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Details

Academic Project - Spring 2008

• Mobis is our internship project at BISAG during the final semester of Computer Engineering at Gujarat University.
• BISAG gave us an opportunity and complete freedom to find and implement an improved solution for Surat city's e-services which resulted in Mobis.
• Not only were we able to propose a solution but also build a working prototype for Surat City and demonstrate it to the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC).

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BISAG

Bhaskaracharya Institute For Space Applications and Geo-Informatics (BISAG) is a State level nodal agency to facilitate the use of spatial and geo-spatial technologies for the planning and developmental activities pertaining to Agriculture, Land and Water Resource Management, Wasteland/Watershed Development, Forestry, Disaster Management, Infrastructure and Education.

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Vision

• BISAG's vision for Surat city is the introduction of e-services to help bridge the gap between government and citizens.
• City's municipal corporation needs to provide important updates to the citizens such as during disaster, traffic control, ongoing development programs in the city, weather, new facilities launched and events like health camps.
• Make it easier for citizens to access their personal information like their property, water and drainage connections and tax data.
• Citizens should be able to pay the tax online which would save a lot of time for both the citizens and the civic officials.
• Provide facility to lodge complaints regarding water, drainage or any other facilities provided by the corporation. This is an important part of citizen to government interaction.
• Provide city civic officials involved in the functioning of the municipal corporation also need access to sensitive data for their work procedures in field like during the property tax collection the recovery agent may need access to information of wards, societies and plots of specific to his zone and also the plot details like tax outstanding.
• There is a need to provide a single window service for these processes in an easy to access manner.
• As Surat City is the model city of the Indian state of Gujarat for any government projects, a successful project for Surat city can be implemented for other cities as well.

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Current situation

The city municipal corporation maintains a website to give some of the above mentioned information. It has a lot of important information for the citizens but the website is not becoming popular among them because of poor reachability of websites/internet among the citizens.

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A better solution

We took opinions from both the citizens and the government. Although accessing internet was a hurdle for most citizens, a wide range of citizens used mobile phones and if we could provide the above mentioned services on mobile platform, it could help both sides come closer.

Alternatives

• SMS based services: - The SMS based services are often costly, very cumbersome, provides less functionality and have more number of interactions.
• Flash services (Network carrier provided services): - These services are again costly, constrained Graphical User Interface (GUI), need more interactions and less functional.
• WAP browser based application: - In such applications the user gets user interface which is same as seen on any website but still the alternative is not able to use it properly because the GUI is constrained.
• Windows CE: - This alternative could not be considered because it lacks support for platform independency and is not an open source solution.

Selected Alternative

Java Micro Edition(J2ME) :- The features of this solution alternative such as – platform Independence, widely supported on mobiles, better control on GUI, cost effectiveness, adaptability, open source and the support for Service Oriented Architecture were able to satisfy our design requirements fully. Java also provides a complete End-to-End solution.

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Services

Mobis has three parts:

1. Database of information to be provided which is maintained by content managers.
2. Web Service that exposes the underlying database.
3. Mobile Client that connects to the web service.

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Potential

• Extend bill payment for gas, electricity, phone, water tax etc.
• Complaint tracking
• Offline access
• Surveys and event registrations
• Rail and bus schedules

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Awards and appreciation

• Awarded the first prize in a state level "College to Career" competition hosted by Microsoft and Government of Gujarat in 2008
• Nominated for best e-governance project at Manthan Awards in 2008

I am very impressed. I have advised GIL (Gujarat Informatics Limited) to get these students in touch with GUDM (Gujarat Urban Development Mission) to see how we can do a pilot in one of the municipalities. Anita Kerwal, Gandhinagar
Secretary of Primary Education and I/c Secretary of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat

Mobis bridges the gap between government and citizens since all the information related to city will be available on citizen’s mobile. Gujarat Samachar, Vadodara

Budding engineers display their software skills at college fest. Bashir Pathan The Indian Express

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Technology

• Web Services - Service Oriented Architecture using JAX-WS
• Database - MySql
• Web Server - Apache Tomcat v6.0
• Mobile Client - J2ME

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Team