Ramana graduated from the Madras University in Chemical Engineering. She is a civil servant in the Indian Administrative service, which provided her opportunities to work in the general administration departments as well as to execute various digitalisation projects.
She participated in the Pioneering the Issue of Smart Family Cards Nationwide. For this project, she designed and implemented the project of issuing smart public distribution system family cards to 1.02 Cr families integrating with Adhaar card in a short period of 18 months. Adhaar enrolment was completed in a swift manner and this family cards distribution aided in reaching 99 % of Adhaar Enrolment.
She then led the Conversion of Analog signals to Digital for cable TV operations for the TamilNadu state. This country was the first to release a Cable TV operations owned by the government as a market control activity. Since TRAI’s regulation mandated only use of digital signals, the state owned TamilNadu Cable TV Corporation was to be converted from analogue to digital. The set-top boxes were deployed along with setting up of Network operating Centre (NOC) to handle the subscriber base. This was completed in a record time of 5 months deployment of set box was completed in 4 months.
Another project she was involved with was the online system for issue of certificates from government departments to citizens. As part of government mandate to be transparent in issue of certificates to citizens (community certificate, legal heir certificates, income certificate, property certificate), the team developed an application within 24 months with 185 services launched. Was responsible for smooth launch of the services with periodic training to the district level officers and responsible for change management.
Ramana worked on an e-commerce platform that helped self-help groups formed up by women or men in dire and challenging economic circumstances working non-profitably with the creation of an e-commerce platform where they could sell the products they were creating. The platform was developed with help of ICICI bank as partner and in the first year generated a consistent turnover just for the silk sarees alone. This platform was extended to other products like jute bags, palm-leaf handicrafts, food products, cashew, etc. This was nominated to Hble PM’s award for innovation under Betterment of Livelihood, a certificate of appreciation was given by the TamilNadu state.
Similarly, to the previous project, she worked with twenty-nine self-help groups comprising of Tribal people. Nearly 180 families benefitted from this project and they generated a profit share.
She is currently working on an ongoing project called the Development of Under privileged Girl Children and Assistance Project (DURGA). This project aims at improving under privileged girls and children of rural areas who have had difficulties in pursuing their studies beyond high school. Ramana addressed the risk factor around low knowledge about menstrual hygiene, which also was one of the factor causing high mortality rates of pregnant women. This was taken as pilot project to 200 girl children in one of the block.
Grevance redressal mechanism of Hbl’e Chief Minister of the state and monitoring of the petitions was developed and as District Magistrate of Ariyalur received an award from CM for speedy disposal of all petitions within the timelines of citizen charter.
More recently she worked as part of the electoral reforms for the Election Commission of India which launched a movement to seed the Adhaar in the electoral roll. As DM, Ariyalur completed 95% of seeding and received an award from Election Commission of India presented by Hble Governor of TamilNadu.
One of the pioneer project of the state of TamilNadu is the CM breakfast to primary school children. CM award was given for developing a mobile application to monitor the preparation of food dispatch to schools, arrival of school children, their attendance and the consumption of the food. Mobile application included all the above features for various levels of monitoring by the officers apart from a website for the state level officers to monitor through MIS.
I hope this EdTech Fellowship will help me accomplish my ongoing work of girl child education and improvement of their life skills.