Some hits, many misses in Tripura pilot project

At around 11 am, on February 7, when Pulak Chakma, the young medical officer in charge of the newly upgraded Panisagar Community Health Centre (CHC), logged on to the centre’s video-conferencing facility, there was already a queue of 30 patients at the Ramnagar Gram Panchayat office 7 km away. Though it is not a great distance, it takes a considerable amount of time to travel from Ramnagar to Panisagar because of the difficult terrain and the lack of public transport.

Chakma’s first patient in the e-OPD is 47-year-old Mohammed Aftab Chowdhury, who suffers from presbyopia (age-related long-sightedness) and stomach aches.

RailTel, the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) operator in Tripura, ensures steady broadband connectivity — a big achievement in Tripura. Huge LED television screens at both ends ensure that the doctor gets a good view of the patient. His prescription can immediately be printed out at the Panchayat end. Chakma advises Chowdhury to visit the CHC for an eye check-up. For other issues, the doctor prescribes some medicines.But the process is not smooth because of the lack of trained personnel. Chakma himself is not good at working a PC. He struggles to type the prescription and share it on-screen without disturbing the video-chat. Thankfully, the local NOFN project head, who was travelling with this correspondent, helped resolve issues.

NOFN authorities have placed a trained operator (called a data management associate) at each of the 15 Gram Panchayats. Their performance is monitored by the project manager at Panisagar, ensuring relatively seamless services to the villagers.

But State Government establishments, which are supposed to deliver key services, largely remain out of such monitoring. While some have eagerly participated in the training offered by NOFN, many others treat it as an additional workload. The result is uneven delivery of services.

Until the advent of the e-OPD service, Chakma and his team of five doctors at Panisagar CHC were offering outpatient services to 50-60 patients a day apart from looking after 30 in-patients. Chakma admits that he video-conferencing, if implemented to its full potential, will increase the scope of health care and reduce the flow of both in-patients and out-patients at Panisagar. While there is a lot of scope for improvement in healthcare services, the delivery of other services is slightly better.

Until about a year ago, Phunbumnag Halam, a grameen rozgar sevak at Noagang Panchayat in North Tripura, had to travel frequently to the block office in Panisagar, approximately 15 km away, to ensure villagers got paid for their work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The rules require the beneficiary details to be registered online. But, until a year ago, the Panchayat did not have an internet connection. For Phunbumnag, this meant five trips to Panisagar every month spending money from his monthly income of ₹8,000.

Once there he had to wait for hours, along with grameen rozgar sevaks from other villages, to access the computer at the block office. The connection, provided under a previous e-governance plan, was poor, and often meant a night-long stay at the block office.

NOFN has changed that, providing a lasting solution to the problem for 15 gram panchayats and three village committees in Panisagar. They can now file the MGNREGA Action plan smoothly from their villages.

Block Development Officer Tapan Kumar Sinha says the medium has the potential to do many more things. But, he feels it requires professional assistance. “We need someone to devise programmes at the block level,” he says.

The education department has begun tapping the potential of the interactive medium.

A couple of months ago, the department used the video-conferencing facility to conduct a workshop on mathematics for students of government schools preparing for their final exams.

Eleven high schools in the block have each been provided connectivity, a huge LED television screen, five computers and UPS facilities.

Currently, the facilities are being used to surf the net due to non-availability of e-learning content in local languages. Teachers, too, lack training on how to impart content available online to students. Some schools, such as the Bengali-medium Bilthai Higher Secondary School, are using the facility to download lessons in English from YouTube.

The video-conferencing facility is also being used by villagers to connect with relatives elsewhere, free of cost.

For example, at Noagang, video-conferencing is scheduled every Saturday for locals to chat with their relatives in India and abroad. Slowly but surely, NOFN is bringing the world to the people of this remote North-East region.