GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
A Digital India Initiative
GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
The Open Government Data Portal of the Surat Municipal Corporation was launched on 23rd October, 2016.
The website aims to provide the data residing with the various departments and sections of the Surat Municipal Corporation. The data available on the Open Data Portal of Surat can be accessed by anyone across the globe 24X7.
The basic purpose is to provide the citizens of Surat in particular and the Indians in general; the free access to the data and information belonging to the various subjects and items of interest to the citizens like education, health related issues and facilities, income and expenditure of the Surat Municipal Corporation/ departments, per capita income, data regarding the various government schemes and numerous socio-economic data or information etc. This will facilitate the transparency and better governance.
The surat.data.gov.in is, in a way, the outcome of the movement for the digital empowerment of the Citizens and inspired by the Digital India program being undertaken by the Government of India in a big way.
The surat.data.gov.in site, Open Government Data Portal of Surat City, is designed and developed by the Open Government Data Division of National Informatics Centre (NIC), Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India. The portal has been created under Software as A Service (SaaS) model of Open Government Data (OGD) Platform, India of NIC. The content of the site is managed by Surat Municipal Corporation.
Open Government Data Portal of Surat City is a platform for supporting open data initiative of Surat Municipal Corporation. The portal is to be used by Surat Municipal Corporation for publishing datasets, documents, services, tools and applications for public use. It intends to increase transparency in the functioning of the city administration and also open avenues for many more innovative uses of City Government Data to give different perspective.
Open Government Data Portal of Surat City has following modules:
Data Management System (DMS) – Module for contributing data catalogs by various departments for making those available on the front end website after a due approval process through a defined workflow.
Content Management System (CMS) – Module for managing and updating various functionalities and content types of Open Government Data Portal of Surat City.
Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) – Module for collating and disseminating viewer feedback on various data catalogs/functionalities.
Communities – Module for community users to interact and share their views/opinions with others.
The surat.data.gov.in site has various sections, organized under multiple tabs, like Home, Catalogs, Events, Announcements, Suggestions, Community and Visualization.
The screenshot of the homepage of the surat.data.gov.in site is displayed below:
The homepage of the surat.data.gov.in provides access to the various other sections and facilities/links. It also gives the statistics on the available resources, catalogs, departments contributing data to the data portal etc.
On the top of the homepage of the surat.data.gov.in is the banner for highlighting important matters like new resources or datasets added, events, important information etc.
The Catalogs section provides information on the number of catalogs which are available on the data portal and also the resources included in various catalogs. Catalog is a kind of envelope which contains the resources or dataset of similar type.
The screenshot of the Catalogs section of the surat.data.gov.in site is displayed below:
There are facilities for searching and sorting the catalogs, resources and datasets. The catalog and resources/datasets are sorted by default on the most recent basis. We can sort the catalog and resources/datasets based on other criteria like most relevant, last updated etc.
The citizens or the users can give suggestions for various types of resources and datasets and on other relevant matters. The screenshot of the surat.data.gov.in site displayed below shows the suggestions tab for writing about the suggestions on the data portal.
There are also other useful links and matters on the data portal like Policies, National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), Visualizations, Contacts etc. Some of them are in the nascent stage of development as it is an evolutionary process.
Surat Municipal Corporation is the first Municipal Corporation in India to launch an Open Government Data Portal to share data and information with the citizens. This is a pioneering step in the direction of transparent, participative and responsive governance at the grass root level.