Online Census-based Information Sharing for Delivery of e-Governance Services

Abstract

Census is the citizen's socio-economic data collection process for the preparation of the citizen database stored in National Population Register (NPR). NPR preparation in India has been facing various barriers like high human resources requirement, time consuming process and limited availability of the citizen database for e-Governance services. An Online Census System (OCS) themselves permits the enumerator to enter the census data using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The 12 digit Unique Identification (UID) number issued by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an individual identification number specific to each citizen. In this paper, the design of UID based Online Census System (UIDOCS) is proposed. Census information sharing service is an open standard based web application that interacts with other web applications for the purpose of sharing citizen data. This will help in using uniform and reliable census data across various e-Governance applications. This paper presents a census data integration mechanism based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with various e-Governance applications. The proposed architecture of information sharing consists of three layers; Web Service Provider, Service Broker and Web Service Consumers. Web Service providers publish services to a service broker. Web Service Consumers find required services using a service broker and bind to them. A prototype of the framework is implemented and validated with e-Governance applications for issuing Caste Certificate and Rural Area Certificate as pilot based. It is concluded that census web service can be effective and efficient in all types of e-Governance applications as it can provide accurate and timely information within reasonable amount of time.