My software runs your schemes, give me credit: IAS officer to Govt
- Munish Moudgil is a 1998 batch IAS officer who has developed a software to avoid duplication of beneficiaries in government schemes.
- He demands credit for his innovation apprehensive of the fact that some other IAS officer may take up credit.
- The successful monitoring of government's Parihara scheme owes to the algorithm system he has developed.
FollowIIT-Bombay alumni and an IAS officer Munish Moudgil has more than one reason to be upset. He had created a software, which he is struggling to get credit for and he has to fight fellow-IAS officers to get the credit. A software programmer too, Moudgil's software innovation not only benefitted the government by removing duplication of names of beneficiaries from among the database, but has also helped the beneficiaries of the government's ambitious scheme Parihara.
Parihara is the government's crop loss compensation scheme for farmers where the farmer's name is matched with a beneficiery and checked for duplication. Moudgil's algorithm is based on the data borrowed from the Bhoomi Monitoring Cell.
A 1998 batch IAS officer, Moudgil programmed the name/string matching algorithm that gives out graded score-screening databases to match names and details. With this software, screening a village with 5000 people will take just 15 minutes. As luck would have it, the programm clicked and even the government acknowledged that with adoption of the software in various places. Observing the popularity of the software, his peers are scampering to take credit for the work.
Getting a whiff of it, Moudgil wrote a letter to the government, requesting Intellectual Property Rights for the software to ward off software poaching. The letter to teh revenue secretary says,"The name/string matching algorithm is my personal creation and I wrote it, I did its coding in 2014-15. I developed the algorithm seeing that KRDH and Aadhaar authorities were struggling to identify the name in multiple databases. The success of algorithm was hand tested by me... The said creation is my intellectual property and could be used by government with acknowledgement. I have improved the algorithm and may be permitted to work with Bhoomi Monitoring Cell to roll out the improved version which government can continue to use. I request you to accord official permission.”
Meanwhile additional chief secretary and development commissioner T M Vijay Bhaskar said that the successful monitoring of the Parihara scheme owes credit to two people-Rajiv Chawla (senior IAS officer) who has driven this scheme and Munish Moudgil for his algorithm.
