Mobile phone applications (m-apps) are the buzz words in today’s digitized world. The affordability and instant connectivity combined with the convenience features of the mobile phones has resulted in mobile technology holding significant potential for e-Governance projects. M-apps are being extensively used all over the world for entertainment, market, educational, personalization and e-Governance features over wide variety of platforms offered by various mobile phone companies. The e-Governance facilities offered by various departments are being utilized by common citizens of many countries around the world. The improved, flexible and better Governance features offered by such m-apps have brought a major paradigm change to overall thought process of the developing countries. This has resulted in e-Governance applications integration with mobile platforms for making affordable and lightweight mobile phone applications (m-apps). The app stores for Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia Symbian have been leading the way for developing such wonderful mobile phone applications for usage by the common citizens. The developments of m-apps have led to more of uniform application development standards. This has resulted in increased innovativeness, giving overall advantage to the customers in choosing and selecting from the great pool of m-apps offered by various platforms in this global digitized age. These fullyfeatured and wide-variety m-apps have resulted in the availability (anytime, anywhere)—24 × 7 of wide variety of remote information at the door step of the facility centric citizens, which was not possible some years ago. Mobile software development is thus paving the way for the future. Various programming languages are being used for developing m-apps such as: Java for Android OS, Visual C#/C++ for Windows Mobile, Objective-C for iPhone OS, etc.

Android is an open-source operating system that uses modified version of the Linux kernel and various kinds of API’s. Google bought Android in 2005 and has since been popular for developing mobile applications. The private companies could add or modify their own applications and can sell them, without having the need to submit these to the open-source community under the Apache License [1]. Mobile applications are developed for various other mobile platforms such as for iPhoneiOS, Nokia-SymbianOS, J2ME, Blackberry and Windows mobile. Android come under the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). The main advantage of developing mobile application is it’s being free, open-source, scalable and its encouragement to the third party development (to use and customize it). The built-in modules can also be improved with modified versions. Another main feature is the portability of applications across variety of architectures since most of the programs are written in Java. The easy customization of user interfaces can be easily done for various screen resolution. Android is optimized for low-power and low-memory devices thus making it more advantageous in comparison to other platforms. Variety of embedded codec does add more to its versatile features as they have been built into it. The embedding of browser and map views in the developed mobile phone applications also add greatly to its functionality.

Our work has been motivated by some previous work on the use of mobile technologies for the development of mobile applications (m-apps) for real-time projects involved in e-Governance initiatives and for various other real-time application scenarios around the world. The need and importance of the implementation of location based services in Android, providing the clients with services that originate from the geographical location of user’s mobile device has been emphasized by Ch. R. Rani et al. [2] in their research work. The work on iOS application for university campus for iPhone, iPod touch and iPod has been done in order to simplify the liveability of the university for students and officials of the university. The scope and features of the application have been discussed for the real-time events and activities associated with the university [3]. The design and implementation of integrated multilingual voting service for conducting elections in Nigeria using Hypertext processor Web platform and Google Android mobile platform in native language has been done by Olaniyi et al., 2011 [4]. The integrated system for a real-world application of emergency medical service (EMS) data system has been proposed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing data system. The core technologies having hand-held computers, GPS and GIS have all been integrated for the verification, transmission, storage and analysis of the accidental data [5]. The system architecture proposed by B. Bhargava et al. [6] had an outdoor navigation application with integrated support for pedestrian crossing guidance, specially made for real-time guidance for blind. W. Lawrence et al. [7] worked on the application of biometric security in agent based hotel booking system using Android OS using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) on the internet. Android 2.2 enabled mobile phone with JADE-LEAP agent development kit has been used for the purpose. R. P. Padhy et al. [8] developed cloud based rural healthcare information system model along with its functional components to facilitate and improve the quality of patient care. The systematic performance of Android platform has been studied and analyzed using benchmark application and public profile software. DDMS and Traceview-Android SDK tools were used to study the application and framework performance of Android OS [9].

The Farad Kendra’s (Farad centres) have been established at various district Tehsils and sub-Tehsils of the various states in India. This has been done so as to provide automated computerization of the revenue (land) records & better e-Governance to the common citizens of the country. The bank and Farad Kendra’s (land record centres) are distantly located far away from the reach of common citizens, especially rural citizens who have to reach from remote places for availing services. The loan approval process of bank can be approved after the authenticated land records and relevant documents are shown to the bank officials. This is possible only after facing much hurdles, paper work and unnecessary harassment of the customer. This unsatisfied service results in sheer time-wastage and much struggle for the customer. Still many deficiencies (issues) that exist in the recent system are as detailed below:

• Revenue officials are still pursuing with traditional methods.

• Distance to be travelled for reaching Farad Centre.

• Lack of awareness about establishment of Farad Centre (Farad Kendra’s).

• Time-consuming process.

• Power (electricity) problems at the Farad Kendra’s.

• No support, training or guidance to the citizens.

• Staff/operator problems at the centres.

• Procedural hassles (Documentation work).

• Illiteracy problem.

• Malpractices by officials.

• Non-transparency of revenue records.

• Non-availability of Kiosks (self-operated system).

5. Proposed System—Design & Architecture

Figure 1 depicts the overall workflow of the proposed