supported by illustrations and other works of art, including carpets depicting the cheetah.
The chapter chronicling the cat’s extinction (coauthored with Raza Kazmi) is particularly instructive and reveals that the last wild cheetah was sighted not in India in 1947 as is widely believed, but in Pakistan in 1997. Fewer than 30 wild Asiatic cheetahs survive today in Iran. Being hunted by the British as trophies had also decimated populations and, coupled with the massive loss of the cheetah’s favoured habitat—grasslands and scrublands— led to its extermination.
The book is a poignant reminder of how humans brought the downfall of a unique cat “that could soar” due to its prodigious speed. The cheetah didn’t ask for its “elevation as a royal pet”, and as the author writes, “it was interference by humans with its life, habitat and prey that spelt doom for this cat”. The tragedy is we do not seem to have learnt from history—as we subject the cat, again, to political whims and fancies. ■
The author stresses the cheetah’s ‘Indianness’, elegantly rubbishing claims of it being an ‘exotic alien’