22nd National e-Governance Webinar Showcases TRINETRA and PAI

The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) ran the 22nd National e-Governance Webinar on 23 October 2026. Shri Avanish Kumar Mishra, Joint Secretary in DARPG, was in the chair, and the audience was drawn from Union ministries, state governments, districts, local bodies and the boards that run temples and shrines.

Two Gold Award winners on display

The session was built around two projects that took Gold at the National Awards for e-Governance 2026. One is TRINETRA, an artificial-intelligence video surveillance system for the Mahakal Rudrasagar Integrated Development Area (MRIDA), which takes in the Mahakaleshwar Temple at Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. The other is the Panchayat Advancement Index (PAI), the data-driven assessment framework of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj.

TRINETRA at Mahakaleshwar

Shri Pratham Kaushik, the IAS officer who administers the Shri Mahakaleshwar Temple, told the webinar that the design borrows from the surveillance model of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board and was enlarged for the sharp rise in pilgrim footfall at Ujjain. More than 450 AI-enabled cameras send video analytics, facial recognition and predictive crowd monitoring to an Integrated Command and Control Centre, which handles live watch, crowd flow and emergency coordination. Response time to an emergency has come down from 15 to 20 minutes to under five minutes. The project brief also counts 552 missing-person cases closed, 53 lost items recovered, 10 thefts intercepted and video evidence given in seven police cases. Ujjain Smart City Limited and the temple management committee are the implementing partners.

Panchayat Advancement Index

Smt. Sunita Jain, Senior Director (IT) at NIC, presented the PAI, which rates every gram panchayat on nine Localized Sustainable Development Goal (LSDG) themes. It works on 150 indicators and 230 data points, with validation workflows, dashboards and panchayat scorecards, and the portal covers roughly 2.6 lakh gram panchayats. Its makers call it a development report card rather than a ranking exercise, because the aim is to show village, block, district, state and central officials where the gaps are. More than 360 officials attended the webinar, which is part of a series meant to spread award-winning ideas for others to copy.