Approach

NalJalSeva: Empowering Rural Water Management With DIGIT

NalJalSeva, powered by the DIGIT platform, is designed for rural communities to independently manage their water supply infrastructure. The solution allows users to add new consumers, generate demand, collect revenue, and record expenditure transactions. It simplifies record-keeping, maintains a consumer database, monitors user charges, and provides a unified system for benchmarking rural governance and operations.

The NalJalSeva solution design impacts the financial and operational governance outcomes in multiple ways. Some of these include:

• Empowering Local Communities: Villages gain full control over their water systems, promoting long-term sustainability.

• Digital Governance: Built on DIGIT, NalJalSeva streamlines revenue and expense management, ensuring smooth operation.

• Transparent and Accountable: Financial and operational activities are visible to local governments, ensuring transparency and accountability.

Problems Addressed By NalJalSeva

The Finance Department and Water Supply and Sanitation Department have limited visibility over the fiscal sustainability of water schemes and get hit by the sudden demand for large funds to clear electricity bills.

The Department of Water Supply & Sanitation (DWSS) face several problems due to the lack of financial visibility of schemes:

• Unreliable and poor-quality water—Ineffective fiscal resource tracking often results in underfunding of water quality or treatment schemes.

• Inability to collect adequate water charges — Manual methods of revenue collection from households on account of water charges often lead to shortfalls. Pending dues often accumulate and adversely impact financial planning and proposed schemes.

• Lack of visibility of revenue and expenditure information - Inadequate financial transparency offers limited insight into how funds are being managed and spent by the local governing bodies. This creates financial blind spots, leading to misallocation of resources and unplanned expenses.

NalJalSeva helps digitise the revenue and expense records of Gram Panchayat Water Supply Committees. The dashboards and data insights provide DWSS and FD officials with visibility into the GPWSC's financial status.

The app offers capabilities to:

• track and manage the revenue and expenditure records using the digital platform

• share reports over WhatsApp

• access updated insights on consumer satisfaction/quality of services provided by local governing bodies

• view dashboards for a snapshot of collections and expenditures to the Sarpanch/other rural administrative officials

• access detailed collection reports from each household for accurate insights into consumption and demand

Approach

NalJalSeva integrates with the Fiscal Information Exchange (iFIX) platform to promote transparency and accountability in fiscal transactions. The fiscal events are posted on the platform in a standardised format making it easier to track and manage financial performance. The events are aggregated and processed to provide rich insights on key performance metrics which are available to users in the form of fiscal sustainability dashboards.

The illustration below provides a visualisation of how multiple actors interact with the distinctive Gram Panchayat Water Supply & Sanitation system registries to manage and coordinate various fiscal events. The key actors or stakeholders of the system include system administrators, department workers, local governing bodies, citizens and collection agents. Streamlined interaction between these actors is crucial for effective operations and management of fiscal events to facilitate sustainable and equitable access to basic services within the community.

The NalJalSeva app offers multiple benefits that promote the efficiency and transparency of water management services within local governing bodies.

• Digital book-keeping - maintains all receipt and expense records in digital format reducing the reliance on physical documents.

• Account management - simplified consumer and vendor account creation or management

• Low-effort operations - easy to use and environmentally friendly

• Minimise manual work - a simple mobile app that saves the time and effort of managing revenue & expenditure transactions

• Environment friendly - digital operations ensure all accounts are managed digitally thus reducing paper usage

• Accountability and transparency - recorded fiscal events and data-driven insights available through performance dashboards ensure accountability and transparency in operations

• Seamless handover - easy to handover records from one to another Sarpanch

• Dashboard insights - configurable dashboards provide easy and effective visualisation of local governance performance metrics

• Better planning - helps in better planning and efficient fund management, leading to better services

• Builds trust - information sharing about GPWSCs’ performance with citizens helps build trust and confidence

• Online and cash payment - Online payment through multiple options - Netbanking, Credit/Debit Card, Mobile Wallets. Cash payment is also available

• Notifications and alerts - SMS alerts, digital bills and receipts shared on registered mobile numbers, active SMS alerts

• Consumer rating - Citizens can rate the quality of water services in villages/wards. It helps identify problems and improve water services.

• Full or partial payment - users have the option to make partial payment of bills