The application ‘Sakarma’ is thought of as a generic system for District Panchayats, Block panchayats, Corporations and Municipalities. A Decision Support System (DSS) can hardly function in district panchayat presently since no consolidated information on their corporate functioning is readily available. For the same reasons it is not possible to have models to aid decision making and to answer questions like what if ?. Sakarma is a non conventional strategy to build up a decision support system starting with an archive.
The 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments have endowed on the local bodies extensive functions relating to economic development and social welfare. The local bodies in Kerala, in this context, following the people’s plan initiative, have transformed themselves into major institutions involved in development and social welfare decision making. The conventional decision making in district panchayats today are not backed up by data, and alternatives are quite often not discussed. Therefore, in such a context, nobody would be courageous to talk about decision support systems even though there is plenty of scope for one. The objective here is to archive the decisions being made, to start with, and thereafter identify semi-structured and unstructured problems. Finally we could end up with evolving decision models for solving such problems. For doing this the DSS application shall have at its disposal, information on various functional areas within the organisation which shall also be compiled parallely.