egov india 2010
Technologies 4 government
Infrastructure first Like sound mind lives in a sound body, e-Govt apps too run smoothly on a robust data centre underneath
(L-R) Dr Neeta Shah, Director, e-Governance, Gujarat; Deepak Jain, Head–Data & Storage Solutions, Huawei Symantec India; Arun Shetty, Head, Avaya Aura Sales & Consulting, Avaya; P Venugopal Director STPI, Hyderabad; Sanjay Sahay, IGP, Police Computer Wing, Karnataka (Chair); L Suresh, President, ITSAP; BV Sarma, DDG National Informatics Centre, Hyderabad; Sanjay Kumar, MD, APTS
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ata centre and networking are essential components of an IT infrastructure and can be seen as the head and nervous system of a human body. Effective management of these core IT components in the government was the talking point of the session on “ICT Infrastructure, Data Centres, Network and Communications.” The session was moderated by Sanjay Sahai, IGP, Police Computer Wing, Government of Karnataka. Recalling the dilemma that the state of Gujarat faced way back in 2000 on whether to first create an integrated ICT infrastructure or to take up the applications, Dr Neeta Shah, Director, e-Governance, Government of Gujarat, said, “The state chose for creating the infrastructure.” Shah informed that the state had completed one BOOT cycle for the SWAN project and that around 30,000 villages in the state had
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Arun Shetty, Head, Avaya Aura Sales and Consulting, said, “Our focus is on serving citizens and meeting specific objectives established by the government.” Shetty proposed the contact centre model, where the reach can be through an SMS, e-mail, fax or even by posting messages on social networking sites. He said the continuous improvement in service delivery, safety and operational continuity and budget constraints were some of the challenges in realising the objective. Deepak Jain, Head, Data and Storage Solutions, Huawei Symantec India, while proposing that the consolidation of the existing data centres was very important, pointed out the requirements of the next-generation data centres and said that these should be scalable and built for future requirements. Sanjay Kumar, Managing Director, Andhra Pradesh Technological Services, Government of Andhra Pradesh notified about various ICT initiatives taken up in the state since 1999, including the SWAN project that provided 8Mbps connectivity at the state-to-district level and 2Mbps connectivity at the districtto-mandal level. He also informed that a pilot was being done for setting up connectivity in villages through a Wi-Fi system. The pilot would be completed by December 2010, and then would be scaled to all villages having
Way back in 2000, Gujarat toggled on prioritising the infrastructure or the apps. Building the infra yielded good results e-Gram centres. “The data centres became operational in 2008. We are using bandwidth from four service providers including BSNL, Tata and Airtel. Gujarat is the first state in the country to have 3-tier data centre and 4-sub data centres,” he told. On applications front, Shah said, “The government used Integrated Financial Management System to close the financial books for fiscal 2010 by March end. Earlier, the same work used to cross the deadline by a month. Besides, we now publish the budget online.”
population more than 2,000. L Suresh, President, ITSAP presented the citizen’s perspective of the robustness of IT infrastructure and its subsequent impact on citizen services. BV Sharma, DDG, National Informatics Centre, Hyderabad outlined various hosting services being offered to government bodies from by the NIC Hyderabad centre. P Venugopal, Director, STPI, Hyderabad detailed various initiatives taken up by STPI for the promotion of software and IT industry. September 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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