Following sarkaari projects

How would you like the ability to watch and follow all work that our local governments do? All concerned citizens want it. A lot of work needs to happen though to make such a thing possible. Fancy websites for bodies like BBMP and BMRC are only the face, there need to be internal government systems to store and expose the information about their workings. And then you need easy to use tools that sarkaari babus and engineers would use to enter information into these systems.

Forget the technicalities for a moment. What we want is this. Tender gets floated for a work, we see it. We should then see all the bids, and the winner. And then on, the status and progress of work. Last, after the work gets completed, the details of how it was signed off as completed or successful.

Lets talk BBMP. They do upload tenders on their website for us to see, though it might be that they only show us what they think is important. Anyway, tender goes up, what happens next?

It looks like they are trying to use this system called tenderwizard built by Antares Systems. Its an internet based Business to Government (B2G) e-procurement system for buying/selling of goods and services through quotations, tenders/bids and auctions. Go to tenderwizard site and you'd notice that a lot of government bodies from Karnataka, Delhi and Kerala are trying to use it.

But that is all as far the positive stuff is concerned. You do find some BDA and BWSSB material on tenderwizard site, but not much from BBMP. This system itself isn't publicized much, any reason behind that? Moreover, there were rumors that BDA started using this system and then stopped because the transparency wasn't appreciated by everyone.

Beyond watching the work tendering process, I don't know of anything that'd let you and me track the project-work itself. RTI is the only route available I guess, but then it'd take a lot of effort to get every update about every project via an application. The company that built and runs BBMP / MCC sites (eGovernments.org) has a system that could do this (eGov Works), but I have no idea if Bangalore/Mysore cities are planning to implement it.

Anyway. If you have any leads or information on things on this whole work transparency front, do share here. Please note that we don't allow anonymous posts or comments. If that makes you uncomfortable, you could use the contact form to mail in your 'leads'!