Rural Development through ICT Technologies: A Case Study of Uttarakhand

This paper is focused on the online web application “Village Information System (VIS)” which is developed for the development of rural areas. VIS is an online software application which is used as decision support system tool for the efficient management, planning and development of rural areas.VIS is capable to manage all the village related information with ongoing government schemes in a technological environment. VIS acts as an interface, which connects government officials and rural development agencies to village people and vice versa. As a decision support tool, it provides a mechanism for storage and fastest retrieval of village related information in systematic manner on digital platform. Web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript are used as a front-end tool for architectural design of VIS, Oracle 10g as a backend tool for storage of information, Java as a programming language and My Eclipse as a integrated development environment ( IDE) for VIS. As a pilot study, VIS is developed for Darimkhola village of Almora district of Uttarakhand. VIS provides a digital platform which support rural planners, district administrators and policy makers in sustainable planning, implementation and monitoring of various existing & upcoming government schemes in rural areas. On another part, VIS also helps villagers by providing them detailed information of currently available government schemes, their eligibility and procedure for taking benefit out of these schemes. VIS can be accessed 24x7 by using any of the computing devices like computer, Smartphone, tablet, etc.