It has been raining awards on the Coimbatore Corporation. After receiving the ‘Best Corporation’ award from Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on August 15, the civic body has bagged four awards for its website.
Union Minister for Urban Development Kamal Nath gave away the award, which has been instituted by Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation. The Corporation emerged winner in the ‘Best G2C Website 2012’ and ‘Best G2C Website 2012’ for cities between one and two million population categories and was the runner-up in the ‘Citizen Voice’ and ‘User Experience’ categories. G2C stands for government to citizens.
On account of winning four of the six eligible awards, the civic body also bagged the overall championship, said Commissioner T.K. Ponnusamy.
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Other award-winning city municipal corporations include Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Thiruvananthapuram, Surat, Bangalore and a few others.
Mr. Ponnusamy said that the jury panel that included Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information, Infrastructure and Innovations, Arun Maira, Member, Planning Commission, M. Ramachandran, former Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, and Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Executive Vice-Chairman, Info Edge (India) Limited, selected the Coimbatore Corporation after analysing various parameters.
Transparency and accountability, online services, citizen voice, user experience and outcomes were the parameters, said D. Sowdhamini, Information Technology officer, Coimbatore Corporation.
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Janaagraha had said that the fundamental tenet that it followed in the evaluation of websites was citizen centricity.
It evaluated and ranked municipal corporations’ websites through the lens of citizens and that resulted in increase weightage for front-end, user-oriented aspects, etc. over back-end technology.
The organisation also said that it included global cities such as New York City, London, Singapore, Sydney and Johannesburg to serve as peer benchmark for Indian cities. And also to be geographically to be representative, eminent for digital governance, having population comparable to Indian cities.
It further said that it carried out the evaluation during December 2011 – January 2012.
Mr. Ponnusamy said that the award was a recognition for the Corporation’s e-governance initiatives.