Monday, August 12, 2002		Feature

Divinity @ Goa
Frederick Noronha

FROM sermons to software! That's the shift Silvan M. D'Sa wants to nudge churches in Goa into as he polishes his code that seeks to give the parish an IT thrust - and make it easy for priests to manage their funds and the faithful.

From keeping tab of church revenues to listing devotees in a particular neighbourhood, two of D'Sa's packages promise to make life easier for church administrators.

One of them, Fabrica Accounts, keeps tabs of church accounts. It has slots to account for payments made for a range of service - prayers in the cemetery, processions, sermons, bells and chimes - or the celebrant's stipend.

"You don't need to think... just go to the right slot and enter the amount," said D'Sa, who runs a small software outfit, Computech, out of the north Goa town of Mapusa. From the church revenue, a part of the earning goes to the priest as compensation for his work. "This segregation is done by the software," said D'Sa.

Each month, a summary of the accounts is automatically generated. The software complies with the requirements of the Goa church. It confirms to the income and expenditure register that is required by the Goa and Daman Archdiocese's seccao das confrarias (section for confrarias). Another software that D'Sa has written keeps records of parish members. It cross-links devotees residing in the neighbourhood with the ledgers where their records are maintained.

If a priest wants to get across his message by post, the software generates neat mailing labels that list the heads of the households. Posting out a message to all thus becomes an easier task.

But finding the right persons to run the software is no easy task. "People come for a month, and then leave. I've trained at least five persons so far," lamented D'Sa.

Getting takers for the program is also not easy - not surprising, given that software is a rather new field in Goa.