It’s been a little more than a decade since the government of Karnataka introduced Panchatantra (at the time, the government’s first initiative at digitisation in gram panchayats — which has now evolved into a whole ecosystem) to about 6000 grama panchayats, aiming to digitise every panchayat’s physical day-to-day administration records.

Fast forward to the present day, Panchatantra is now a fully rounded digital ecosystem at the heart of Karnataka’s panchayat e-governance, with almost every function, task, and activity related to administration carried out through it (or rather mandated) to ensure transparency and accountability across all administrative functions.

It’s been two months since my introduction to the platform, thanks to my time working with the Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Department, Karnataka. I’ve had the chance to get familiar with, use, critique and interact with the platform and also visit two very different gram panchayats in the state(Doddabanahalli Grama Panchayat, Bengaluru East Taluk, Bengaluru District and Jakkarasanakuppa Grama Panchayat, KGF taluk, Kolar district) and understand how they use this platform, that, is supposed to be their one stop solution for work that also, at times, serves the purpose of being definitive proof and record of the work they do, for the department.

Through this article, I will expand a little on what the platform now entails after the revamped launch of Panchatantra 2.0, what the department aims to achieve through this complete digitisation, and what the expectations are of the gram panchayat staff. I will also share some observations and insights from gram panchayat visits on how they have adapted to the tech and how they seem to be using it now, almost a decade into implementation, as well as some major friction areas we were able to observe across the two panchayats and what solution designs we are exploring to address the same.

So what exactly is Panchatantra 2.0? What is it used for? What has changed?

Panchatantra 1.0 was launched as a web platform more than a decade ago for Karnataka’s grama panchayats to upload their accounting, approve citizen service requests, record staff attendance, approve applications for in-house latrines as part of the Swachh Bharat mission, collect property tax, and upload a scan of meeting minutes proceedings. The aim was to make digitisation a mandate to ensure more transparency and accountability across panchayat administrations.
Panchatantra 2.0 was then launched, taking this a step further, as a more comprehensive platform aiming to strengthen all aspects of Gram Panchayat functioning through technology with a focus on improving how schemes, benefits, and support reach people on the ground, while also equipping Gram Panchayats with the right tools, guidelines, and training to work more efficiently. A dedicated planning module was introduced, letting gram panchayats map out long-term plans for their term by working through a set of prerequisite questions and setting priorities. The platform now also makes it easier to track and review progress using key indicators, while introducing more transparent revenue collection systems.

For the department, Panchatantra 2.0 becomes a way to stay closely connected to what’s happening on the ground, how Gram Panchayats across the state are performing. It allows for ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance. Taluk-level officials now have dashboards to monitor all GPs within their jurisdiction, GPs themselves can track their own performance across modules with a grading system, and all this administrative data is public-facing through the platform, a significant leap for accountability as well as accessibility.

With digitisation, the gram panchayat’s administrative interface is now largely a digital one, which means it has to be a strong one. Which raises the question: ten years in, is the technology working for them, or are they working around it?
During our visits to the two grama panchayats, the first sight was that of piles of books, registers, and folders stacked up across shelves and tables right alongside the computers. So, it is safe to say that even after ten years into digitisation, paper isn’t going away from the panchayat day to day, and maybe it shouldn’t have to. While digitisation is a mandate now, accommodating the preferences and comfort of the users here can never be an afterthought. The goal has to be a middle ground, one that serves accountability without piling onto an already full workload. The amount of work done in loads of paper has reduced, if not a drastic amount, at least a noteworthy amount, given the demographic. The digital mandate has also now led to so much more accessibility for citizens into the administrative functions, as compared to a decade ago.

In the panchayat office, most of the work is done in the field. From resolving citizen issues and conflicts, to addressing people in person, to ensuring implementation across schemes and services is effective. In their day-to-day, administrative work remains on paper, to accommodate the older GP staff, and to keep up with the pace of things. Physical mediums are still the most widely accessible. The ease of noting extra things down, scribbling, highlighting or just handing papers over across a table is still unmatched. It’s visible, it’s tangible, and they are familiar and comfortable with it. Conversations with the GP staff also revealed that accounting work first happens in the physical daybooks, month books, and then the digital entry is done. For meeting minutes, the minutes are first noted down on paper/proceedings book and then entered digitally. Scheme and service requests come in on paper, and then assimilating it, approving it and doing a system entry becomes a secondary task for the staff. So, a good bulk of the work is still paperwork. Now, digitising all of this is a secondary task for the GP staff. A compliance task. It’s tedious, and it’s also, in a lot of cases, the second time they are doing the same entry, which often leads to loss of data during this whole process.

Meeting management has its own dedicated module on Panchatantra, and is arguably the one that has evolved the most. What started as simply uploading a scanned copy of meeting proceedings has now become a mandated same-day digital entry, complete with a digital signature from the president, with the department pushing for this shift specifically to make minutes readily accessible to citizens and to ensure more transparent decision-making. Grama Panchayats have adopted a multitude of modalities here. Some secretaries/Data entry operators write on paper and then articulate and do a digital entry. Some write in digital softwares before hand, some prefer audio recording/dictation.

Apart from the whole process being tedious in terms of both articulation and data entry, another issue here is quality. Agenda points are often generic in nature, which then leads to equally generic agenda notices. In many cases, the meeting discussions are stagnant and predictable, resulting in minutes that are lower in quality and less useful for the citizens, defeating the whole purpose of making the minutes accessible. This makes it important to establish ways to reduce effort for the staff and increase the quality of the data that goes into the system.

With all this shaping the core problem, the main goal here became — how to reduce effort for the GP staff while also looking at improvement in terms of quality. How do we leverage tech to reduce effort while also improving quality, in a way that supports the staff rather than becoming a barrier?

With the major pain point being data entry, we wanted to explore possibilities that would simplify the task or aid it. With AI tools with really good speech-to-text capabilities coming into the picture, our solutions to this problem of tedious data entry have been looking at ways to integrate speech-to-text into the workflow of entering minutes and also looking at how AI can be leveraged to improve the quality of the minutes by giving valuable feedback. We tried to do this by analysing a data dump of meeting proceedings, identifying themes across, and defining parameters that would make each category of minutes stronger in terms of quality.
Our prototype explores STT-based data entry and then an AI feedback layer that nudges the user to add missing details or rephrase certain aspects of the minutes entry to enhance overall quality and make it more contextual. That said, a key concern we’re actively designing around is ensuring the AI feedback doesn’t nudge users into writing content that wasn’t actually discussed. Many of these entries are written post facto, after the meeting has already concluded, and if the system starts suggesting details that weren’t part of the actual discussion or decisions, there’s a real risk of it altering the records. Getting that aspect right is one of the core challenges we’re working through.

As for addressing the gap in terms of the quality of meeting discussions itself, making discussions around each agenda point more fruitful, we were looking at exploring how discussions can be more guided, if AI could generate relevant templates(paper or digital) with pointers specific to the theme of each agenda point, data collection becomes more informed right from the start. Strong data at the point of noting is what makes for strong data at the point of digital entry. This could also guide the discussions during the meeting itself to give more structure and prod the members to discuss certain details specifically as they need to be entered.

Beyond insights on meeting minutes, our time across the two panchayats also surfaced friction points in how the broader Panchatantra platform is navigated day-to-day: redundant actions across modules, workflows that could be better sequenced, and a citizen-facing side of the platform that has a lot of untapped potential, both in terms of guidance and data visualisation. These are areas we are actively working on, and there’s more to write about as those solutions take shape.

The gram panchayats have made significant progress in adapting to the tech, and that’s no small thing given the demographic and the scale. But as the platform expands its scope, the question shifts from how do we get them to adopt to how do we accommodate them better, reduce the friction, aid current workflows, and let technology work with how they already operate, and not against it, or by introducing entirely new ways.

We look forward to piloting these prototypes and seeing what holds and what doesn’t. Hope to write more about it soon; you might want to stick around.