VIJAYAWADA: Minister for IT, Panchayat Raj & Rural Development Nara Lokesh will be honoured with the ‘Skoch Person of the Year- Governance’ award for technological interventions in the Panchayat Raj department.
Lokesh has been selected for the honour for bringing in a slew of technology-driven initiatives including ‘Jalavani’ call centre to resolve the issues related to drinking water, transparency in governance by monitoring all the services using a dashboard, taking up a pilot project to install sensors and monitor the source of drinking water supplies on 60 parametres, streamlining the online tax system using the PRIS survey, garbage collections using Radio-Frequency Identification (RIFD) cards and others.
The minister was able to prevent misuse of Rs 60-70 crore by geo-tagging tankers supplying drinking water to the people in summer. Earlier, over `100 crore was spent for the same.