4th Anniversary Issue: January 2009 Issue

ASIA’S FIRST MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON E-GOVERNMENT

www.egovonline.net - Asia’s Leading Portal on e-Government

4 Anniversary Issue

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VOLUME 5

| ISSUE 1 | JANUARY 2009

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4 Tracks 40 Countries 100 Thematic Sessions 200 Companies 5000 Delegates

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India's Largest ICT Event INDIA

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4 - 6 August 2009 | India Expo Centre, Greater Noida (Delhi NCR), India Organisers

Co-organiser

Department of Information Technology Ministry of Communications & IT Government of India

knowledge for change

Supporting Partners

Previous partners of egov India

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eINDIA 2009 is a unique platform for knowledge sharing in various domains of ICT for development and facilitates multi-stakeholder partnerships and networking among governments, industry, academia and civil society organisations of different countries, including India. The objective is to bring together ICT experts, practitioners, business leaders and stakeholders of the region onto one platform, through keynote addresses, paper presentations, thematic workshops and exhibitions.

INDIA

2009

Will have the strong participation from

Government | PSUs | IT Companies | Banking and Financial Intitutions | Academia | Telecom Industry

For Sponsorship and exhibition enquiry, contact: Gautam Navin (+91-9818125257), gautam@csdms.in For paper submission, contact: Nilakshi Barooah (+91-9911142973), nilakshi@egovonline.net

www.eINDIA.net.in

ov volume 5 | issue 1 | January 2009 PRESIDENT

EDITORIAL

Dr. M P Narayanan EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ravi Gupta

Moving ahead with confidence

GROUP DIRECTORS

Maneesh Prasad Sanjay Kumar ASSISTANT EDITOR

Prachi Shirur

What does ‘FOUR’ signify? There are four basic elements in our planet – fire, water, air and earth! In mathematics four is a highly composite number! The Holy Cross is associated with the number four! Plato had propagated four virtues - wisdom, courage, self-control and justice!

SR. CORRESPONDENT

Sandeep Budki SR. SUB EDITOR

Nilakshi Barooah RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Tannu Singh MARKETING

Gautam Navin mobile: +91 9818125257 email: gautam@egovonline.net Debabrata Ray mobile: +91 9899650692 email: debabrata@egovonline.net SALES

Santosh Kumar Gupta mobile: +91 9891192996 email: santosh@egovonline.net Anuj Agrawal mobile: +91-9911302086 anuj@csdms.in SR. GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Bishwajeet Kumar Singh

But for us at egov this year, ‘FOUR’ signifies completing four calender years of successful publishing.

Four years back, we decided to tread on a path never traveled. When we decided to embark on this path, e-Governance was at a nascent stage and even the Government of India’s National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was not formulated. It was a time when there was lot of skepticism from government and technology solutions providers about the sustainability of e-Governance.

Breaking such conventional way of thinking, we moved ahead with the confidence to create a base for ‘knowledge sharing’ and to bring to the fore front a clear picture of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the government sphere. We addressed this issue through our three verticals web portal, events and last but not the least – our monthly print magazine – ‘egov’. egov is today four years old and it is a time to celebrate and a time to retrospect our endeavour.

We still believe that this is just the beginning! And we are all geared for the long and the exciting journey ahead. We are here to witness and bring to you the transition of India into e-India.

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Om Prakash Thakur Chandrakesh Bihari Lal (James) WEB MAINTAINANCE

Zia Salahuddin, Amit Pal SUBSCRIPTIONS & CIRCULATION

Lipika Dutta (+91 9871481708) Manoj Kumar (+91 9971404484)

We take this opportunity to thank all our partners, supporters, readers and our egov team whose support and dedication has made this fruitful journey possible and worthwhile.

Achieving another milestone in our journey, we will be celebrating our 50th issue this year! Watch out for GOLDEN issue in May, 2009 to celebrate this special occasion.

EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE

eGov

On that note, we wish you all a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!

G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA 201301, India tel: +91 120 2502181-85, fax: +91 120 2500060

Happy Reading!

email: info@egovonline.net egov is published in technical collboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies egov does not neccesarily subscribe to the views expressed in this publication. All views expressed in the magazine are those of the contributors. egov is not responsible or accountable for any loss incurred, directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided.

Owner, Publisher, Printer, Ravi Gupta Printed at Vinayak Print Media, D-320, Sector - 10 Noida, U.P. and published from 710 Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30, Sector - 50 Noida, UP Editor: Ravi Gupta

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Ravi Gupta Ravi.Gupta@csdms.in

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CENTRAL GOVERNMENT CORNER

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Planning the Future India Subas Pani, Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India

NeGP: An Introspection

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R Chandrashekhar, Special Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India

e-Districts going Strong S Abbasi, Director, Department of Information and Technology, Government of India

UT & STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

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In Lakshadweep Everything is Unique BV Selvaraj, Administrator, Union Territory of Lakshadweep

Siddharth, Principal Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal

Chhattisgarh

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Attracting investments in ITeS

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Roll Outs to happen in January’ 09

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Quality of Services is Prime

Target: 100% e-Literacy Dr. Ajay Kumar, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala

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PPP: Philosophy of Success

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Computer Literacy Boosting e-Governance

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Tapping the Advantage of ICT Literacy

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Banking on PAWAN

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Our Focus - Capacity Building

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Enhancing Sustainability of CSCs

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Large State: Larger Challenges

Making e-Nagriks for e-Governance

Setting Example 60 Chhattisgarh Aman Kumar Singh, Secretary -IT & CEO – ChiPs, Government of

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D S Srivastava, Special Secretary, Department of Information and Technology, Government of Uttar Pradesh

V S Bhaskar, Commissioner & Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Assam

Ajay Mishra, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Andhra Pradesh

Abhishek Singh, Secretary to Governor & Secretary – Information Technology, & Technical Education, Government of Nagaland

Anurag Jain, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh

B K Agarwal, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Himachal Pradesh

Ram Muivah, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Manipur

Narinderjit Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Punjab

Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, Commissioner cum Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Orissa

Raj Kumar, Secretary, Department of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat

Featured States & UT

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CASE STUDY

23 Securing Education 90 Helping e-Government Step Into Web 2.0

SPECIAL FEATURE

44 Contributing to Development and Convergence Centre for Development and Advanced Computing (CDAC), Government of India

FEATURE to Knowledgegrid 54 Powergrid Samir Chaudhury, DGM – IT, Powergrid Corporation of India Ltd. Telecom Services 55 Powering Powergrid Corporation of India Ltd.

CORPORATE CORNER

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Re-Engineering and ICT Prakash Rane, Managing Director, ABM Knowledgeware Ltd.

Technology Solutions to the 36 Providing Government Karan Bajwa, Group Director – Public Sector, Microsoft India

made Easy 87 e-Procurement Sumeet Bhatt, Director, NexTenders (India) Pvt. Ltd.

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egov is a monthly magazine providing a much needed platform to the voices of various stakeholders in the arena of e-Government, apart from being a repository of valuable information and meaningful discussion on issues of e-Governance in general, and eGovernment in particular -both to the specialist and the generalist.

Contributions to egov magazine should be in the form of articles, case studies, book reviews, event reports and news related to e-Government projects and initiatives, which are of immense value for practitioners, professionals, corporates and academicians.

We would like the contributors to follow these guidelines, while submitting their material for publication.

ARTICLES / CASE STUDIES should not exceed 2500 words. For book reviews and event report, the word limit is 800.

AN ABSTRACT of the article/case study not exceeding 200 words should be submitted along with the article/case study.

ALL ARTICLES / CASE STUDIES should provide proper references. Authors should give in writing stating that the work is new and has not been published in any form so far.

BOOK REVIEWS should include details of the book like the title, name of the author(s), publisher, year of publication, price and number of pages and also send the cover photograph of the book in JPEG/TIFF (resolution 300 dpi). Book reviews of books on e-Governance related themes, published from

year 2002 onwards, are preferable. In case of website, provide the URL. MANUSCRIPTS should be typed in a standard printable font (Times New Roman 12 font size, titles in bold) and submitted either through mail or post.

RELEVANT FIGURES of adequate quality (300 dpi) should be submitted in JPEG/ TIFF format.

A BRIEF BIO-DATA and passport size photograph(s) of the author(s) must be enclosed.

ALL CONTRIBUTIONS ARE SUBJECT TO APPROVAL BY THE PUBLISHER.

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Please send in your papers/articles/comments to: The Editor, egov, G-4, Sector 39, NOIDA (UP) 201 301, India. tel: +91 120 2502180-85, fax: +91 120 2500060, email: info@egovonline.net 10 }

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Planning the Future India http://www.planningcommission.nic.in

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In the next one year, we would like to have high speed connectivity in 6,000 blocks and 4,000 tehsils across India”

Subas Pani Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India 12 }

Planning Commission has played a pivotal role in creating a conducive environment for e-Developmentof India as a whole. What is the road ahead?

Planning Commission has an important role in the e-Governance initiatives of the country. One of the major initiatives is to monitor the release of funds and progress of expenditure. We are trying to work out a comprehensive scheme from the Controller General of Accounts, so that there is the minimum time lag between the release of funds for various ministries and actual unit where the funds are utilised. This will be monitored constantly. This is an ambitious plan and the piloting is going on for the same. We hope that it will be rolled out in the next financial year. A separate dedicated team is being created for it.

The other is that for the overall programme, we are making a major initiative by assisting the state in making the overall planning and monitoring systems for all the plan and progarmmes of both the Government of India as well as the State Governments.

For this we will provide number of professionals who have a background in project management in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), evaluation and Geographical Information System (GIS). Through this programme we expect that we will be able to put a GIS unit in each district 4th Anniversary Issue

which will act as a support to the planning team. There are various other programmes for which we are releasing funds, and we are looking into the fact that how they can be converged and be complementary to one another.

Thirdly, there are various flagship programmes such as National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), Pradhan Mantri Gram Sarak Yojna. For example in the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna, the implementation agency is an executive engineer, in NREGA, it is the programme officer in the block level. The implementing agency should be enabled to use ICT in an effective manner, so that the primary data which is originating is captured directly and fed into the computer system and the data base is updated. This will compress the time and enable the planners to plan in a better way.

We have initiated ‘reality checks’ of all the 6000 blocks in the Rural Development Department. Reality checks mean the checking what are the computer systems available, whether there are trained personnels available, whether there is data connectivity, which type of data connectivity is available – mobile unit or high speed connectivity. Fibre has been laid out in large areas, but there is the problem of last mile connectivity.

We are trying to ensure that the actual 2 Mbps connection is available in the block head quarters. www.egovonline.net

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Under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), we You are depending on BSNL a lot, are you also looking at have a component where there is an initiative for other service providers also? providing last mile connectivity. Is your initiate a separate We are not depending upon BSNL. We are taking into endeavour? consideration the Point of Presence (PoP) of all the operators, Our initiative is complimentary, because the State Wide Area and wherever it is available, we will utilise it.

Network (SWAN) is being rolled out in many states. They BSNL has already worked out a large programme and are looking more from the point of view of Common Service the government has also supported them by funding them.

Centres (CSCs). But there is a lot of urgency, because we are We are looking at the last mile connectivity where we are now trying to make payment to all beneficiaries of NREGA looking at the PoP. It may happen through the SWAN, or any directly in their respective accounts in the Post Office. other means. What is important is that in the block and the This cannot be done, until the block level works is tehsil, the connection has to be there. What is to be done in completed. Reality check means, we will check what are that particular block or tehsil, depends upon the local the gaps. The most important thing is that the physical situation there. connectivity needs to be addressed.

Under NREGA, we are also proposing that there should be What is the road map for Rural Health Mission? a Local Area Network (LAN) in every block. We are talking In the health mission, we ideally want is that every Primary about spending INR 30,000 crores on a single programme Health Centre (PHCs) should have connectivity. All the which has to reach to about 3 crore field units of all the major plans and people. There has to be high quality programmes should be ICT enabled. infrastructure and high quality It will help the programme as well as human resource. Under NREGA, fostering economic growth and reach We are one of the fastest Orissa has done a pioneering work in helping certain services to the growing economies and our in this respect by providing two common people.

ICT professionals in every block.

There should be a strong health fundamentals are good. We have We have suggested that this model team at the district level with a very good banking sector and should be replicated in all the other ICT professionals which enable a reasonably good regulation places as well. connectivity. The Chief District Medical Officer (CDMO) is the which has stood the test of time.

There is a huge crunch of person running the programme at the Also, the government is closely ICT professionals in the district level. These will be the tools Government Departments of the available to them. Our idea is that monitoring the system� country. How are you tackling whoever is the domain person there, this situation? they should be enables to use ICT to All the state governments has their run his programme successfully in own recruitment policies. Some of them outsource the work, the ground. Personally, I feel very keen and look forward to it while others train their own people. Eventually, we should as a major initiative to help ICT programme monitoring. move to a stage where the usage of ICT should be extensive.

Will India be able to continue with the current How do you plan to address the issue of connectivity in growth rate?

That is for the experts to say. There are various projections the government offices?

Sometime back, when I was in the Election Commission, we and nobody can predict what will happen. It will be perhaps made sure that every single person was trained. There are lower than what was being predicted. In a difficult situation 800,000 polling stations, everybody in one way or another like this, India will be reasonably doing well and will have way is using electronic voting machines. The percolation of one of the best growth rates in the world. technology to the lowest level is extremely important. We want to mainstream it, make it pervasive and ubiquitous in In light of the current global economic situation, how do you see India coming up? very single point of actual work being done.

That would require a lot of initiative for which we have We are one of the fastest growing economies and our included Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the fundamentals are good. We have a very good banking sector Department of Information Technology and Department of and a reasonably good regulation which has stood the test of time. Also, the government is closely monitoring the system.

Telecommunications.

We are all working together towards this ambitious Generally, all over the world, the current thinking is that programme. In the next one years time, we would like to the public investments should be expanded. The Planning have high speed connectivity in 6,000 blocks, 4,000 tehsils Commission is actively working towards the same so that it and 10,000 units. Also in all the major buildings we would provides the necessary support to the government.

Sandeep Budki like to have a LAN connectivity for the regular work to be sandeep@egovonline.net carried out.

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NeGP: An Introspection http://www.mit.gov.in

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Amongst the states implementing e-Governance there will be some who will be leaders, others who will be trying quiet hard, and yet others who might not be able to do as good as others�

R. Chandrashekhar Special Secretary, e-Governance, Department of IT, Ministry of Communication and IT, Government of India 16 }

You will be completing six years in office, so in retrospect what do you think were the major roadblocks when it came to adoption of Information technology (IT) in Government, in a macro-perspective?

Six years is a long time to look back, but since you have brought up the topic then I would say that the first hurdle to be crossed was, for people to atleast understand as to what was the need for a national programme like National e-Governance Programme (NeGP) and how has it arisen. There was a wide spread perception that something was happening in different parts of the country. But the need for the kinds of integrations we are talking about today was not at all self-evident and much less understood at that point of time. Moreover, since there were a large number of players, ministries, governments and departments involved it did take quiet a bit of time for people to be brought together and reach a convergence on a kind of a broad framework of a national level programme.

The second hurdle was that six years back it was still not very well understood that e-Governance as an area was not a concern of only government and technology partners, but infact there were a whole lot of other stakeholders that were equally involved. You as an organisation are a prime example of a kind of stakeholder who analyzes and conveys the message to others; then there are stakeholders who benefit from 4th Anniversary Issue

the system outside the government; then there are stakeholders who benefit from the system inside the government; then academic institutions like IITs and IIMs form yet another stakeholder who help study and analyze trends.

Moreover, private sector as in the IT organisations were not hugely involved in e-Governance at that time.

So really spreading the word around to all the stakeholders and to arouse their interest on the one hand; and on the other hand to get their perspective on the whole issue was indeed no easy task. Thus, it took almost three years before this kind of collaborative framework could be established and the broad contours of this national level programme could be concretized. And then ofcourse the next phase was that of initiating the process of formal approval by the government which finally happened around May 2006. And this approval by the government gave a kind of unifying vision to the whole programme thereby truly initiating the real processes of collaboration, consultation and bringing together of all the stakeholders. But even before the final approval by the government, in the last year of that phase leading to May 2006, various elements of the programme started to get clearer.

Elements like the concept of shared infrastructure, the concept relating to Public Private Partnership, started to get crystallized even as the government formed a clear vision, direction and mandate. And broadly speaking this www.egovonline.net

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was the phase of actually getting down to action of actually putting some of these pieces together.

So starting from 2006, i.e. after the approval by government, to may be the middle of the next year it is the phase of actually putting these individual pieces together on the ground. And in parallel with this another overlapping process which has already started is that of integrating all these pieces together to create the orchestra of a complete shared delivered services through a common shared infrastructure. And I would say that we will be seeing a lot of these services being visible on the ground, getting delivered in an integrated manner over the next two to three years.

You started from scratch and as you said it took you two to three years to build up the agenda and develop a framework, it must have been a hard process. So which was harder, to sell NeGP to your seniors including the political parties in power; or was it harder to sell it to your colleagues, juniors and other public partners?

I don’t think I was selling at all, infact it will be presumptuous enough to think that I had something which I was trying to sell, it was not at all so. The task that I had was to try and understand all the dimensions and try and put them together, and also keep distilling out whatever was common. So, it was really about trying to understand the perspectives, which infact had many advantages accrued to it. First advantage was that each one of the collaborative partners, no matter which walk of life they came from had some idea about e-Governance.

But as the discussions proceeded I think everyone’s ideas got moderated and modified by what other people had to say.

Another advantage was that it made people look closely at what they wanted out of the process and what they could get out of the process.

As a result of which the understanding of each player of their own roles became perhaps clearer. And since the benefit of that consensus and collaboration was visible, all the players were ready to go ahead with the process and the programme. For instance let us take the example of inside the government, it took some time for various departments to realize that they were better off riding on a common programme because than atleast some parts they will get already readymade, rather than trying to manage an entire programme on ones own. Anyways there was an absolute limitation on the kind of progress that a single entity could achieve on its own, from the perspective of a citizen. So for various departments even within the government the benefits of the collaboration became more evident and advantageous.

Therefore I think this sort of arrangement has been really helpful for all partners involved.

Rather than asking about the intended consequences, I want to ask you about the unintended consequences of both positive and the negative kinds that you encountered in developing this whole NeGP programme over the past six years?

If we look at some of the intended positive consequences then I think that first and foremost the kind of collaboration that became necessary among the various stakeholders had a very positive outcome. Infact all of us ended with a ov

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greater degree of respect for what the other agencies were bringing to the table. There was also the realization that in today’s world as more and more number of parties joined the collaboration, the collaboration went on becoming stronger; but for the collaboration to work the framework needs to be clear to all parties involved. Everyone collaborates because they expect to get something and contribute something to the collaboration. And even if one does not get into the rigid calculation of whether I get more than I give, as long as everyone is contributing as well as getting something out of it the collaboration should work well.

Other positive consequence of the whole programme was the development of concepts, like this concept of shared infrastructure, external support from other agencies, and piggybacking on the efforts of others, which not only made different parts of this programme more cost effective, but also effective in terms of achieving the end-results. Moreover the programme was able to generate a lot of passion amongst different people and that energy was very important in a national programme of such giant proportion.

Some of the un-indented but not un-anticipated consequences of the programme was that there was a gross mismatch between the pace at which real progress could be achieved and the pace at which expectations increased. So a lot of effort had to go, on the one hand, in not allowing the feeling to grow that expectations are not being met or that things were not moving, and on the other hand to generate quick wins where people could see the tangible benefits of some of what was happening; even today it is a constant battle, so there needs to be a constant balance between the short term, middle term, and the long term goals as well as benefits as we go forward.

The entire Information and Communication Technology (ICT) space has grammatically changed in terms of tool, technology and the cost involved in the last six to seven years. So in your view, if you had to start this National eGovernance Programme (NeGP) from scratch now in this changed scenario, would you do anything differently, be it in terms of technology, economy or partnership?

Obviously if we were planning step one of the NeGP programme in today’s environment, things would have been very different because any plan has to take into consideration not only where we are in terms of evolution but also the environment in which the programme is being planned out.

But since there was a detailed consultation process combined with long sessions of discussion even when we had started six years ago, so in my view all the reasonable perspective did bubble up to the top and got adopted. Yes, one perspective is that one perhaps could have used higher degree of force, force as in more mandated approach, more implementationoriented approach, with lesser emphasis on discussion, deliberation, consensus and collaboration. And it is possible, that it could have led to a speedier implementation, but it is also possible that it could have led to larger mistakes. So I think there was a certain amount of trade-off in terms of the speed in the approach which was been taken up based on consensus and collaboration, but it also helped to get better abiding and thus avoid bigger errors.

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There is a growing awareness about e-Governance which has increased drastically in the last five years amongst various government officials at all levels. But the feeling still persists that at the ground level, especially in the case of state government officials through whom most of the public interface happens, there the transformation using ICT is not as fast as one was expecting. So what is that one factor which can induce wider adoption of ICT at very-very basic fundamental level like that of state, so that various states can very soon claim for themselves the status of fully ICT enabled states of India?

I would say there are two very broad approaches or perspectives towards citizen-centric e-Governance, one is the inside-out view which is looking at the supply side of the eGovernance and at how quickly you can e-enable the systems and processes inside the government to make available the services. And a typical example of this nature is the MCA21 programme which is an end-to-end e-governance projects which has on the supply side made available the service to the corporates side.

But there also exists an outside-in view which is the way the citizen will interact with the development. And given the situation, for a very long time the inside-out view was the only view available because unless the service is e-enabled from inside nothing would be available outside. But as the common front-end infrastructure base is coming into picture, like CSCs through which all physical services would be made available, SWAN which networks these services, and SDCs which house these services; so eventually even if we adopt outside-in view, this shared infrastructure is going to be used. Hence once this infrastructure is in place, even the outside-in approach is possible where you can e-enable the systems from outside and then work towards e-enabling them on the inside progressively. And as has been observed, it turns out that it is possible to show dramatic improvement on the outside-in path fairly quickly and then include the back-end system which takes time. So while this process of eenabling of the front end of a system does not provide true eGovernance but combined with proper shared infrastructure and proper middle-ware, it does provide the advantage of making available atleast 50 to 60 percent of the benefits of services under e-governance straight away to the commonman in rural areas for a very wide spectrum of services, and that too very quickly. And this is the exciting phase we are entering now, which will take maybe another six months to get fully functional.

Even in your last avatar in the state government in Andhra Pradesh you have played an important role in initiating processes towards an IT-led Government. And now you are again playing a similar role at the centre. So how is it different now when you have such a broad framework, in comparison to the earlier situation at the state government where you had a barren land to start with?

Yes that comparison is clearly demarcated. The obvious advantage of having a baron land then at the state level was that of having to deal with no constraints, which allowed one to think both out-of-the-box and absolutely fresh. But otherwise it was very difficult to make any progress at that 18

Ravi Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, egov in Conversation with R. Chandrashekhar

point of time because then the level of growth of the IT capability within the country was not as good as it is today; even the level of maturity of IT tools and capabilities was not as great; moreover the interest of other stake-holders who in my view bring an important value to the table was just not there. So, it was then largely based on thoughts and efforts of a few individuals and a lot of the learning was also by trial and error which was not only a little expensive but also very slow.

Today the environment is much more conducive and the employees are also not threatened by Information and Communication Technology (ICT), so the receptivity towards any ICT based programme is much higher. And also with a broader framework in place one not only has a sense of what one needs to do internally but also of the externalities that one can depend upon.

In your view what are the inherent natural advantages and disadvantages that India has over other countries when it comes to implementing and adopting Information Technology (IT) in the government and in the country as a whole?

India surely has many inherent natural advantages, some obvious others not so obvious. There are disadvantages too but advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

So, let me start with advantages. First and the most obvious advantage is that India has a very vibrant IT sector which has enormous depth. And speaking clearly from the perspective of e-Governance we also have the advantage of some turmoil in the global market as a result of which the entire attention has turned towards domestic markets. And in terms of Human Resource (HR), India is the provider of skilled HR to the world, so in today’s environment most of these HR capabilities can be tapped to take the e-Governance agenda forward which is not the case in any other country.

Another not so obvious advantage is that we are late starters in e-Governance, as a result of which we do not have a lot of legacy, legacy in terms of back-end as well as nonstandard applications. This puts us in a very good position to take maximal advantage from the learnings coming from implementation in our own country as well as learn to from the experiences and failures of the other countries.

From the point of view of disadvantages in light of the NeGP, it is essential to reconcile the tight structured programmatic compulsion imperative with the decentralized, disperse, dissipated decision-making structures of the government.

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Moreover, in my view language is not as big a challenge as it is made out to be because language is needed only at the front-end. Another big constraint is the lack of highly-skilled inter-disciplinary manpower, which understands the area of e-Governance in terms of technology, process, projectmanagement, organisational-behaviour and handling publicprivate partnership. There are also constraints in terms of people who are responsible for certain domains not being able to reconcile their domain route with the types of extra skill required to lead such projects in order to manage the whole transition to a technology based organisation from a essentially manual structure. And also in order to change these processes which the government has followed for centuries, it needs certain entrepreneurial manpower employed within the government itself to take the initiative.

The IT spending of government has been very low. Do you think that a financial regulatory reform making it mandatory for all central and sate government to spend a certain part of their budgetary allocation on Information Technology (IT) would work better than the current approach based on discussion, consensus and collaboration?

Personally I am not in favour of the mandated force based approach due to certain reasons. I also think that there are many alternative approaches available which are being currently used, and are proving out to be quiet effective.

Let me start by why I was against that kind of an approach, it is mainly because mandated-force based approach is rooted in an era where it was believed that the mere induction of technology would improve efficiency. Second problem with this approach is that for the government in the budgetary system once money is used as a yardstick, there is always an emphasis on expenditure alone. While in the short term this kind of approach may be beneficial for the business, but in the long run this kind of an approach is detrimental for both government and businesses because no democratic government can sustain expenditure for a long time without any visible benefits being made available to the people. And NeGP is very clearly based on outcomes and value for the investments that are being made.

There can be another approach to implementing these mega projects like NeGP, which is the one being currently followed by the government. This approach rather than emphasizing on budgetary expenditure necessitates that these mega programmes need to be implemented in e-Governance mode such that the entire supporting system becomes eGovernance enabled. Infact, when the cabinet approved the NeGP it also mandated that all the major flagship programmes should be implemented in this mode. Herein in this approach money-spending and the percentage of spending become consequence rather than the cause of the decision, and thus I think this is the right approach to take forward.

How has the role of private sector evolved in the last ten years especially in the domain of e-Governance? And how do you think it will be further shaping up in the future?

I think the role of the private sector has evolved a lot in the span of these five years. Ten years ago the sole focus of private 20

sector was towards the international market. Moreover at that time Indian government also did not know how to procure Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in a meaningful way because besides hardware, procurement of intangible products like softwares, consultation was still not well understood within the government spheres. So the net result of an outward looking industry combined with a government which was not appreciative of these nuances of the private players, was that private sector did not look at e-Governance in any significant way. There was some interest amongst smaller industries towards e-Governance, maybe because they could not afford to look at international market, so they looked at government to provide some kind of opportunity.

But on the whole the aspirations of the private sector was out of sync with government’s own requirements, because government required a certain minimum level of back-up and sustained support from the organisation. So with regards to both big and small private sector companies, there was a big mismatch between the expectations of the government and these private players. But over a period of time,not only has the government matured but also the private sector has become more stable and also more mature. Moreover with the movement of these private companies higher on the value chain, development of an understanding amongst them about the nuances of the government has significantly increased.

Also the recent downturn in the market has forced the private sector to look inwards. Moreover even the government in accordance with the need and imperatives of e-governance programme has increased its spending. Hence a combination of these developments has changed the entire scenario, such that now government and private-sectors are working together successfully in a lot of projects in the domain of e-Governance as well.

In the next five years what are the further developments we can expect to witness on the horizons of the eGovernance scenario in India?

If one is looking for measurement tool, then in the area of e-Governance there are two yardsticks which will provide a clear distinct assessment of e-Governance projects. First yardstick is that of the percentage of services which have been e-enabled. And second yardstick is that of percentage of people who have an access to these services. I think these two percentages form a very good indicators of the amount of progress that has been made in deep-seated areas like literacy, e-literacy and other infrastructural problems.

And the dream is to see that over the next three years atleast 50% of the services should be e-enabled and atleast 80% of the people should have access to these services. And then over the next five years we will progressively e-enable all back-end services as well as end-to-end services. And as always, amongst the states implementing this e-governance there will be some who will leaders, others who will be trying quiet hard, and yet others who might not be able to do as good as others. So broadly this is the stratification for the categorization of the states planning to adopt and implement e-Governance in my final analysis.

4th Anniversary Issue

Ravi Gupta Ravi.Gupta@egovonline.net

www.egovonline.net

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CORPORATE CORNER

Re-Engineering and ICT http://www.abmindia.com

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Proper implementation of our Property Tax software has capability to fund the entire e-Government budgets of that ULB, including long duration hand holding support”

What is the core competence of ABM Knowledgeware in the space of e-Government ? e-Government is truly visible in the form of time-bound service delivery to citizens in a more efficient and transparent manner. ABM has been operating in this niche area of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enabling citizen and consumer services for over a decade. ABM has provided these solutions necessarily by blending government Process Re-engineering and ICT. As on date we have over 150 Citizen/consumer Facilitation Centres (CFCs)- A single window for citizen services running in India. These CFCs are delivering end to end G2C and G2B service covering almost 150 different citizen services (G2C) touching day to day lives of the citizens. Approximately, 65 lakh citizen services were delivered through our e-Governance solutions last year.

Prakash Rane Managing Director, ABM Knowledgeware Ltd.

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Can you tell us about your eGovernment project carried out a Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM)?

ABM in Consortium with SAP has implemented e-Government solution for MCGM which covers almost 70 percent of the functions of MCGM. The solution is a combination of SAP and software solutions designed/ developed by ABM for Property Tax and Water Billing.

4th Anniversary Issue

MCGM has over 3500 IT users and 200 locations connected on a stateof-the art data centre. After successful implementation, ABM is now responsible for managing the entire software system of MCGM for the next 3 years. ABM manages the software setup which handles more than INR 22,000 crore worth financial transactions per year in addition to all the citizen services in MCGM. This project stands out as an exemplary e-Governance project not only in India but in the Asia Pacific region as well.

Can you tell us about your e-Government project carried out at Kalyan Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) as well as about ‘Setu’ in Maharashtra?

The e-Government solution designed and developed by ABM for Kalyan Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) has a distinction of winning all the possible awards at different levels like Industry Associations, State Government, Central Government, International bodies for innovation.

ABM’s KDMC solution is a perfect tool for creating e-Governed municipal corporation. It is recently adopted by Government of Maharashtra for roll out in all 200+ Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in Maharashtra. It provides around 100 citizen services, G2C and G2B, across the counter by carrying our integrated computerisation of vital departments.

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CORPORATE CORNER

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like Double Entry Accounting, Property/Water Tax, Licence, Birth/Death registrations and Town Planning.

This solution also has the distinction of being one of the 3 short listed e-Government solutions by Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD), Government of India for empanelment under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

The KDMC solution has already been adopted by several ULBs so far. This solution provides a cost effective and proven option for computerisation of a municipal corporation by meeting the JNNURM guidelines laid down by MoUD GoI for e-Government. Our project like ‘Setu’ in Thane Collectorate was a pioneering initiative of citizen centric e-Government which was subsequently rolled out by state government across the state. It is important to note that most of our implementations have resulted into concrete tangible as well as intangible benefits to our customers for improved revenue and citizen services How have your solutions helped in bridging the digital divide that exists in India?

I had the opportunity to study e-Governance implementations in different parts of the world. Most of these implementations have the fundamental objective ‘removing intermediaries’ between government and citizens. The e-Government framework is used to replace the intermediaries. It is achieved by delivering service on the web by avoiding the visits of the citizens to government offices.

But India cannot follow this model of Dis-Intermediation due to the digital divide prevailing in the country. India needs to make e-Governance more ‘inclusive’. Most of the citizens in India do not have the access or ability to use Personal Computers (PC) or Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) to access the e-Government framework. On the contrary there is a need to ‘Re-intermediate’ in Indian e-Government framework. It is necessary to introduce a layer in the eGovernment framework which makes it possible for citizens without IT literacy to access the government services. Hence, ABM decided to introduce the Citizen Facilitation Centres as mentioned above where the citizens can walk – in and take end to end service using the friendly staff deputed on CFCs to assist citizens. They do not have to possess the PCs or ability to access computerised citizen services .

Due to process re-engineering the touch points for the availing citizen services within ULBs have been reduced substantially for each of the service. In many cases it is reduced to single touch point at the CFC. As a result of the combination of walk-in CFCs, reduced touch points and government process re-engineering our e-Governance solutions provide the benefits of “inclusive” interaction of the citizenry with govt bodies. This will surely percolate into the system, ultimately resulting into participation of citizens into governance when appropriate use/analysis of the data is carried out.

What are the challenges in expediting the e-Government initiative in India?

There are several challenges in achieving expeditious roll out of e-Government projects in an inclusive manner. The sheer size 22

of government machinery which needs to undergo mindset change, extremely wide geographical coverage required to reach the masses, some uniformity of outcome based e-Government initiative in states covering their subjects, easy and inexpensive access for delivering and seeking government services, effective Internet policy, security of government data and transactions, privacy of personal data, viability of maintenance and upgradation and so on.

Government also has the challenge to choose any of the two between ‘scalability, security and functionality’ of e-Government framework, as it is difficult to have all the three at a time.

One of relatively underplayed challenge is that of availability of proven software solutions which provide expeditious e-Government services without compromising on the credibility of the government services. There are some examples in India where the over emphasis on the fast delivery of services have proved to be counter productive to the very purpose of governance.

The 1 lakh kiosks scheme of Government of India may face the challenge of providing end to end e-government services due to scarce availability of proven e-Government solutions. In the ULB perspective proper implementation of our Property Tax software has capability to fund the entire e-Government budgets of that ULB, including long duration hand holding support.

Indian IT industry has seen very few private sector companies like ABM, which are working exclusively in the area of providing e-Government solutions. Can you briefly tell us about your growth?

ABM has grown over 600 percent in terms of revenues and human assets in the last 5 years. We are the winner of the prestigious ‘Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 2008’ and ‘Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2008’. This acknowledges our speed of growth as a technology company not only in India but also in Asia Pacific region.

Our solutions for ULB have won international recognitions in addition to acceptance at state and central government level. ABM was adjudged as the ‘Best Technical e-Government Organisation’ by a committee consisting of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MoICT) in 2006.

We have the unique accomplishment of having several sustained e-Government projects even after change of champions which are delivering value year after year to our patrons.

Our own solutions in the areas of ULBs, utilities have been standardised by progressive states in India. We have added a new practice of providing change management support to government customers after implementation of SAP which we feel would be one of the important niche areas for us which is unmatched by any competitors. Today, ABM is placed as the most competent e-Government solution provider for any size of Municipal Corporation in India with enviable track record.

4th Anniversary Issue

Nilakshi Barooah nilakshi@egovonline.net

www.egovonline.net

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CASE STUDY

Securing Education VeriSign’s solutions provided efficient budget monitoring system for US department of education

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he U.S. Department of Education (ED) was created in 1980 by combining offices from several federal agencies. ED’s 4,200 employees and $68.6 billion budget are concentrated on the promotion of student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness through the use of quality education programs. The department is responsible for establishing policies on federal financial aid relating to education, and the distribution and monitoring of those funds. ED also is chartered with collecting data on America’s schools, disseminating education-related research findings, and ensuring that an appropriate nationwide focus is maintained on key educational issues. The department’s elementary and secondary programs serve more than 14,000 school districts and approximately 56 million students attending approximately 97,000 public schools and 28,000 private schools.

Department programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study assistance to about 11 million post-secondary students.

BY PRESIDENTIAL DECREE

The Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 (HSPD-12) was signed in August of 2004, mandating stringent identity verification and authentication checks for all federal employees and contractors. Winona Varnon, director of security services at the U.S. Department of Education, elaborated, “The directive involves validating that a person is who they say they are before they are granted permission to enter a federal building or access federally controlled information systems. HSPD-12 contains very specific requirements for the process of personal identity verification (PIV). It ov

January 2009

involves a smart card-a “PIV card”-with embedded biometric data, including both facial images and fingerprints, and PKI-based digital certificates obtained from an approved Shared Service Provider public key infrastructure (SSP PKI).” She continued, “We performed extensive market research to determine who would be our PKI provider and issuer of our smart cards. We selected VeriSign after thoroughly reviewing and vetting over 20 companies. We were impressed that VeriSign had the longest history and the best reputation for being a solid provider of PKI solutions.

In addition, we were very pleased with the company’s obviously excellent track record of working with both federal and private entities.”

FEDERAL AGENCY TURNS TO VERISIGN FOR MISSION-CRITICAL SERVICES

VeriSign Shared Service Provider PKI Service is built upon a proven, hosted PKI platform with the high reliability, scalability, and availability needed for 4th Anniversary Issue

federal agency mission-critical SSP PKI services. To enable these agencies to deploy a low cost, robust solution for complying with specific Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), VeriSign provides a SSP PKI service and a complementary Card Management System (CMS), MyID PIV for VeriSign, for the personalization and management of PIV smart cards. Both VeriSign SSP PKI Service and MyID PIV for VeriSign are on the GSA Approved Products List for FIPS 201-certified products and services. The featurerich VeriSign SSP PKI Service provides SSP PKI capabilities and functionality, including a Registration Authority (RA), key management, repository, all necessary archive services, and a dedicated federal agency Certification Authority (CA). Additionally, VeriSign SSP PKI Service contains a responder service based on Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). By selecting VeriSign SSP PKI Service, federal agencies are able to take full advantage 23

of VeriSign’s highly available and scalable PKI platform to help ensure the availability and integrity of their core SSP PKI services. The VeriSign solution utilizes a global repository service, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing federal agency enterprise directories for storage and retrieval of digital certificates. Audit policies and procedures support the most rigorous compliance requirements. A full suite of disaster recovery capabilities is provided through geographically distributed back-up datacenters with a dedicated secure link to mirror all transactions in the event of a failure with a primary agency SSP PKI CA. MyID PIV for VeriSign was certified by the GSA in 2006, making VeriSign the first vendor to receive certification using FIPS 201 compliant certificates. By adopting a wholly standards-based approach, the U.S. Department of Education was more quickly and cost-effectively able to implement a proven HSPD-12 solution, saving tax payers’ money.

VERISIGN’S POWERFUL COMBINATION OF PKI SERVICES

My ID PIV for VeriSign is integrated with VeriSign SSP PKI Service. Together they offer numerous and flexible deployment alternatives, with custom tailored features and workflow options for meeting FIPS 201 requirements.

The solution integrates user enrollment, document capture, biometric capture, card production, credentialing, and printing within a strictly role-separated application suite. Varnon recalled, “As a result of VeriSign’s industry leadership in PKI and related identity protection solutions, it is well positioned to provide support to the other vendors engaged by the department to deliver products and services in support of HSPD-12 compliance-so we purchased 30 days worth of VeriSign Professional Services.

VeriSign’s unique ability to leverage established relationships with other GSA approved HSPD-12 vendors to achieve near seamless product integration provided the necessary experience and leadership the department needed in accomplishing such a complex undertaking. The implementation went extremely smoothly. We have since issued approximately 1,800 cards and we’re ahead of schedule, by September 24 }

1st 2008 we will have issued a total of 5,200 cards.”

As part of HSPD-12, the U.S. Department of Education performs a stringent series of verifications on each individual application, including corroboration of supplied statements, confirmation of physical characteristics, and a detailed national agency background check (incorporating employment, criminal, and military verifications, where relevant). All verified information is entered into the enrollment application, and sent electronically to the security management system where

By utilizing the VeriSign solution, we have great flexibility for the future, and are well positioned to handle upcoming federal mandates with the minimum of fuss” Winona Varnon Director of security services, U.S. Department of Education

it is substantiated once again by an ED employee. At this point, the entire record is sent to MyID PIV for VeriSign prior to creation of the physical smart card.

Once claimed by the applicant, a final fingerprint match is performed and a 6digit PIN is assigned prior to the issue of a certificate against the approved smart card. PKI digital certificates are fully hosted through managed services provided through VeriSign SSP PKI Service. “The VeriSign Professional Services Organization’s unique ability to partner with the Department of Education in the review, evaluation, implementation and compliance with the myriad of requirements identified in all related National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) documentation as well as FIPS 201 is directly proportionate to the success achieved here at the Department,” Varnon stated. “From the outset, VeriSign was able to leverage best-ofbreed industry experience with PKI 4th Anniversary Issue

and integrate it with a comprehensive understanding of the government’s objectives to help accelerate the project timeline. VeriSign’s offering of VeriSign SSP PKI Service, MyID PIV for VeriSign, and related key management capabilities, with VeriSign Professional Services resulted in us being able to focus on those elements and aspects of the solution where the department’s inhouse skills and competencies would be most beneficial.”

BENEFITS ABOUND

Varnon explained some of the benefits she experienced, “We see great advantages from having implemented a common security credential that will become interoperable across multiple government tiers-if an individual has a validated smart card, then any federal agency has the ability to access the shared services bridge for PKI-based digital certificates and validate that this person really is who they say they are.

By utilizing the VeriSign solution, we have great flexibility for the future, and are well positioned to handle upcoming federal mandates with the minimum of fuss. I also feel confident that the smart card is extremely difficult to tamper with, or to use in an inappropriate manner. A great by-product of this initiative is that it has forced every agency to reevaluate all existing personal identity validation related data-we’ve been able to start with an entire database of clean, accurate, and current data.” She concluded, “VeriSign SSP PKI Service has achieved full Authority to Operate (ATO) and is fully certified and accredited by GSA. VeriSign’s ATO status was a significant contributing factor to the department’s recent achievement of full ATO compliance with all aspects of the Department of Education HSPD-12 solution.

I would absolutely recommend VeriSign-it goes above and beyond to make sure we are completely satisfied.

Without any doubts this is a superior PKI solution and one that is unmatched by any other vendor or governmentmanaged service offering that I know of. I feel very secure that this is the best product on the market-so secure, that I have bet my career and the success of ED’s ability to comply with HSPD-12 on it!” www.egovonline.net

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Technology Applications – The mind and Soul of e-Governance The Indian economy has been growing at over 9% continuously over the last 3 years. IT spend in the public sector has grown from $1.4 billion in 2005 to $2.9 billion showing a growth of 19.6% beating even China's 14.6%. The context today is rapidly changing with the urban citizen becoming tech savy, and the Government adopting IT to manage services delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. eGovernance thrives on robust applications; the very character and soul of all government run services, and when it comes to IT implementation, it is the public sector and government which offers the greatest challenges and pushes the limits of what can be demanded of technology. When we look at the scale of government structures, departments, and public sector bodies operating within the context of a billion plus population, the complexity is baffling.

Enterprise Application Services EAS Managed Security Services MSS

Integrated Technology services ITS E governance services portfolio Software as a service SaaS ‌ XaaS

Data Center Services Networking and Connectivity

How can IT be leveraged to meet these challenges? egov magazine takes a look at what really are some of the key IT solutions in the context of government owned processes and services. How can they help improve efficiency, manage cost, and increase ROI? Sify Technologies offers a range of applications and solutions. In this cover story we look at how these solutions map with the key challenges in the Government context. We also look at some case studies of already implemented solutions across sectors.

Some of the key priorities that gain prominence in the government / public sector are: Leveraging technology to meet large scale citizen-facing functions on the internet (web applications) Seamlessly managing the vast communication needs and enabling co-ordination between numerous stakeholders (communication and collaboration) Managing citizen-facing processes that involve high volumes of documents and data in an efficient way (document and data management) Streamlining internal processes for adequate and suitable staffing within the government and in government managed initiatives (skill assessment and learning)

The e-Governance context Government to citizen Citizen G2C Government to employee Employee G2E Government to Government G2G Government to Business G2B G2X or G2S Government to Stakeholder G2X G2S = stakeholder

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Integrated communication enabling traceability, quick response, information access on the move ?

Data and document management for easy maintenance, archiving and retrieval ?

Customized applications and web interface for citizen / employee facing functions including web services and intranets ?

Accurate, reliable, scalable skill assessment process with pre-assessment learning support and post assessment certification

Sify offers a range of robust applications and services that enable such processes to be managed efficiently and seamlessly.

Application services Human Capital Management

Knowledge Management

Learning management solutions

Document management

Online assessment and certification

Digitization services

E learning content

Unified Collaboration & Communication Basic mail service Unified communication Value added services Anti- spam solution Bulk mailing solution

Enterprise content management

Customer Lifecycle Management FORUM – Forward supply chain Sales Force Automation (SFA) Search engine optimization

Document Management Solution Whether it is passport application processing, or ration card and PAN related document management, or even the massive piles of legal documents in the system at any given time, one of the most critical challenges the government faces today is the need for simplified and manageable document processing, storage and retrieval. The cost, time, and efficiency implications cannot be overemphasized.

Sify's document management solution is a multi-user generic system which encompasses imaging, scanning modules and a document manager. The solution enables customized document profiles, and facilitates extensive access control and security.

Electronic imaging is faster and more economical than data-entry or any other conventional method and the document image archiving technique is 10 times faster than conventional methods, and can reduce costs by 75%.

Case Study The Customer: One of India's leading retail financial services companies with over 135 offices across 95 cities. The company offers a full range of financial services and products, ranging from equities to insurance, and also offers a variety of loans. Customers are offered 24/7 access to all information and products.

The Challenge: Inefficiencies from managing massive volumes of documents for personal loan processing - loan application forms, agreements, income proof, ID proof, residence proof, bank statements etc.

Document loss or damage during transit from branch to head office Cumbersome, repeated document retrieval process High operating costs and admin overheads Delays in loan processing

Sify's Solution: Deployment of batch scanning and document management solution - Sify's DocImage - a multi-user, enterprise-wide document management system which runs batch scanning after loan account numbers are generated.

The application numbers are auto-extracted using the loan file which includes the application form and supporting documents.

The file is indexed on the application number and the loan account number is fetched by Sify DocImage dynamically from the Loan Management System.

Scan

The documents are arranged and made ready for scanning. Size, sides of document and scanning machine are factored in

Verify

Scanned docs are checked for quality to ensure clarity, orientation and detail.

Sequencing check for double-sided documents is also done

Index

The documents are indexed with appropriate key words. This aids in retrieval of documents. Indexing can be done on multiple parameters

Upload

The docs that are indexed are uploaded into the DMS. Here the access rights to the documents are set

Key Benefits: Improved productivity and process control through simple web interface

E Learning: Sify’s custom courseware development, content digitization, high end simulations and blended learning solutions enable learners to internalize, retain and apply knowledge more effectively.

Learning Management Sify brings a winning combination of training expertise, business acumen, and industry knowledge to every customer engagement, building a comprehensive interactive, online learning environment. Our e-learning delivery is flexible and scalable, ensuring consistent learning regardless of organization structure, locations, and audience.

Online Assessment & Certification: Sify had pioneered in the deployment of its online examination engine-Sify iTest for its clients for conducting the online assessment tests. The software application is developed by Sify and has already been used by large academic institutions on a national scale.

Case Study The Customer:

Faster retrieval of e-documents and images

A professional body of Banks and Financial Institutions licensed under the provisions of the Indian Companies Act with 650 institutional members and over 2.5 lakh individual members.

Scalability – ability to store and manage millions of documents on multiple servers across the network

The Challenge:

Increased system security through user and group access control Seamless digitization from scanning to storage, archival, and retrieval Low Cost of Ownership

LMS (Learning Management Solution) and Assessment Skill assessment in the government context poses challenges from achieving scale and accuracy, to data management and logistics.

Every component of the assessment process has to be managed on a massive scale. For instance, about 6 lakh people took the Civil services exams, and about 5 lakh took the NDA test in 2007. The host of other assessment programs include the National Talent Search exams, Public sector banking exams, Railway Recruitment Board exam etc. In this cycle, skill assessment, pre-assessment learning management and post assessment certification become critical components. Sify has already demonstrated its ability to leverage technology for large scale skill assessment and learning.

Sify's Integrated Learning and Assessment Solutions include E learning

Effectively manage the assessment exam for over 50,000 financial professionals in various subjects and complete the process within a short time across over 65 cities Ensure accuracy and integrity in the process while also managing Time, cost, and effort. Typically, printing of question papers and courier of answer sheets for evaluation account for huge costs Create a tamper proof system by ensuring proper candidate identity, security of the exam content and enabling an audit mechanism

Sify's Solution: Sify's offered a comprehensive solution that encompassed Core online assessment engine Pre-assessment processes including candidate ID card generation and secure upload of question bank on its servers Conduct and invigilation of exam across its nationwide academic test centres with complete operational support

Learning Management System

A central monitoring team for overall process management and call center support on the exam day

Online Assessment and Certification

Post-exam results generation

Examination process

Sify's services in this space include: Web application development Portal operations

Generate candidate list and upload question bank into database

Developing online business communities eCommerce

List centers and generate admit card

Web hosting Website maintenance Digital certification and other Internet services

Candidates visit test centers to take exam

Dual authentication - test administrator and candidate login to begin the exam session

Instruction page is displayed to the candidates and sample test is shown

Main question paper is displayed after randomisation on candidate PC

Sify leverages the full potential of up-to-date technology platforms including Open Source, NET, PHP or LAMP and delivers applications for high performance and ROI.

Messaging & Collaboration One of the key challenges is managing communication between stakeholders - within departments, between different departments, Government to Citizen, Government to Corporate, and Government to Government. Essentially, the challenge is managing the vast volume of communication, ensuring traceability, improving response time, and enabling information access while on the move.

Sify's Messaging Solutions include: Sify Linux Enterprise Mailing Solutions (SLEMS) Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC)

Candidates fill responses and submit

Antispam solutions With a combination of robust infrastructure, strategic partnerships and professional services built into the solution, Sify is geared to: Ensure high availability and scalability of an organisation

Instant assessment by software for pre-defined pattern of questions

Secure access to assessment panel for manual assessment

messaging environment Improve mail security Offer scalability for optimum resource utilization Enable communication backup and archival

Report generation

Ensure information access on the go

SLEMS: Key Benefits Ability to manage high volume initiatives effectively Scalable model with the ability to conduct assessment across 70 cities, in 700 test centers, for over 70,000 participants with over 20,000 candidates being tested on a single day High security for handling question paper – encrypted channel for question bank upload to Sify server, restricted access, complete logs, and reports Simple exam process for candidates

Web Application Development Unlike packaged software, business need/ design issues are addressed prior to software development. Custom applications are therefore “custom” ized to user “application” or needs.

With vast experience of building more than 1,400 websites in areas such portal operations, developing online business communities, eCommerce, web hosting, website maintenance, digital certification, and other internet services, Sify offers the industry's most complete solutions under one roof. Combining strong technology and internet services expertise with domain knowledge of key industry sectors, Sify web services has developed several industry-specific applications addressing critical eBusiness needs of its clients.

Sify's Linux Enterprise Mailing Solutions(SLEMS) is a robust messaging solution that runs on a distributed architecture and can support any number of users. It is completely standard complaint supporting mailing protocols including POP/IMAP/SMTP/ODMR and LDAP.

HMC: Offers feature rich, efficient access to e-mail, calendars, attachments, contacts, and more on multiple devices enabling staff to have real time access while on the move.

Antispam solutions: On an average, an employee spends 20 minutes a day in clearing spam mails. Sify's Antispam solutions prevent email address harvesting from a website, while preserving the ease of use and flexibility of standard e-mail links. Sify’s Antispam solutions block 80% of spam at the gateway and reduce bandwidth cost to that extent.

Case Study The Customer: A large insurance firm offering a range of innovative products to individuals and group customers at more than 600 locations through its bank partners and company-owned offices. The company has over 32,000 financial advisors across the country.

The Challenge: Enable easy communication access for over 18,000 insurance agents through a robust mailing system Reduce infrastructure cost and at the same time achieve scalability and offer agents round the clock support

Sify's Solution: Sify's comprehensive solution included: A complete mailing solution with licenses and assets (hardware, software and operating system) so the customer does not incur capital expense for set up Customizable solution with frequent software upgrades 3 levels of technical support with response/resolution time and web based tracking Hosting of the entire mailing system in a level 3 data center with value added services like intrusion detection system, firewall support, and constant monitoring

Key Benefits:

Why SaaS is relevant in the government context?

Core infrastructure investment Different departments adopting different solutions (applications, tools, and technologies) for pretty much the same/ similar requirements Time and cost in conceptualisation, development, deployment, rollout, and maintenance of horizontal applications Availability of skilled manpower

SaaS is most suited for G2G and government internal processes ?

Surveillance ?

Citizen Database with digital identification ? e-learning framework and engine ?

Tele-medicine framework ?

Helpdesk platform/ framework ?

Department Portals

Other applications

SaaS…XaaS utilities

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Workflow based Office ?

Visitor management ?

Digitisation ?

Messaging & Collaboration ?

Web Conf and VoIP ?

RTI ?

Assessment Engine ?

KM (Knowledge Mgmt) framework

Horizontal applications

Easy deployment Ability to scale up at short notice

? e-procurement ?

File Tracking system ?

Green sheet (DMS) ?

HRMS and Payroll ?

Accounting and Budgeting ?

Project Monitoring engine

High availability Move from Capex to Opex model Low license cost and high ROI One-stop integrated solution

SaaS: Making Software Accessible for the Government What really is Software as a Service (SaaS)?

When an application is hosted on the service provider's servers and offered as a service on the internet, rather than a shrinkwrapped product, it enables the customer to eliminate the need to install and run the application on the customer's own infrastructure. This in turn removes from the picture the burden of high software ownership cost, software maintenance, high capital expenditure and software support. The concept now affords a highly versatile delivery model in diverse forms.

The SaaS … XaaS: perspective Software - SaaS Hardware - HaaS

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A significant part of the company's revenue is derived from Corporate Services, which include corporate connectivity, network and communications solutions, security, network management services, enterprise applications and hosting. Sify is recognized as an ISO 9001:2000 certified service provider for network operations, data center operations and customer support, and for provisioning of VPNs, Internet bandwidth, VoIP solutions and integrated security solutions, and ISO 27001 certified for Internet Data Center operations. Sify has licenses to operate NLD (National Long Distance) and ILD (International Long Distance) services and offers VoIP back haul to long distance subscriber telephony services. The company is India's first enterprise managed services provider to launch a Security Operations Center (SOC) to deliver managed security services. A host of blue chip customers use Sify's corporate service offerings.

Consumer services include broadband home access, dial up connectivity and the e-port cyber café chain across 180 cities and towns. Sify.com the consumer portal of Sify has sub portals like www.samachar.com, www.walletwatch.com, www.sifymax.com and www.chennailive.in, www.bangalorelive.in, www.mumbailive.in, www.hyderabadlive.in the city based live video on the web. The content is available in 5 Indian languages, which include Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.

For more information about Sify visit www.sifycorp.com

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UT GOVERNMENT CORNER

In Lakshadweep Everything is Unique http://www.lakshdemo3.nic.in

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We have adopted VSAT technology due to problems with the availability of bandwidth from BSNL”

B V Selvaraj Administrator, Union Territory of Lakshadweep 30 }

The Lakshadweep administration plans to introduce an ambitious Universal State Wide Area Network (USWAN) for digitally interconnecting each and every government office in the territory which will be first of its kind in the country. Kindly elaborate upon such plans and the possible roll out of the projects.

The Union Territory (UT) of Lakshadweep is a group of islands, out of which ten are inhabited and randomly scattered in the India Ocean.

Geographical isolation has hampered the developmental programmes in this territory over the years. Proper connectivity - both physical as well as in terms of communication are a high priority as islands are cut off from the main mother country. We aim that all these islands will be connected with the implementation of Universal State Wide Area Network (U-SWAN).

There are around 230 subordinate offices in various islands of the UT of Lakshadweep. There will be at least 4550 nodes in an office. Altogether, 9,900 to 11,000 desktops will be connected/ networked at a time, leading to a mega Wide Area Network which will have a much larger bandwidth.

The functioning of most citizen centric e-Governance projects such as Total Digitization of Employment 4th Anniversary Issue

Services, Medicine and Appliances Stock and Cargo Movement System, the “EverAlert”, Electricity Consumer Management System and Advanced Ship Ticket Reservation System (Portnet) will be more smooth as more bandwidth speed will be available at Kavaratti. There will be a bandwidth of 16 Mbps in Kavaratti, Head Quarters and 4 Mbps each in Minicoy and at Agathi (the remotest, southern most islands), the gateway of Lakshadweep.

The remaining islands will have a speed of 2 Mbps. Many other e-Governance plans are on the anvil, which will be launched once the U-SWAN is implemented / executed.

Can you tell us about the hurdles faced while rolling out video conferencing in the government departments of Lakshadweep?

The main hurdle which we are still confronting is the non-availability of required bandwidth. The sole Internet Service Provider in Lakshadweep is Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL). Their existing capability does not support the required bandwidth for the web-based programmes. This narrow bandwidth affects our Video Conferencing and we aspire for better bandwidth with the launch of the U-SWAN. The U-SWAN will definitely be the panacea for these disconnected islands of Lakshadweep. www.egovonline.net

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You have a digitally integrated Electricity Department which is connected through NICNET-VSAT. What are the benefits of such technology over others?

We have adopted VSAT technology due to problems with the availability of bandwidth. When BSNL was not able to provide us the minimum required bandwidth, we had to go ahead with the VSAT technology, considering the peculiar geographical situation prevailed over this territory. Minimum level of stabilised and reliable connectivity is made available with VSAT over NICNET of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

The web enabled ship ticket reservation and booking system (PORTNET) has immensely helped the entire population of Lakshadweep. Shipping is the lifeline of the ethnic people of Lakshadweep.

PORTNET has made it possible for them to plan their journey among the islands as well as to the mainland, which was once unimaginable. The students who study in the other parts of the country can come home without much difficulty as they can book their ship tickets through advanced reservation system.

The information on ship schedules, berths and cabins availability in all the ships plying in Lakshadweep waters is provided on the website which can be accessed from any where.

Ship ticket advance reservation counters are also available in all the islands as well as in Kochi, Kozhikode and Mangalore. We are also considering e-Payment for ticket booking to further ease the services. However, entry into Lakshadweep islands is restricted and it is possible only when permission is granted by the concerned authority. Therefore, considering such sensitive reasons, e-Payment for obtaining ship tickets to Lakshadweep has been kept on hold.

Lakshadweep is the first Union Territory in India to fully digitise its employment exchange. Tell us how did your administration achieved such a feat?

The Total Digitization of Employment Services is a good relief to the people of Lakshadweep. The one and only Employment Exchange in this territory is situated at Kavaratti.

Earlier people had to come to Kavaratti for mere registration and for appending any training or higher educational qualification which required a lot of traveling. Now, with the digitisation process, there is no chaotic queue in front of the Exchange which was a common and unavoidable scene in earlier days.

This was possible with the bold decision taken from the How far is the political will responsible for the success of apex authority and consistent efforts, without relenting to e-Governance initiatives in Lakshadweep? any tactics. The project entailed re-entering of all the details Lakshadweep is a UT without legislation. However, the of Live Register in the Exchange which consisted of around leaders of all political entities have taken us into confidence 15,000 candidates with varied qualifications and types and took all the initiatives forward. of details.

The Sub Divisional Officer/Deputy Collector in all the In the light of the given framework of e-Governance in the islands, except Kavaratti, is designated as Additional Indian plains and the islands; do you think the challenges Employment Officer in their respective jurisdiction island with are different in the two areas? powers of issue of registration cards against the registrants Here, in Lakshadweep everything is unique. The peculiar and adding newly acquired educational qualification creating geographical isolation of the UT has its uniqueness in all walks of life. This isolation really is a challenge other 9 Virtual Employment Exchanges for any activity in Lakshadweep where without any additional manpower. All HIGHLIGHTS everything becomes a challenge. these offices have been provided with • A bandwidth of 16 Mbps in Execution of work is really tough owing adequate ICT tools for this purpose.

Kavaratti, Head Quarters and 4 to this peculiar isolation which can be The entire staff for this project in all the Mbps each in Minicoy and bridged with cautious and judicious islands have been trained properly. planning. Without proper and Now a native of Lakshadweep at Agathi reliable connectivity, development in can register his / her name with • VSAT technology has been Lakshadweep is not wise to envisage. the Employment Exchange of adopted due to problems with The most ambitious plan of Lakshadweep from any part of the the bandwidth.

USWAN will be a solution for the world. This has been a great relief for • 9 Virtual Employment digital integration of islands with the the youths of Lakshadweep who pursue Exchanges provision of the right bandwidth. their education in various parts of the • Natives of Lakshadweep can With much optimism, we took up country. This initiative has brought register his / her name with the ICT initiatives and are able to transparency in the system. the Employment Exchange of derive the benefi ts to the citizens.

Lakshadweep from any part of The islands and islets of Lakshadweep All deliverables from each project the world. are interconnected through web should reach the unreached which is the • Ship ticket reservation centres enabled ship ticket reservation and main moral and prime theme of all available at Kochi, Kozhikode booking system (PORTNET). How the premium e-Governance initiatives & Mangalore. successful and popular is this system implemented in this remotest territory • e-Payment for obtaining ship amongst the masses and is there a of the country. tickets to Lakshadweep has possibility of replicating in other Sandeep Budki and Nilakshi Barooah been kept on hold. states as well? sandeep@egovonline.net

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CORPORATE CORNER

Providing Technology Solutions to the Government http://www.microsoft.com

“

What technology drives an application is irrelevant to the average user”

Karan Bajwa Group Director, Public Sector, Microsoft, India 36 }

Common Services Centres (CSCs) are in the process of being roll out in various states and union territories of India. How is Microsoft India participating in the delivery of services through these front end service outlets?

Microsoft has been closely aligned with the various state governments and governmental organisations to help build e-governance applications, understand their requirements and develop a blueprint based on local issues and constraints. The solutions have already been deployed in a few states and Microsoft is spearheading the percolation of these solutions to all the states in the country through the partner ecosystem.

Besides providing the technology platforms for the front end delivery of the Government 2 Citizen (G2C) and Business 2 Citizen (B2C) services and the back end systems for the aggregation and delivery of the G2C services, Microsoft is also working with the CSC operators in order to enhance the business viability of the CSC’s. Offerings such as Digital Literacy Curriculums are being offered through the CSC’s in order to support both the viability of the CSC’s and also the dissemination of the IT skills.

computers across the globe, they used it because it was easy to use. People like Windows or the MS Office suite primarily because it is easy to use.

When we ponder over ways to make rural India adopt computers, we should focus on user interface rather than underlying technologies.

The second constraint is affordability.

Villagers see much less use for a ‘personal’ computer than we do, so shared access through pay-for-use kiosks is the way to go. The key to the success of this model is to find a pricing formula where it is affordable for users and yet makes business sense. A differential pricing model for different segments of users seems to make most sense. In our case, these segments are: the government, education, and rural users.

Open Source Software is just another business model supported by a services revenue stream, that carries alongwith itself perceptions that are in most cases incorrect. The Government needs to, and it correctly is, focusing on the issues like deployability, ease of use, localisation, supportability, affordability and delivery of services rather than the underlying technology and that is the reason for the success of Microsoft in e-Governance initiatives.

Do you see an emerging open source market in the country in the near future?

What technology drives an application is irrelevant to the average user. If we look at the first billion people who use

In light of the current security crisis in the country, how do you think your solutions will be able to safeguard critical government data?

This is an interesting question which cuts across a complex domain and does

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not have a short answer. For safeguarding critical government What are your plans for the year 2009 with reference to data you need to adopt a layered defense in depth approach e-Governance? using people, process and technology.

The world of government work is changing. To meet the We believe that a comprehensive security program needs growing expectations of their constituents, governments to include both the physical security of facilities, such as need to consider new processes, technologies, and systems restricting access to buildings and monitoring alarm systems to improve service and communication. In India particularly, for fire or break-ins, and logical security of IT resources, such there is a growing need to localise the applications so as make as restricting access to sensitive data and monitoring network way for efficient functioning of the system. Addressing this traffic for signs of suspicious or malicious activity while using need, Microsoft has designed cost-effective and innovative technology which from inception is designed to be secure solutions that allow Indian government agencies to and reliable. leverage existing infrastructure and application investments Our solutions provide users and end to end experience of and accommodate for future demands. Some of these all these aspects. For example our physical security solution applications are: uses our own off the shelf technologies (Office SharePoint • Connected Government Framework (CGF) Server 2007, Office InfoPath 2007, Virtual Earth, Office At Microsoft, we believe technology can help deliver better Communicator 2007, Office System 2007, SQL Server quality and more cost-effective services within these tight 2005, Identity Integration Server (MIIS), Remote Desktop budgetary constraints. Our strategy in India is to work in and Terminal Services) integrated with some third party partnership with State and Central governments to ensure devices (CCTV, Access control devices, etc) for monitoring that our technology products and partner solutions meet the our own physical facilities across the globe. Similarly at the immediate and longer term needs of growing India. logical level whether it is the operating system, the network Our initiative for achieving this is the Connected protection, identity and access, encryption of data, server Government Framework (CGF) for State and Central protection, client protection, protection from malware, governments which has been localized as per the requirement protection at the browser level, prevention of data leakage of the Indian government. With CGF, our objective is to or data governance, rights management of the data or provide State and Central governments with a clear picture the development of secure applications our products and of where Microsoft technology can enable their organization procedures continue to strengthening your defenses against to deliver the transformation needed to support increasing attack. Our goal is to create products that are secure by citizen expectations in a managed, controlled and costdesign, secure in their default mode of operation, and secure effective way. The framework consolidates the solutions from when deployed. our partners, as well as our own solutions for e-Government Our dedicated Critical Infrastructure Protection Team around the common business challenges and places them in continues to drive strategic a context which makes sense to a change both at Microsoft and with local government.

• Citizen Service Platform (CSP) partners. Our goal is to enhance the Highlights security of critical infrastructure We call organisations that empower - banking, communications, their staff to deliver cost-effective, We will continue to focus on building a and transportation, energy, seamless services ‘people-ready’ trust worthy ecosystem, engineering for healthcare, and government organisations. Technology has a security, simplifying security, building services by increasing the key role in creating ‘people-ready’ fundamentally secure platforms and trustworthiness of software and organisations. Recognizing this, advancing ways for people to gain more IT services, and by collaborating Microsoft has designed a vision and control of their private data. Some of with governments and critical platform architecture called the the best examples of these efforts are infrastructure providers to reduce Citizen Service Platform. The CSP, the following: and manage risks. as our other offerings has been • Security and Privacy Technology customized as per the dynamic Innovation: Kernel Patch Protection, In the current volatile market Indian environment. The underlying Network Access Protection, Phishing scenario, is Microsoft India philosophy of the Citizen Service Filter, Microsoft Malicious Software betting big on the government Platform concept is to provide Removal Tool vertical? component based, Information • Engineering for Security with Government has always been a Technology-enabled solutions SDL and Privacy Guidelines for key vertical for Microsoft in India. for common services delivered by Developing Software Products and We are partnering with the GoI to Local District. Solutions that can Services finding technology solutions that be rapidly configured to support • Security User Experience: Windows helps in improving the operations common technology and process Security Centre of government and the delivery of foundations across agencies will services to its citizens, expand the deliver the quality and efficiency of • Defense in Depth: Windows quality and reach of educational service that is needed.

Defender, User Account Control, opportunities, and find new ways BitLocker Drive, Encryption, Nilakshi Barooah to grow the Indian Economy. nilakshi@egovonline.net Windows Service Hardening 38

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CENTRAL GOVERNMENT CORNER

e-Districts going Strong http://www.mit.gov.in

“

e-Districts are right now in a pilot phase.

Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) has more or less completed it, the other schemes will be sanctioned only in March 2009, and then there will be a eighteen month time frame for the pilot phase of the rest of the chosen states which are around twelve in number�

S. Abbasi Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communication and IT, Government of India 40 }

How has been the journey of National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) so far?

For the NeGP as a whole, the core infrastructure should be ready by the end of 2009. Most of the Common Service Centres (CSCs), States Wide Area Network (SWAN) and State Data Centre (SDC) should be functional by the end of 2009 in most of the states.

Though it may vary from one state to another. If one looks at the Central Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) such as Income Tax or Customs and Excise, the picture seems pretty good. These are the two MMPs where the project is more or less completed. Moreover, we are coming up with the Passport Seva Project.

Further, there is Ministry of Corporate Affairs-21 (MCA- 21) which has been completed. It is just the state Mission Mode Projects where we are facing a some problems in getting off the ground, and there is still some work left to be completed.

The e-Courts project ( an integrated project), which has implications for the state level also, is already under implementation. Further, Land Records phase II, Municipalities has been sanctioned as well. I believe, these services should take another three to four years to get implemented across the country for all the states.

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What was the vision behind e-District and what is the time frame for the completion of the project?

While there are Mission Mode Projects (MMPs), it is possible that there are certain services which fall between the crack. The idea behind the e-Districts project was to address this issue. The idea was to see whether the services which were being delivered traditionally can be digitised and be delivered using the common infrastructure like the Common Service Centres(CSCs), State Wide Area Network (SWAN) and State Data Centres (SDC). For certain other services like birth and death certificates, old-age pension, we were wondering if these processses can be streamlined, and their delivery made speedier. These services do not require a whole host of back-end computerisation process because once the computerisation happens at the back-end these services can be easily delivered through CSCs. So the entire process is relatively simple. And as most of these services are delivered at the district level so they came to be termed as e-Districts. e-Districts are right now in a pilot phase. Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) has more or less completed it, the other schemes will be sanctioned only in March 2009, and then there will be a eighteen month time frame for the pilot phase of the rest of www.egovonline.net

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the chosen states which are around twelve in number. There is a host of learnings from U.P. alone which we plan to use in formulating a national level scheme in the next six to seven months. But I think we will start sanctioning the funds to states only after their pilot projects have been implemented.

As per my estimates, the country-wide implementation across all districts of this project will take at least three years. So as of now we have a detailed time-line for the pilot projects only. U.P., Bihar, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu are some of the states which are already leading the way for e-Districts but in the next four to five months we can expect to see much more action in the arena of this e-District project in all the states across India.

What is the linkage between e-Districts, CSCs and SWAN? As far as linkages are concerned, if you want to have a centralised architecture through which you can deliver services then you have to web-enable them. This web enablement in the case of government is done through State Wide Area Network (SWAN). The State Data Centre (SDC) will be the point that the Common Service Centre (CSC) operator will access in order to provide the requested services by the citizens. CSC is simply a front-end through which the person or the citizen will make the request.

Unless the back-end of a department is computerised, the services of that department targeted through an e-District cannot be delivered even if CSCs, SWAN, and SDCs are in place because the department cannot process it. So all these (CSCs, SWAN, SDCs etc.) are various items that are required to ensure that various services are delivered to the citizens as seamlessly as possible.

How do you plan to address the issue of connectivity of data centres and e-Districts?

The point is that you already have a state government data centre and these data centres have their Points of Presence (PoP) in the district. So under e-District what we ensure is that whichever departments we are planning to cover is included under the PoP through the e-District project, so that the funds for it can come through the e-District project. This is the way of providing connectivity as far as the government part is concerned.

Then comes the question of connecting the citizens at a CSC. This is generally done through the Internet provided through VSAT or broadband. Meanwhile, Department of Information Technology (DIT) is also doing partial funding of the BSNL’s plan to provide broadband connections to the rural areas. We are hopeful that broadband services will be made available in the rural areas significantly over the next one year.

Do you think the current recession will impact the eGovernance projects which are working on the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.

If the economy goes under the impact of recession, government also suffers because the tax collection goes down, thereby bringing down the capacity to spend even for the government. But during the time of recession, having 42

government project is definitely a matter of greater credibility for any private player. So for private players in these times of recession, government projects becomes the best bet.

This induces a lot of interest amongst private players to get involved in government projects like National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).

As you mentioned, Uttar Pradesh has successfully implemented the e-District project, so what were the major challenges that you faced there?

Actually speaking, the challenges have been faced in reality by the state governments. But speaking from the central government perspective, the first challenge has been faced in the area of bringing about changes in the traditional ways of the governmental functioning, as and when demanded by the learnings carried forward from implementation elsewhere.

Second challenge relates to regulatory issues, for example regulating the rates of digitisation of data in different districts.

And finally the biggest challenge is that of sheer co-ordination of a national-level project of this kind.

In the year 2009 which are the states in which e-District project will see implementation?

Certain states are already moving fast towards the implementation of e-District like Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra and other states of South India. But truly speaking work is being done all across the country. So I am pretty sure that in 2009 you will be see not only the already established states doing well, but even new states will be joining the club of those states which are successfully implementing e-Districts. So it would not be right for me to pin-point any one state or district at this point of time as the only one doing well.

Do you have any personal targets for the year 2009?

We already have 23,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) already up and running. Well, by March 2009 we are planning to come up with at least 40,000 to 50,000 CSCs. And I think this is an achievable target because already a lot of ground work is going on though it might not be getting reflected on the books or accounts.

Do you think there is a need for the tendering process to be re-defined?

I do not think the government processes in terms of e-Tendering needs to be re-defined for it adequately provides emphasis on the needed degree of quality or quantity as might be demanded by the situation.

In the current threatened security scenario do you think we should fasten our pace towards a e-Governed nation?

Obviously, because e-Governance is the best way of keeping a check on people as well as various kinds of other data. So, in a e-Governed nations, not only will the security issue get addressed but even harassment of general public will stop.

So advancing towards a e-Governed nation is of utmost importance to us as a nation.

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Sandeep Budki sandeep@egovonline.net

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SPECIAL FEATURE

ontributing to evelop While serving to both Central and State Governments IT needs, Center for Development NATIONAL EGOVERNANCE SERVICES DELIVERY GATEWAY AND NATIONAL SERVICES DIRECTORY

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s part of its NeGP (National e-Governance Plan) initiative, Department of Information Technology (DIT) has laid down its vision for taking e-Governance initiative further with 27 Mission Mode Projects. CDAC has built and deployed National e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway (NSDG) and National Services Directory (NSD) which is the second Mission Mode Project to have gone live since 14th August 2008. NSDG is the first Gateway built for deployment at Central level. It is a messaging middleware conforming to various e-Governance Standards managed by DIT, such as Interoperability Interface Protocol and Specifications (IIP/IIS) that enable consistent communication and conformance to international standards such as the XML specifications and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Gateway brings in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework for the new as well as existing e-Governance services. DIT envisages various Gateways to be built at various levels, that is at state levels as well as domain levels, thereby establishing a Gateway Constellation which is an innovation in itself. NSD is the central Service Directory for coordination of message exchange among these Gateways constituting the Gateway Constellation

CONFORMANCE TO VARIOUS e-GOVERNANCE STANDARDS

DIT has designed various standards in collaborations with various government and industry representations. The Gateway architecture adheres to following standards: • Interoperability Interface Protocol (IIP) – IIP defines the XML based Message Structure and Message Exchange Pattern for SAP-toGateway-to-SP communication.

44 }

•

Interoperability Interface Specification (IIS) – IIS binds the IIP protocol to SOAP as message carrier.

• Inter-Gateway I n t e r c o n n e c t Specification (IGIS) – IGIS protocol defines the Message Structure and Message Exchange Pattern for Gateway-NSD and Gateway-Gateway communication.

• Gateway Common Services (GCS) – GCS defines the value added services such as User Authentication and Payment Gateway for enablement with a Gateway.

In addition to this, Gateways are required to demonstrate compliance to ISO and ISMS standards.

Every gateway will have to engage in Service Level Agreements with DIT and/or the corresponding controlling entity. NSDG is designed to deliver the requirements for performance, availability and reliability taking into consideration the future of e-Governance infrastructure scalability requirements.

NOT JUST A TEAM OF TWO BUT…

We have been talking about DIT and C-DAC but the whole thought process as well as implementation of the same involved other teams as well. NSDG and NSD

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eGOVERNANCE In Past: Nation had begun to take gradual steps in enabling e-Governance for the masses. The process took the first step with the automation of department services for the faster delivery of the same. However these were isolated attempts limited to the individual department services.

At Present: The next step was to take the web based approach and include the citizens in the automation process. But still the efforts were limited to department service level. As part of this program, Kiosks were established along with service centre concepts at key places. New delivery channels such as mobile devices etc. were enabled. The idea was to deliver services in an easier, better and faster way. With each of these steps, the time in delivering the services to masses was reduced by the best possible extent. However, further improvement was restrained by the fact that these automations were without any consideration for integration of interdependent services.

Government services are rarely delivered in isolations and are coupled with other department services.

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nd onvergence

And Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has taken many leads since its inception in 1988

SERVICE DELIVERY In Future: A need for integration of services to be provided by the government to the citizens is captured now. So as to a Government to Government (G2G) interoperation among e-Governance services is to be worked upon. Ideas were conceived to align the developments happening on technological fronts in areas of Web Services, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These are the tools which facilitate the B2B (Business to Business) interoperability. Gateway model was conceived to act as a tailored ESB for government services. It also was positioned to enable SOA framework for e-Governance service delivery and achieving e-Governance service interoperability. However, with the expected growth in number of e-Governance services, it is realised that having only one gateway will not fulfill the requirements identified. A vision for having multiple gateways connected by a central Service Directory came into the picture. NSD is for the enablement for gateway to gateway communication and service resolution across the gateways positioned at different levels.

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have been path breaking in the whole process of setting the united e-Governance framework for the nation.

The project has been managed by DIT has not just played as the controller to the project but has also been involved in the parenting and nourishing activities carried out along with CDAC. National Institute of Smart Government (NISG), Standardisation Testing Quality Certification (STQC) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) have contributed to the project at every stage of from conception to verification very constructively. The various issues could be resolved then and there with their active participation.

The technical issues have been brought to Technical Monitoring Committee chaired by the Additional Secretary, DIT. Project Reviews and Monitoring has been performed by Project Review and Steering Group chaired by the Secretary, DIT. IMPLEMENTATION PLATFORM

NSDG and NSD are developed on Open Source Software Platform.

All the software architecture components such as Operating System, Application Server, Database Server, Reporting services, Clustering services and Web services belong to open source technology.

The architecture does not compromise on the software quality parameters of

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performance, scalability and reliability requirements of the project. The hardware design of the system addresses the issues such as vendor lock-in, easy availability and scalability of the same for future enhancements.

OPERATIONAL OBJECTIVES

The operation and maintenance of NSDG is to be handled for 5 years

by C-DAC. The NSDG and NSD implementation will be updated and upgraded following the amendments to the standards as well as feedback from government service providers.

C-DAC will be operational in integrating the national level as well as domain related applications with NSDG every year. Accordingly C-DAC will guide the department service implementing agencies in the development of necessary connectors/adapters for integrating the applications identified.

BENEFICIARIES

On the commercial front, Gateway will encourage private players to participate as Service Access Providers (SAP) and act as single window for various services available with any gateway in the Gateway constellation. The government departments would be benefiting from the application to application interoperability. They will be able to serve citizens more efficiently. Citizens will benefit from the fact that more and more e-Governance services across the country are available for them.

FUTURE DIRECTION

DIT has positioned the Gateway at state data centre to achieve the complete e-Governance infrastructure in place.

NSDG and NSD will form the feedback loop for future work in the development of new e-Governance standards and extension of existing e-Governance standards. C-DAC and DIT will work to identify new facilities for value addition to the Gateway.

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SPECIAL FEATURE e-HEALTH

A

pplication of computers in medicine for expert systems for visualization, decision-making in the by-gone digital age have evolved to medical informatics in this information age. Medical informatics, the domain of high social relevance in India, is a newer multidisciplinary field so far with a defined skill set, educational pathway, comprehensive standards, etc. In developing countries like ours, medical informatics also promises to address the issues related to at least one major existing national divide namely – non-uniform distribution of healthcare services. Information Communications and Electronics Technologies (ICTE) can be effectively used to improve the overall healthcare delivery system for better healthcare services. This requires R&D efforts in multiple areas including development of telemedicine and tele-education systems, hospital information systems, picture archival and communication systems, biomedical instrumentations, virtual reality applications in medicine, and frameworks for standards compliant medical systems.

C-DAC has been working towards development of several technologies for better healthcare services for the last several years. These efforts have resulted in deployable systems and solutions for Telemedicine and Tele-education, Hospital Information System, Teleoncology, Decision Support System for Ayurveda, and Software Development Kits for international healthcare standards. These systems and solutions are briefly described below.

the specialist’s workstation is initiated from the patient end and the patient’s data is uploaded. The specialist then examines the data, makes a diagnosis, provides advice, and suggests a course of action. The two doctors get on to a video-conference to jointly arrive at the diagnosis and the course of treatment.

This advice is then transmitted back to the presenting doctor at patient end who takes appropriate action.

This essentially avoids patient discomfort of having to travel to the specialist’s office/clinic, or specialist’s discomfort of having to visit the patient, especially when the patient is in trauma.

Thus right care can be provided at the right place at the right time with minimal discomfort to all concerned.

This sort of interaction is becoming quite common.

C-DAC’s Telemedicine solutions named Mercury and Sanjeevani provide integrated solution to make such communication possible. They can be used to provide Tele-consultation for various fields of medicine including radiology, cardiology, oncology, and ophthalmology.

Telemedicine solution also enables Tele-education in critical domains using the same infrastructure.

HOSPITAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (HIS)

C-DAC’s Sushrut, a Hospital Information

System (HIS), has been developed with the objective of streamlining the flow of offering hassle-free treatment to a patient in a hospital, while allowing doctors and other staff to perform to their peak ability, in an optimised and efficient manner.

Sushrut is modular, thus ensuring sustained benefits through changes in technology, protecting and providing optimal returns from the investment.

It is modeled on a unique combination of a “patient centric and medical staff centric” paradigm, beneficial to the recipients and the providers of healthcare.

Sushrut uses a network of computers to gather, process, and retrieve patient care and administrative information for all hospital activities to satisfy the functional requirement of the users.

It also helps as a decision support system for the hospital authorities for developing comprehensive healthcare policies.

Sushrut incorporates an integrated computerised clinical information system for improved hospital administration and patient healthcare. It also provides an accurate, electronically stored medical record of all the treated patients. A datawarehouse of such records can be utilised for statistical requirements and for research.

TELE-ONCOLOGY

C-DAC pioneered the first implementation of the Tele-Oncology

TELEMEDICINE

Telemedicine is the use of Telecommunication and Information technologies to provide clinical care at a distance. Consider a typical Telemedicine interaction. A patient goes to a doctor, who after examination of the patient’s file, feels the need for a second opinion. The doctor then consolidates the relevant clinical data into the patient’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and then seeks an opinion of a specialist doctor using Tele-consultation. A connection to 46

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SPECIAL FEATURE •

Modules of TEJHAS (Telemedicine Enabled Java based Hospital Automation System) Core Services

Support Services

Back Office

• • • •

• • • • • • •

• •

• • • •

Patient Management Consultation Surgical Oncology Resource Scheduling Investigation Nuclear Medicine Radiation Oncology Chemotherapy

•

Pharmacy

Cash & Billing Central Stores Purchase Blood Bank Radiology Engineering Central Sterile Services Department

•

Enquiry Management Information System Master Data

•

Users

DICOM AND HL7 SDKS

TEJHAS: C-DAC’s Hospital Automation System integrated with the ONCONET Telemedicine system

system in India in the state of Kerala.

It is known as ONCONET-Kerala. It is a comprehensive telemedicine solution, which has established knowledge enabled oncology network connecting specialty hospital at Regional Cancer Centre, Thriuvananthapuram (RCC-T) with remote hospitals at various places (Kannur, Kochi, Palakkad, Kozhenchery, and Kollam) in Kerala. It provides telemedicine services in early cancer detection, follow-up consultation, treatment, prevention of cancer, and tele-education. A web-enabled Hospital Information System, called TEJHAS (Telemedicine Enabled Java based Hospital Automation System), was also developed and integrated with the ONCONET Telemedicine system.

•

Applications as well as data can be plugged into it to help you customise the tool to your specific needs aided by automated data loading and customised textual and graphical report generation capabilities.

Development team consists of IT professionals and Ayurveda experts of national and international repute.

end-to-end medical solutions based on traditional medicines at your fingertips.

With AyuSoft your health decisions are expected to be more informed, more accurate, and quicker.

Key features of AyuSoft are:

C-DAC’s Medical Informatics Standards Software Development Kit (SDK) for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Health Level 7 (HL7) are toolkits that provide APIs for applications/medical devices to comply with NEMA’s DICOM standard and Health Level 7’s HL7 standard.

Both are rapid application development tools, which provide high return on investment through cost effective implementation of the standards.

AYUSOFT

AyuSoft is a vision of converting classical Ayurvedic texts into comprehensive, authentic, intelligent, and interactive knowledge repositories with complex analytical tools. It is a pioneering multidimensional effort for Indian traditional medicinal system. It provides

C-DAC Medical Informatics SDK • • • • •

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Integrated system offering multiple interconnected applications under the same umbrella.

Systematic examination tool as per classical Ayurvedic guidelines.

Investigations, case analysis, etc. according to practical clinical needs and research challenges.

A high-end query database with multi-dimensional search utility.

System addressing heterogeneous needs of various user categories like hospitals, practitioners, and researchers.

Offers human expert analysis with human-independent analysis.

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The toolkits are designed to be easily programmable allowing DICOM and HL7 developers to build sophisticated and complex applications on top of these standards. The toolkits allow building applications targeting multiple platforms, thus providing flexibility to developers to write applications once, run anywhere.

Both SDKs are supported with plenty of sample test codes and tutorials that make life easier for developers to start using them in a short period.

Comprehensive API documentation explains the usage of different components of the SDKs. 47

SPECIAL FEATURE KAVERI- AN INSIGHT

K

AVERI is a Valuation & Registration Software For The Department of Stamps & Registration, Government of Karnataka.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

To take care of the entire registration process inclusive of necessary report generation and property valuation Providing efficient and quality service to the general public at a nominal cost Speed up the work thereby improving the quality Streamlining the procedures Business process re-engineering coupled with computerisation to enhance the productivity Continuous increase in revenue collection Step in the direction of realising the concept of a paperless office

•

• • • • • •

HOW HAS THE PROJECT SUCCEEDED IN ACHIEVING ITS OBJECTIVES?

The software includes all the processes followed during the registration, viz. the Property Valuation, Stamp Duty Calculation and payment, Party Information, Receipt Generation, Witness Information and Capturing Photograph and Thumb Images. Instant valuations of immovable properties are done. More than 35 diverse ranges of

reports like Endorsement, Certificates, Daily Register, Index, etc. are generated.

The added feature of this software is that reports can be customised in local language also • Valuation and e-Registration software has endowed the citizen with efficient and quality services.

Quick and efficient registration process ‘Same day registration’ service Return of the original documents within 30 minutes Immediate search of important documents Faster and efficient document copy Web Access to valuation information Automated KIOSKs for online calculations of various duties and also furnish additional information on the registration process, the pre-requisites, contact details, etc.

• With the activities in the department becoming faster and efficient, the quality of services offered to the citizen has increased tremendously.

Since the work burden of the department officers has reduced to a great extent, the focus is now on better service to the citizen.

• The procedures followed during the registration process are streamlined

Revenue collection before the introduction of Kaveri (C-DAC’s Valuation and E-Registration Software in Karnataka): (Rs. In Crores) Sl.No

Year

Stamp duty

Registration fee

Total

01

2001-2002

821.87

207.38

1029.25

02

2002-2003

989.43

278.85

1268.28

During these periods, the rate of stamp duty on conveyance 10% and 2% Registration fee was in force.

Revenue collection after the introduction of Kaveri: Sl.No

Year

Stamp duty

Registration fee

Total

01

2003-2004

1333.01

176.16

1509.17

The Government of Karnataka reduced the rate of stamp duty on conveyance from 10% to 8% and Registration fee from 2% to 1%, which effects from 01-04-2003. In spite of reduction in stamp duty and registration fee there is significant growth in revenue as the Kaveri system calculates the valuation of property automatically eradicating the discretionary power of the Registering officer in accessing the valuation of property.

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by the computerisation of the department. The software ensures that all the necessary procedures required for registration are followed strictly. Transparency in the process has evolved in due course of time.

• Business process re-engineering coupled with computerisation has improved performance and cut down costs of the department. Tasks are completed in much lesser time than actually required doing them manually.

• Increase in Revenue Generation in the department is noticed.

• Valuation and e-Registration software reduces the manual process of writing records such as Day book, Daily amount reconciliation, Periodic reports, Pending document information, etc., as these are generated through the software.

Such records are error free, accurate, quickly and anytime generated. A major amount of time and efforts of the departmental staff is reduced by this facility. This is genuinely a step in the direction of realising the concept of a paperless office.

DETAILS

Valuation and e-Registration software suite is a client-server application, which takes care of: • Complete computerisation of the existing 5-step registration process • Determining the Market value of any immovable property located within the state.

• Scanning of registered documents and a secure document archival technique with backup facility.

• Generation of all types of reports (periodical, miscellaneous) at all levels in the department’s hierarchy.

• Capture and storage of digital images along with thumb print of every applicant. www.egovonline.net

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SPECIAL FEATURE

Overview of the Valuation and e-Registration software suite

Electronic generation of Index II. Daily report generation for Sub Registrar office including Receipt, Indexes, Minute Book, Day Book, A Register, remittance etc.

Automatic fees and stamp duty calculations Single data entry architecture Secure CD based Archival system Exhaustive document search based on different parameters Encumbrance Search certificate generation Marriage registration Firms and Societies registration.

MIS report generation at all levels in the hierarchy.

Vendor Management software Web enabled info base Bilingual interface (English and Kannada)

• •

• • • • • • • • • • •

SUSTAINABILITY

Kaveri has long sustainability.

Its robust features and design help in the long running of the application.

The software has taken into consideration the conditions, working of the department and the rules and process, which would enhance or transform in the years to come.

The BOT concept is an exclusive feature contributing to the functioning of the software. In the long run, the department staff would be enriched with the hardware and the software concerns, thereby owning the well-maintained system, enabling the department to continue with utmost ease.

Revenue generation is a key feature of the Kaveri Application Suite.

The service charges collected

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•

•

•

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from the citizen will suffice the e x p e n s e s incurred by the Vendors as well as generate revenue to the department.

Approximately 21% of increase in revenue has been observed during the year 2004-2005.

FUTURE PLANS

• • • •

Cost Effective •

REDUCTION IN CORRUPTION

The following features help in reducing corruption: • Automatic valuation of property.

There is no discrepancy in valuating the property manually.

No department official is involved in the valuation.

• Automatic calculation of Stamp Duty, Registration and other fees.

Since the fees are automatically calculated through the software, there is no scope for extra recovery from the citizen.

• Vendor Management System.

The Vendor Management System of the software calculates the exact payment to be made to the Vendors based on the services rendered and generates the report. This forms the basis for the payment to the Vendors. There is no manual intervention in the calculation of this amount. generation of • Automatic Encumbrance Certificate.

The Encumbrance Certificate is automatically generated through the system. Manual search for encumbrance could lead to vested interests.

INTEGRATION WITH LAND RECORDS DEPARTMENT

• • • • •

The agriculture land transaction will be updated in BHOOMI server at the end of the day.

No need of data entry at BHOOMI client.

The corruption will be reduced at BHOOMI kiosk.

The FIFO concept adopted at BHOOMI client.

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Online search for Encumbrance Anywhere Registration Readymade Data to other Governing bodies Benefit to Town Planning Department

•

Kaveri is highly cost effective in all respects. The expenses incurred per transaction and the service charges to the citizen have been so premeditated that the department and the vendors begin revenue generation right from the implementation of the software.

Kaveri proves to be cost effective by endowment of the following services…

...to the citizen • Quick and efficient registration process • ‘Same Day Registration’ service • Return of original documents within 30 minutes • Immediate search of important documents • Faster and efficient document copy • Web based information • Automated KIOSK for instant information at the offices. …to the department • Reduction in time consuming and error prone writing work • Faster, easier and highly efficient registration process • Reduction in writing of Index II and search writing • Reduction in mundane chores of writing reports • Document image access facility • Improved revenue for the department.

• Improvement in the work environment • Enhancement of department staff (computer literacy) • Greater control of administrative authorities • Tremendous boost to the image of the department • Better services to the citizen • Efficient and faster decision making • Quality service and good relief to the beneficiaries • Better office environment • Quick and accurate generation of various reports 49

SPECIAL FEATURE NRCFOSS & BOSS LINUX

T

he world of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) changes rapidly. New technologies and along with them new opportunities, come and go at an ever increasing speed. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is one such development, that is playing out before us today. FOSS signifies many things like revolutionary development process, disruptive technology, ideological movement, new knowledge and standards, and many more. It offers many opportunities for governmental, private sector, and educational institutions.

Free and Open Source Software and the associated “Network effect” is playing an accelerating role in the emergence of an Information Society.

The benefit realisation of FOSS has motivated governments, industries and communities worldwide to adopt and implement FOSS. Advantages like increasing interoperability, developing local capacity / industry, reducing costs, conserving foreign exchange, achieving vendor independence, enabling localisation, reducing piracy / copyright infringements and increasing growth of knowledge-based society are among the compelling reasons propelling the adoption of FOSS. Market forces are tilting towards open standards and there is an increasing demand from customers for interoperability. Microsoft’s agreement with Novell on joint interoperability of Windows and Linux is in indicator of this trend.

The customers want to deploy the best and the most cost effective solution backed up by assured support.

There is also a need to enable not only proprietary and open source systems to communicate and inter-operate efficiently and effectively, but even various open source systems from multiple distributors should be made interoperable among themselves.

Successful free and open source projects require an eco-system of supportive commercial efforts and there is also the need to bridge the layers between users and developers.

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NRCFOSS

India as a country has emphasised upon the Open Source Software (OSS) with the intention of leveraging the IT prowess

It is estimated that by 2012 nearly 80 percent of commercial software will include elements of open source technology. Industry and government can play an effective role in growing the entire eco-system around Open Source. While the often-cited cost and stability benefits of FOSS are attractive, Governments often choose to promote FOSS in their own countries for a variety of other reasons also” of the citizens of India. However, there are many hurdles to be crossed such as lack of awareness, absence of standards and interoperability criteria, lack of skilled manpower in open source software technologies, absence of appropriate business models, insufficient user confidence and the very low awareness of the technology itself.

It is in these contexts that Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology set up a National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) in Chennai with the twin roles of bridging the digital

divide as well as strengthening the Indian Software industry. NRCFOSS will contribute to the growth of FOSS in India through Research & Development, Human Resource Development, Networking & Entrepreneurship development, as well as, serve as the reference point for all FOSS related activities in the country including the creation and maintenance of a National FOSS Portal (www.nrcfoss.org.in). The activities of NRCFOSS are coordinated by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chennai and Anna University (AU-KBC Research Centre). The primary focus area of C-DAC is FOSS technology and solutions, while the primary focus area of AU-KBC Research Centre is Human Resource Development.

NRCFOSS piloted a proof of concept through which it introduced FOSS Technologies in the formal & non-formal sectors. In the formal sector, NRCFOSS introduced the FOSS in engineering undergraduate curriculum of the Anna University with an affiliation of 254 engineering colleges. The strategy was to train teachers of engineering colleges and equip them to offer FOSS electives.

And student projects in their colleges at the UG/MCA levels as related to FOSS are inspired as part of the curriculum so as to ensure that large number of Engineers and MCAs are produced every year with exposure, training and skills in FOSS technologies. In the first phase around 207 teachers from around 105 engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu were offered training.

In the second phase NRCFOSS would extend the scheme to other states.

Already, few of the other states have shown keen interest to introduce such programmes in their states.

BOSS

As part of the development of FOSS

Objectives of NRCFOSS • • • • •

Human resource development for general FOSS capacity building in the formal and non-formal sectors Design and development of FOSS products and technologies with emphasis in the areas of e-Governance, School education and SMEs Encourage and promote the development of applications under FOSS & SOA framework in the areas of School education, SMEs and e-Governance domains Supporting Localisation and Indian language computing using FOSS FOSS Promotion and decimation through study programmes, lectures, symposia, conferences, exhibitions and the like.

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SPECIAL FEATURE (SMEs), schools, and the first time user. A second target group is the Linux distro (distribution) developers so that they can develop a new distro based on BOSS Linux.

BOSS LINUX IS AVAILABLE IN BOTH DESKTOP EDITION AND SERVER EDITION.

products and technologies, NRCFOSS has come out with an Indian version of Linux named as Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) which supports Indian languages. It was decided by a committee of experts to have an Indian distribution of Linux so that the language used for the desktop environment and some of the applications can be in the Indian language which will enable the mainly non-English literate users in the country to be exposed to ICT and to use the computer more effectively. In the long term, the BOSS Linux project will attempt to be the standard GNU/Linux distribution for desktop computers in India.

This Linux distribution (distro) is based on Debian Linux and is targeted at the government user initially. The ultimate objective of creating BOSS Linux is to enable the people of India, most of who are not English-literate, to be exposed to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and GNU/Linux. It is hoped that with this version of BOSS that is available in the Indian language, more people will turn to FOSS as an alternative to using illegal unlicensed proprietary software.

The availability of BOSS Linux will have a positive impact on the digital divide in India as more people can now have access to software in their local language in order to use the Internet and other ICT facilities effectively.

Community Information Centres (CIC’s), and Internet cafes will benefit from BOSS Linux too as this software can be utilised to power these outlets and is also affordable and easy to install, use and support.

The primary target groups for BOSS Linux are the government employees/ users, Small and Medium Exporters ov

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BOSS Linux Desktop OS is bundled with the BharateeyaOO a derivative of Open Office suite which supports commonly used document types and open standard file types apart from utilities such as Internet Browser, email client, Internet messaging client, pdf viewers and important features like Bulk Document converter & device drivers required for the government domain. BOSS Linux incorporates the graphical installer with which any end user with little knowledge of computer can also install the OS. BOSS Linux desktop edition version 3.0 is currently available in DVD format with install, live and utility options.

BOSS Linux Server is a Debian based server operating system. BOSS Linux Server features include userfriendly GUI Front end that has Firefox, Thunderbird and also supports printers and USB devices such as cameras.

Presently it supports Intel and AMD x86/x86-64 architecture and is being tested on other architectures. BOSS Entry level server was released during Elitex 2008 (Jan 2008). BOSS Server has been upgraded to advanced level server featuring Virtualization, LDAP Server and LTSP Server. BOSS advanced level server is been configured for Intel ix86, AMD- 64 and Intel Core duo. BOSS Advanced Server 1.0 includes Web Server (Apache2), Database Server (Mysql and Postgresql), Virtualisation Server (Xen), Mail Server (Postfix), Proxy Server (Squid), Network Server (bind9 and DHCP3) and File Server (Samba and NFS) Today, several state governments have recognised the advantages of using open source software. C-DAC has also entered into a pact with National Informatics Centre and state Governments of Tamil 4th Anniversary Issue

Nadu, Chattisgarh, Kerala and Bihar for deploying BOSS Linux for their eGovernance projects. Witnessing the encouraging response from Government organization, C-DAC has initiated three tier support centre and also has plans to extend support service to its customers through a 24 X 7 help desk.

C-DAC is now re-designing the eGovernance framework by its offerings to the government organisations. SaaS is emerging as a suitable model for many organizations to create a more flexible base for supporting the business. C-DAC aims to broaden the facility of its data centre to Government organizations, which may not have the adequate facilities to set up or may lack requisite technical manpower in the field of IT. Using SaaS and cloud computing as a component of their ongoing IT strategy, could make great economic sense for end users. C-DAC has employed SaaS & cloud computing internally within its organisation at Chennai and plans to expand it to its centres in Delhi, Bangalore, etc.

C-DAC Chennai is working on development of SaaS delivery stack based on Model driven Architecture.

C-DAC is going to introduce the SaaS model in computing internal operations for government agencies. CDAC Chennai’s Personnel Information System is currently working on SaaS and once the system becomes stable , the agency will extend the service to government departments on a pilot basis with in one year.

Most state Government have data centres and their departments are connected under State Wide Area Network (SWAN). Thus, SaaS would be easiest way to automate operations in Government.

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SPECIAL FEATURE INDIA DEVELOPMENT GATEWAY INITIATIVE Inspired by inclusive vision, powered by technology

O

ur country is well poised to take the benefits of ICT to the common man. There has been consistent progress in addressing the challenges that exists - be it infrastructure or social barriers. The India Development Gateway (InDG) initiative is in response to limitations that exist at the social front. This nation-wide initiative is supported by the Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and IT, GOI and executed by the Hyderabad unit of C-DAC. InDG facilitates rural empowerment through provision of credible information products and services, that respond to the real and strategic needs of the unreached, especially women and poor, in their local language. In the process, it catalyzes the use of ICT for collaboration and knowledge sharing among development stakeholders.

It is an established fact that Information, when properly provided, is a positive power of unequalled strength. India Development Gateway thus follows a carefully worked out strategy for fulfilling its objective.

Building symbiotic partnership with various development stakeholders, delivery of value added content and services through online and offline

presence, use of local languages for content delivery and ensuring strong pro-poor and pro-women orientation in all the services, are the guiding strategies for this initiative The online mode through the multilingual portal, www.indg.in, provides knowledge management services on the thematic areas (initially the five sectors of Agriculture, Primary Education, Health, Rural Energy and eGovernance), collaborative tools and a platform for learning and networking to its user communities. To begin with, five Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali), apart from English are presently used for information delivery.

A content framework desinged in consultation with user communities, serves as the strong backbone for the portal. The initiative is currently associating with over 200 organisations for generation of content on about 2000 topics.

The rainbow of associating institutions include international agencies, government, civil society organisations, community based organisations and private agencies. A specific point of interest is that, the rural communities have been generators of knowledge,

apart from being users of it too, in this initiative.

InDG follows a decentralised content management system for content on the multilingual portal. An automated content flow process that ensures free flow of authenticated, unbiased, value added content is the key feature of the portal. Various interesting features that aim at providing interactivity and comfortable use to the rural audience are also available on the portal. The offline mode in the form of products complements the online mode, wherever connectivity and other delivery issues are present.Participation of rural communities and the people working closely with them at every stage of the initiative has been one of the unique characteristics of India Development Gateway.

Constant interaction with user communities is made possible through consultative workshops, field visits and various outreach events. Capacity building activities for content contributors and master trainers of village knowledge centre operators are also facilitated as a part of the initiative.

As the rural landscape is set to take advantage of the flourishing ICT initiatives, by various institutions, and more specifically through the Common Service Centres, InDG offers the much required content that makes the difference in the lives of rural people.

India Development Gateway - At a Glance Agriculture in InDG - Towards sustainable use of resources and gainful employment The Agriculture vertical of www.indg.in focuses on technologies and processes for sustainable use of resources, besides creating avenues for employment and supplementary income for the rural communities.

Our user communities share and use information related to Banking and credit, crop production technologies, best practices, Animal husbandry, various on and off farm enterprises. Crucial inputs such as weather based advisory and market information for farming community and Potential Fishing zones for fishermen are available in local languages.

Health in InDG - Improving the quality of Health in Rural India The Health vertical of www.indg.in focuses on areas that contribute to improving the health scenario among rural communities, especially that of women and child. InDG has been effective in addressing the information needs related to the adolescent and reproductive health of women in rural communities. Other important topics include Hygiene, First Aid, diseases, Child health, Nutrition and a database of health care services.

Primary Education in InDG - Establishing the right of a child to quality education The Primary Education vertical of www.indg.in focuses on child rights and improving the quality of primary education. One can access information related to child rights, girl child education, multimedia content on various subjects, resource materials for teachers and IT literacy. e-Governance in InDG - Complementing the e-Gov movement in the country The e-Governance vertical of www.indg.in focuses on propagating the nation wide e-Governance initiatives through provision of related information in local languages. ICT initiatives in states and judiciary, downloadable public utility forms, online citizen services, resource links, mobile governance are some of the key areas covered in the portal.

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SPECIAL FEATURE INITIATIVES IN e-EDUCATION

D

evelopment of a Quality Assurance Framework, Quality metrics, prototype tool for evaluation and comparison of e-Learning applications and training the teachers in e-Learning are the various initiatives being undertaken under e-Education.

Quality Assurance Framework for e-Learning is a three year project funded by e-Learning Division, DIT, GoI. Objective of the project is to develop quality metrics that can be used for quantifying the various quality parameters of an e-Learning tool and the content and develop a prototype tool that can be used by end users for deriving the quality metrics so that the effectiveness of a tool can be measured and also different tools can be compared.

The quality assurance framework adopted web service architecture to facilitate deployment of quality parameter evaluation modules on various nodes to circumvent inherent limitations while evaluating the parameters.

The prototype tool upon evaluation of intended quality parameters viz., Scalability, Security, Content Reusability and Portability, Usability and Accessibility will generate quality parameter wise analytical report along with executive summary report

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comprising quality index value.

As a part of the project C-DAC organizing a five day training program for academia and industry on eLearning tools and practices, content development and standards and course management with hands on sessions.

Quality Assurance Framework for e-Learning is a three year project funded by e-Learning Division, Department of Information Technology, Government of India”

GRID LEARNING

“Collaborative Class Room” grid based e-Learning experimentation is a funded project by DIT, GoI, under the foundation phase of Garuda Grid Computing initiative. The objective of the project is to establish collaborative environment for educational purpose, jointly by IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC in collaboration with Garuda Grid Partner

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Institutes. The project focus is to deploy access-grid collaboration environment that comes with various tools and solutions for e-learning especially video conferencing and audio conferencing coupled with third party software solution for content aggregation and hosting on grid nodes. This project has research component which involves exploring network infrastructure based experiments such as QoS, High-qualityvideo transmission and Multicasting and comes with specific interfaces for e-Learning grid services.

MULTILINGUAL e-LEARNING FRAMEWORK

e-Sikshak, is a multilingual e-Learning environment developed by C-DAC, Hyderabad. e-Sikshak provides features like Course Organiser, Discussion/ Bulletin Board, Announcements, Assessment, Collaboration, Query Handler, email, WhiteBoard, Chat with Indian Language Interface.

These functionalities are developed as components and can be interfaced to other e-Learning tools.

C-DAC, Hyderabad developed Cyber Security Course content having multiple presentations formats which include PPT, PDF, Recorded Video Lecture, Flash Animations. This course is being offered over internet to working professionals, IT administrators and Information Security personnel. The work was supported by eLearning Division, DIT, Government of India.

The e-Sikshak framework is being used by C-DAC to offer e-Learning courses like Core Competency in Software Process Management (CCSPM) and Cyber Security.

Indian Law Institute, New Delhi is offering course on Intellectual Property Rights using eSikshak.

This work is developed as part of a funded R&D project of e-Learning group, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India.

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FEATURE

POWERGRID TO KNOWLEDGEGRID POWERGRID has adopted a multidimensional approach for empowering all users of its IT enabled services and facilities covering all its functional areas for the benefit of all stakeholders

P

OWERGRID as a public utility, is committed to the principle of good governance and has adopted a multidimensional approach in accomplishment of the mandate of e-Governance. The vision of e-Governance in POWERGRID is ‘Transformation of POWERGRID into KNOWLEDGEGRID’. The mantra for e-Governance is “IT is Of the user, For the user, By the user”.

The objective of e-Governance initiatitive in POWERGRID is empowering all users of its IT enabled services and facilities covering all its functional areas for the benefit of all stakeholders such as the organisation, employees, government, State Electricity Boards and peer organisations, business partners/vendor communities and the citizens and society at large.

MILESTONES OF e-GOVERNANCE

The continuously growing and increasingly demanding business environment as well as transparency in business function calls for e-Governance in all business processes. POWERGRID has taken a holistic approach towards e-Governance initiatives.

ENTERPRISE WIDE AREA NETWORK

A futuristic Enterprise Wide Area Network (EWAN) was envisaged in 2002 to establish state-of-theart infrastructure as a platform for e-Governance initiatives.

EWAN consists of 24x7 data centres with high uptime and high speed connectivity (2/10 Mbps) among the various critical locations of the organisation. EWAN is capable of carrying data, voice and video traffic across the connected locations.

Two dedicated Internet leased links (8 Mbps and 3 Mbps) have been provided at corporate centre, Gurgaon as a single gateway to Internet for all connected locations. e-Governance initiative is overlain on the top of converged EWAN 54 }

infrastructure.

The e-Governance initiatives comprise of IT enabled services for internal and external stakeholders bundled under the key elements viz. DATANET, VIDEONET, VOICENET.

)DATANET DATANET comprises of data services which are provided through converged network. The following services are provided through DATANET: Integrated Grid Management System: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System/Energy Management has been deployed with state-of-the art technology for management of grid operation of extra high voltage intra and inter regional network of power system.

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The e-Governance initiatives of POWERGRID comprises of IT enabled services for internal and external stakeholders”

Centralised Finance and Accounting System (FAS): FAS is an in-house system which captures all financial transaction across the organisation and provides online status of the same.

The POWERGRID website, www. powergridindia.com, has multifaceted features to act both as information portal as well as single platform for web service delivery. The web Servises are Inspection Management System(IMS), Online Recruitment System, Online Complaint Management System, Online Tender System, Online Bill Tracking System and Sub-Vendor Status System.

)VIDEONET VIDEONET provides video conferencing facility to the top/middle management level personnel at Corporate Centre and Regional Head Quarters. At corporate 4th Anniversary Issue

centre, Gurgaon a high end MCU based video conferencing unit has been installed which is capable of carrying out video conferencing with three locations simultaneously at 512 Kbps.

The VIDEONET system is being used on a regular basis for project monitoring, budget monitoring and e-Training. The use of video conferencing system has resulted in huge cost saving and time saving by avoiding journey of the top/ middle personnel.

)VOICENET Implementation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system known as VOICENET is one of the biggest implementations of VOIP system so far in INDIA. The coverage of this System is in the corporate centre and the thirteen regional offices of POWERGRID. The VOICENET includes around 1,300 telephone sets distributed across the connected locations. The VoIP system has helped in improving the cost effective communication among the employees.

CONCLUSION

Considering POWERGRID pioneering initiative in e-Governance Ministry of Power has entrusted POWERGRID with the project of establishment of National Power Monitoring Centre (NPMC).

The centre has been established with a control room in the Ministry of Power as an apex monitoring setup for a country wide power scenario of central and state power projects as well as online grid operational status. The futuristic planning and effective execution of eGovernance projects has resulted into huge tangible and intangible benefit to the company and society. However, POWERGRID foresees this not as a destination but as a journey, an endless journey of improvement.

Samir Chaudhury, DGM(IT) Sunil Kumar, Manager(IT)

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FEATURE

POWERING TELECOM SERVICES POWERTEL offers its country wide telecom network to support the e-Governance initiatives of Government of India and various state governments

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OWERTEL has the unique distinction of being the only telecom player with a country wide over head optic fibre network using Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) on its vast power transmission infrastructure making it sturdy, secure and vandalism proof. We have a network coverage of more than 20,000 Kms with multiple self resilient rings covering over 100 cities.

The DWDM backbone network has a capability of 32 lamda capacity with scalability to Terabit capacity level and the entire network is monitored 24x7 and managed through Network Management Systems established at its National and Regional Control Centres.

Our network reliability is of 99.99% and the licenses we hold are ISP Category “A” and National Long Distance (NLDO).

Our clientele include country’s leading NLDOs, Cellular Operators, ILDS, ISPs, BPOs , MNCsand government agencies. The range of services offered by us includes provisioning of leased circuits and IP leased circuits at E1, DS3, STM1 levels and above.

POWERGRID is also geared up to provide value added services such as Video Conferencing, VoIP, and MPLS based VPNs utilising its network.

The Pilot Project successfully completed for installation of GSM& Microwave Antenna on its transmission

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line towers which is expected to pave way for major break through for rural connectivity and e-Governance projects. POWERTEL offers its country wide telecom network to support the

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e-Governance initiatives of Government of India and various state governments.

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Making e-Nagriks for e-Governance http://www.itwb.org/

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We are taking SWAN to the Gram Panchayats in West Bengal”

West Bengal had plans for setting up of 6,797 Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the state, when can we expect these CSCs to be functional?

So far we have been able to put in place a little over 2,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in the state. There are two Service Level Agencies (SLAs) – one is SREI and another is Reliance Communications. These CSCs have started providing basic services such as providing birth and death certificates.

Some of them have gone to the extent of tying up with the Electricity Boards for making bill payment options available, this has happened in the Hoogli district.

They have also started providing services such as reservations in the Indian Railways. So far the response from the public has been good. In the Hoogli district the pilot projects are running successfully.

Siddharth Principal Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal 56 }

The contract for West Bengal State Wide Area Network (WBSWAN) was signed way back in September 2007.

How are you addressing the issue of last mile connectivity through this?

90 – 95 percent of the work on the West Bengal State Wide Area Network (WBSWAN) is complete. We would be concluding the remaining work by the end of December 2008. We would be inaugurating it in the beginning of 2009. We have a pilot project in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal.

WBSWAN only provides connectivity 4th Anniversary Issue

up to the block level. Therefore, SWAN connects all the districts and an extension of it connects all the sub-division and block level But in Bardhaman, we have gone down to all the 277 Gram Panchayats. This initiative is the first of it kind in the country. Now, we have plans for rolling out this pilot project in the remaining districts of the state. We have already send the proposal for the same to the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India and they are examining the same. Since this project intends to connect all the Gram Panchayats, we would be glad if the Ministry of Panchayati Raj funds it.

Another interesting thing we have done in Bardhaman is that instead of hardware based solutions for video conferencing, we have a local based company for developing the software based solution.

This has reduced the cost per point from INR 2 lakh to about INR 4,000. We plan to put video conferencing softwares in all the Gram Panchayats of Bardhaman and some of them are already in place.

In our interactions with the District and the Sub-Divisonal Administrtation, we have found out that these facilities are extensively being used. Encouraged by such feedback, we plan to replicate the model in other districts also.

How is the work on State Data Centre (SDC) progressing?

The work on the State Data Centre (SDC) has been initiated. We already www.egovonline.net

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have the consultants and the implementing agency in place for the same. The construction of the building for the SDC has started which we expect to be functional very soon. In the meanwhile, the data is being stored in the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The data will be eventually transferred to the SDC, which we expect to be functional by May 2009. There is no delay with the development and storage of data because of the absence of the SDC right now. The SDC will be an extension of these services.

With the current threatened security scenario of our country, do you think the computerised police departments of West Bengal will act as an effective tool for checking terrorist activities in the state?

In terms of physical security in areas such as Salt Lake or Rajaghat, we are in conversation with the IT industry and the Police Departments for enabling ICT based security solutions.

We have gone a step ahead of that, the IT Department of West Bengal has chosen a private entity who is developing a product for security purposes. The product which is being developed by us is a very interactive one and it enables the analysis of any movement and can take a picture which can be sent on a mobile device of the security professional. We are trying to ensure all the safety and security aspects pertaining to cyber security, IT industry security and how to improve public surveillance with the help of ICT tools.

What has been the major partnerships in West Bengal under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model? Apart from private sector, do you have partnerships with other agencies outside the realm of government?

In West Bengal, number of e-Governance projects has been on a PPP model such as WBSWAN and CSCs. In terms of the video-conferencing as well, we worked on a PPP model as there was a close collaboration with the private players.

So far, we have had a very fruitful partnership with private players for the e-Governance projects.

West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation (WEBEL) has developed a number of products which are not strictly PPP based, but they are developed in close collaboration with academic institutions such as IIT Kharagpur, IT Department, Jadavpur University. We also have the Centre for Promotion of Open Source which promotes the use of open source software which ensures that the masses have a taste of a ICT. We have developed the software called Baisakhi Linux in Bengali language for the benefit of the citizens.

What has been the key achievements in developing IT software?

It is our intention to cover most of the schools in the remote areas by providing them education through multimedia. From the very beginning, we have tried to address the people who are physically challenged. WEBEL has developed a BRAIL software in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur where people can use libraries through this software. This software is being used in 120 schools, in 22 states in 13 different languages across the country. We are already thinking about the health sector as well. We developed a tele-medicine product 58

which is used in four projects where the lateral hospitals are connected with the nodal hospitals in West Bengal. Beyond the state, the product is used in the North-Eastern regions as well, in states such as Tripura. These two products have won all major national awards.

Department of Information Technology, GoI has emphasised that state Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) are going to be the focus for the next few years, what are the developments on this front in West Bengal?

I am a bit disillusioned. The Detail Project Report (DPR) for the Mission Mode Projects has also been prepared and we are now waiting for the funds to be released by the Government of India for rolling out these projects. Though the government processes takes a long time, the Government of India is taking a little longer to release the funds. We are waiting for these funds, so that we can start the process. It has not been done for any other state as well. If it is done for one line ministry, it will be done for all the other ones. We have been told that some development is happening under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM). Whichever, way it is, the MMPs can be rolled out only when the money come rolling.

In the implementation of the various e-Governance projects across West Bengal, what do you think have been the major roadblocks?

One of the major roadblocks in the implementation of eGovernance projects has been Capacity Building. Issues of convincing, orientation, training the people and how to motivate the people to be a part of the process. One very important thing in this regard is change management. To achieve this there is a need for course re-engineering and streamlining the procedures where legislative and executive policies and orders can play an effective role. There will be attitudinal problems, mental blocks and there will be a feeling of erosion of their authority. But if these are overcome, there will be more transparency and accountability in the system, which is the main objective of e-Governance.

What are the other e-Governance projects in the pipeline for the year 2009?

The WBSWAN will be completed in 2009. Our focus will be to ensure that all the CSCs are in place. We have two eDistricts which are operational right now. One is the Bankura and the other in Jalpaiguri. e-Districts are envisaged as a medium for providing seamless administration from one department to another. If this project succeeds, then I think that e-Governance will go beyond from being department specific to bring all districts together. We also expect that the State Data Centre (SDC) to be fully operational.

Would you like to give any message for our readers?

I believe that what is required in e-Governance, is to develop e-Nagriks in each and every corner of the country. My intention is not just to make a person learn how to use a computer. Rather, my intention is to make a person realise how a computer can make his / her life easier.

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Nilikshi, Barooah nilakshi@egovonline.net

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Chhattisgarh Setting Example http//:www.chips.gov.in/

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CGSWAN is the largest WiMAX 802.16d deployment in Asia connecting 3,000 Government offices of the state government”

Aman Kumar Singh Secretary Information Technology and CEO - ChiPS, Government of Chhattisgarh 60 }

You informed egov last year that CHhattisgarh Online information system for Citizen Empowerment (CHOiCE) will be replicated in rural areas under the Common Service Centres scheme. How far has this been successful in catering to the different needs of urban and rural areas?

CHOiCE state wide rollout is going on as per schedule. Chhattisgarh has already completed selection process through transparent process and selected its two Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) operators AISECT for Durg & Korba Zones and Zoom Developers for Raipur and Raigarh Zones. The Government to Citizen (G2C) services are already under final stages of testing / fine tuning in five districts for workflow, roles, responsibility of authority and other technical issues such as connectivity master data population. It is expected that entire 3000 rural CHOiCE Centres as part of CSC will be fully operational for G2C services by August 2009 as per the revised schedule.

Regarding catering to the different needs of urban and rural areas the issues in Chhattisgarh are three fold namely technological infrastructure, capacity and service requirements.

The technology infrastructure work in terms of strengthening backend support including upgradation of server farm, redundant lease lines, multiple instances for application server, and other performance and security infrastructure are already complete or are in advance stages of 4th Anniversary Issue

completion. Significant success has already been made in capacity building for handholding support required for such a vast rural deployment roll out.

The formal support structure and units are already in place and continuous training / retraining programme of stake holders is underway in big way.

In terms of specific rural centric services requirements, state is in advance stages of completion / integration of these services. These services are mostly related to land records and welfare related information / delivery mechanisms required in rural area in the state, most of which are ready to be made functional after undergoing rigorous testing.

Our priority also includes intersecting or cross departmental / organisational rural application from different base / platforms. CHOiCE will transform the e-Governance for rural citizen, once the State Services Delivery Gateway (SSDG) is made functional with help of state partner Centre for Development and Advanced Computing (CDAC).

Give us an update on the State Data Centre (SDC) in Chhattisgarh?

State of Chhattisgarh based on its requirements has been considered and sanctioned funds along with large state category. The ‘Pre Draft’ document for selection of Centre Operator submitted by State Consultant is already being scrutinised and shall be submitted, after approval from the State Project Committee, to Department of Information Technology, GoI, in a www.egovonline.net

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short span of time. Taking into account, the growing trend of miscreant attacking economic nerve centres, the state is creating a world class secured civil structure. Our State Data Centre (SDC) Consultant is helping in selection of technology infrastructure which is sufficiently future proof, support state responsibility towards citizen, can embraces change faster and at less expense with lower ongoing operating cost. We as part of strategy cautiously spend more time on planning then in execution. We are hopeful to bring this infrastructure at the same time along with other core infrastructure and utilise the fund within the right time frame.

The implementation of State Wide Area Network (SWAN) in Chhattisgarh is expected to be completed by March 2009. What is the progress so far and will it achieve its expected time line?

Chhattisgarh State Wide Area Network (CGSWAN) is a hybrid backbone connecting all districts and eventually Blocks using Lease lines, VSAT and Wi-MAX. It is also the largest WiMAX 802.16d deployment in Asia connecting 3000 Government offices of the state government. Chhattisgarh is the only state which has cared to include all its offices as part of horizontal connectivity. After following a transparent bid process TCS has been selected as BOOT Operator for the state and agreement in this regard has already been inked on October 8, 2008. The roll out work has already started in full swing though the state is witnessing assembly election but this has not deterred the ongoing CGSWAN rollout work.

Entire dispatch, intermediate task and milestones are strictly adhered to. The vertical connectivity for all districts and blocks shall be completed in the next four month, which is well ahead of the set deadlines. The completion date of project for all horizontal offices is August 2009.

Your state has several firsts to its credit in regard to eGovernance. Could you highlight the key lessons to be learned from such achievements, especially by those states that are still lagging behind?

Chhattisgarh’s approach is rather simplistic which other states may also evaluate for their own state requirements.

Our entire focus was on requirements for citizen services delivery and citizen empowerment, and never on selection of a particular technology. One of the most important part of this entire e-Governance projects for us is the full spectrum thinking to include all component, functions and coopt all stake holders. We could ensure projects to be successful by institutionilisation of all the factors stated earlier. We have constituted an empowered committee under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary with proper process in place to take right decisions backed by required notifications from cabinet of the state. This in turn gives direction and guidance to the project execution committee constituted with proper representation from the stake holding departments and organisations.

In our selections of technology part in any project, we always preferred open standards, system and protocols on wider / multiple delivery channels including Internet, XML to describe data, no limitation on usage by multiple citizen - clients from the outset, virtualisation of resources and their capabilities, and lastly maximum level of automation possible 62

with it. For us secure, reliable system is a sine quanon. Our state has pragmatic approach for open standards rather than having a ‘Jehadi’ argumentative approach for open, free or proprietary codes. At the same time, for every project by us measurement matrix on how and what to improve is a mandatory. These matrixes are ensured to match with service-level agreement elements and ensured allocation of appropriate resources. We proactively create a feedback mechanism along with the system to ensure citizen and user needs are being addressed in a timely way.

What are the key outcomes of the state Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) in Chhattisgarh?

Our state has taken a proactive approach on e-Governance and now we are rightly placed for being supported by the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). One of the most welcome outcomes is that the state is already through with pilot phase and poised for statewide roll out of all such projects with necessary infrastructure pieces in place. The immense learning we have from being an early starter is giving us clear understanding on change management, state citizen specific requirements and department readiness and capacity building within the state. However, in some of the projects such as e-Procurement and other state specific initiative we may have to wait for some time before DIT provides central assistance.

We have observed that negative bidding is becoming a trend in acquiring government tenders. What are your comments?

We have always preferred leveraging strengths of private organisations in its e-Governance initiative and has benefited from such collaborative partnerships. Negative bids received in projects are an indication that business entities view the state as being a good investment destination. Perfect execution of technology initiative and creation of corresponding business value propositions associated with the execution are the two most important goals for such collaboration. However, the state shall be extremely careful that it is not a monopolistic trap by any greedy corporate.

What are the other e-Governance projects in the pipeline for the year 2009?

During the coming year our major e-Governance initiative for the state shall include creation of ‘State GIS Application Centre’ which shall be a state of art facility for the utilisation of special GIS data set already created by the state. Digital Secretariat and Citizen Call Centre are the other two major initiatives that the state is undertaking. The citizen call centre will be a one stop personalised help desk of the government to connect directly to its citizen. The state is also working on its Transport Management System and Integrated Check Post on its borders with other state. These state of the art facilities shall do away the multiple check post of different departments and also regulate vehicle playing within or ‘out to out’ the state. Another ambitious initiation includes agriculture information network for the state farmers. Apart from this, other central assisted Mission Mode Projects will also be taken up.

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egov Team

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Target: 100% e-Literacy http://www.kerala.gov.in/dept_it/index.htm

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100 percent household e-Literacy has been attained in Malappuram, Kannur, Kollam, Kazarkode, Kozhikode and Thrissur districts and post-literacy services like e-Pay, e-Krishi, e-Learning are being introduced here”

Dr Ajay Kumar Secretary, Information Technology, Government of Kerala ov

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Kerala was the first state to have achieved 100 percent literacy in the country. When can we expect the same for e-Governance?

We are confident that our state is going to add another ‘first’ to its credit within a short span of time by achieving a full hundred percent e-Literacy. The state government has rightly understood that the digital gap includes the imbalances in physical access to technology as well as the imbalances in resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen. So in order to address all these issues related to the digital divide in a holistic manner, the government has introduced many a e-Governance project like Akshaya, Friends. By setting up around 2,500 Akshaya centres all across the state, the government tries to ensure the presence of at least two Akshaya centres in a village, it became easy for even the rural people to have access to the information and communication tools. Akshaya not only provides physical access to the new technology for the people, but also it trains them in using the computers.

100 percent household e-Literacy has been attained in Malappuram, Kannur, Kollam, Kazarkode, Kozhikode and Thrissur districts and post-literacy services like e-Pay, e-Krishi, e-Learning are being introduced here. Malappuram and Kannur districts have been officially declared as 100 percent household 4th Anniversary Issue

e-literate districts. The government is slowly changing the mode of service delivery (through computers and the internet), and is simultaneously taking steps to enable the public to avail these facilities. In short, the holistic approach of the state government towards the egovernance projects helps them reach the public effectively and you can expect Kerala to be a 100 percent e-governed state within a few years. e-District has been rolled out in two districts of Kerala – Kannur and Palakkad. What is the ground reality in terms of roll out in other districts?

The e-District project started in Kannur and Palakkad in July 25, 2008. Presently, the system requirement study is going on for the pilot district, based on which selection of solution provider and implementing agency would be made.

After the completion of the project (which is expected to take 18 months ), an impact study will be conducted. The state-wide roll out of the project will take place only after this.

How do you plan to utilised funds for State Data Centres (SDCs)?

The State Data Centre has been identified as one of the core infrastructure components to consolidate services, applications and infrastructure to provide efficient electronic delivery of 63

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G2G, G2C and G2B services. e-Procurement is one of the New projects in the pipeline We already have a tier III Integrated Mission Mode 5,000 sq. ft State Data Centre Projects, which is going • Expansion of Technopark Phase III, which has been operational to be implemented in the Thiruvananthapuram - in about 100 acres of land for over 5 years. We have state soon. Department of • Technocity project at Thiruvananthapuram in about over 100 servers and 150 Commerce, Government of 450 acres of land applications of different India has identified Kerala • Setting up of Technopark Kollam in about 40 Departments running in the as one of the three states to acres of land existing State Data Centre. implement the e-procurement • Expansion of Infopark, Kochi in about 150 acres The existing State Data Centre programme in the next phase. of land is near saturation. Recently, Data collection in this regard • Setting up of Infopark at Cherthala in about 65 we had to augment its UPS is completed and the Detailed acres of land ((which is less than half an-hour drive capacity to meet demand Project Report preparation is from Ernakulam city) from Departments. The new underway. National Institute • Setting up of Infopark at Ambalappuzha, State Data Centre sanctioned of Smart Government (NISG) Alappuzha district in about 100acres of land by the Government of and Pricewaterhouse Coopers • Setting up of IT Park at Koratti, Trichur in about India is being set up in (PWC) are the project 40 acres of land Technopark, Trivandrum. consultants.

Kerala has • Setting up of Cyber Park at Kozhikode in about This is another 6,000 sq. identified eight Departments/ 70 acres of land ft facility being developed organisations to implement • Setting up of IT park at Thaliparambu, Kannur in and will cater to increasing the pilot run for the project. about 30 acres of land demand for Data Centre from We expect that the RFP for • Setting up of IT park at Kasargode in about 100 several Departments. It will the service provider can be acres of land be linked to the existing State floated within next three Data Centre and augment the months. existing facility. Wipro has been selected as the consultants and RFP is near finalization. We expect to float the RFP next Your department has emphasised upon the localisation month. A total of Rs 55.68 crores has been sanctioned by the of content and celebrated 2008 as the year of promoting Department of Information Technology, which will be utilised linguistic diversity in cyberspace. How far has the for setting up a new State Data Centre for Kerala. Of this INR campaign been successful in its mission? Also, is the 15.5 crores will be spent as the capital expenditure and the content generation being outsourced? rest will be used to meet the operational expenditure.

Malayalam Computing and Entegramam projects are two major projects by the government which focus on the IT and technology parks is the next big thing in Kerala. strengthening of local language content in the cyber sphere.

Can you give us an update on its progress so far?

Malayalam Computing, is a Kerala Government attempt to Aiming the new horizons in the industry, the government hinder the gradual erosion and disappearance of our local has set up a new company, Kerala State IT Infrastructure language, Malayalam. Started in February 2008, the campaign Ltd (KSITI), which will play a crucial role in identifying is active at present in five districts of Kerala – Kannur, locations, partners for investment and resources required Malappuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta and Kozhikode. It is for implementation of all IT infrastructure projects. This expected to cover all the other nine districts of Kerala soon. company will also channelise private investments into the The campaign is being carried out through the network of sector through the PPP route.

2500 Akshaya Centres around the state. Each Akshaya centre Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in reaches approximately 1200-1500 families. The campaign Kochi have become the most sought after destinations by the will address about 40-50 lakh households in Kerala over IT investors in India. But the government takes care that the the next three years. The campaign is being carried out in IT development in Kerala does not centre around these two participation with local self governance bodies and other cities only. The benefits are disseminated to all parts of Kerala social organisations. The website www.malayalam.kerala. through a hub and spoke model of development envisaged by gov.in, which was hosted as part of Malayalam computing the State Government. In this model, Thiruvananthapuram, campaign helps the public download necessary software and Kochi and Kozhikode will act as hubs and surrounding training manual on Malayalam Computing.

In order to increase the local language content in the weblocations as spokes.

Each of these parks is less than an hour drive from an sphere, it was decided to host a portal for each panchayat airport and connected by National Highway. The land is in the state, documenting all details of the village – be it on already with the government. Most of these facilities are agriculture, geographical area, culture or artforms. The project being developed as SEZs with both IT space as well as related named ‘Entegramam’ (which translated in English means My Village) is one of its kind as this is a project where the portals social infrastructure. have been created by the local people, about local content What is the status of the common e-Procurement platform in the local language. On demand from local community, which was said to be set up during 2008 – 09? a marriage portal is under development as part of the 64

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entegramam project. This would meet the local requirements of online match-making in the community.

Automation project in the Motors Vehicle (MV) department.

This project envisages the use of wireless technology to facilitate enforcement by the officials of the department.

You had told us earlier that you envision a move One of the benefits of the project is the ready availability towards m-Governance. What kind of government to of online real time data of vehicles and license holders, citizen services would be available on a mobile device? which in turn will strengthen the enforcement, bring in Are you in talks with any of the telecom service provides efficient penalty collection system and thereby ensure regarding this? strict enforcement and improvement of road safety measures m-Governance involves the utilisation of all kinds of wireless in the state. and mobile technology, services, applications and devices The main m-Governance project that is in the pipeline is for improving the service delivery. Several initiatives are development of an overall m-Governance platform for the underway. For one of the projects (Dr. SMS), the pilot district State. This would enable provision of e-Governance services implementation has been completed. through mobile telephones. As part of this development Dr. SMS is a unique attempt to deliver healthcare information of mobile infrastructure, twenty services across eight through mobile phones. It enables Departments shall be provided on a citizens to use their mobile phones to mobile platform. The consultant has been HIGHLIGHTS get information on health resources. It identified and kick-off of the project is • Malappuram and Kannur provides the user with a comprehensive expected shortly. districts officially declared list of medical facilities available in as 100 percent household What are the other e-Governance their locality, like doctors or hospitals e-Literate districts projects in the pipeline for the year having expertise in various medical • 100 servers and 150 2009? disciplines (cardiology, nephrology applications of different Apart from stabilising the ongoing projects etc). In the pilot phase, the project is Departments running in the and expanding their scope geographically implemented in Kozhikode, where it is existing State Data Center and in terms of processes being covered, fully functional and it helps the users • Technopark in we are planning several new initiatives avail the facility by sending an SMS to a Thiruvananthapuram and which we expect will take shape during pre-designated number (9446460600).

Infopark in Kochi are the the next year. As part of stabilising the The content of the SMS should include sought after destinations by activities, third-party software testing and the pin code of the locality where the the IT investors in India security management of our e-Governance person concerned is looking for the • Kerala identified as one applications will become an important part medical facilities/ doctors. We are in of the three states to of our efforts. Among new initiatives being the process of rolling it out to other planned, some of the main ones include: districts. The data entry is complete in implement the e-Filing of Value-Added Tax; Setting up four more districts and we may expect e-Procurement programme Centre for Advanced Training in Free the roll-out in these districts in next in the next phase and Open Source Software (CATFOSS) few months. Meanwhile we are also • Healthcare information in Kochi; e-Inventory Management in the process of identifying an SMS through mobile phones has Implementation; Use of email for work aggregator through which the Dr. SMS been implemented at the policy; Kerala State Service Delivery service can be provided. An RFP for the district level Gateway; Strategy for use of IT by Small same shall be brought out in a couple • Overall m-Governance Scale Business and Industrial Enterprises; of months. project is in the pipeline and e-gov initiatives in PSUs. Another project which is part of m-Governance is the Enforcement egov Team

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PPP: Philosophy of Success http://www.dit.mp.gov.in/

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MP was the first state to put cyber treasury in place whereby citizens can avail the facility by making anytime, anywhere tax/fee payments”

Madhya Pradesh plans to set up a total of 9,232 Common Services Centres (CSCs), by when can we expect all these CSCs to be functional?

The Common Service Centre (CSC) project is being implemented in full earnest. Approximately 1,200 CSCs have already become operational. The salient point of this project in Madhya Pradesh (MP) is that we have already developed Government-to-Citizen (G2C) www. canvas-mponline.gov.in which is mandated to provide e-Governance services to the citizens. This will definitely help in making CSCs viable.

Five partners from the Public Private Partnership (PPP) have been selected to implement the project in different areas of the state. As per the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed with PPP partners, CSCs are to become fully functional by March 2009. However, because of the model code of conduct additional time is being sought by the partners.

Anurag Jain Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh ov

January 2009

The Madhya Pradesh State Wide Area Network (MPSWAN) project for which the bidding is slated to be completed by December 2008. How do you plan to address the issue of last mile connectivity through this project?

The project envisages connecting all block headquarters to the state capital through districts and divisional Head Quarters (HQs). All block Head Quarters, Tehsil HQs and District HQs are being connected to the State HQ 4th Anniversary Issue

through optical fiber network. In each Block/Tehsil/District HQ the necessary equipments will be installed, one Point of Presence (POP) is also being established.

The work of establishing POPs is on the verge of completion. The offices will be horizontally connected to these POPs through wireless or wired line connections. A minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps shall be provided at each Block HQ which will be scaleable in future.

The connectivity to the end-user is based on either one or more of the standard technologies like leased circuits, radio frequency dial-up circuits or using appropriate ethernet ports for the individual offices. Tulip IT is implementing the MPSWAN. Service provider will ensure uptime of SWAN and service levels. The horizontal connectivity to various departments and offices will be provided via copper/ optical cables and broadband wireless radio on unlicensed band, depending on the feasibility. It is expected that 75 percent of the horizontal connectivity shall be provided through wireless.

In Madhya Pradesh, a cost effective broadband connectivity to deal with the challenge of the last mile wireless technology is also being worked out.

How do you plan to utilise funds relesed by DIT for State Data Centres?

State Data Centres (SDCs) is an important Information Technology (IT) initiative under National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), of Government of India.

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Madhya Pradesh Government has also adopted the project and its implementation has been initiated. All Projects categorised under Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) including other e-Governance projects of the state will be hosted at SDC. This will ensure better delivery of government services to citizens.

In Madhya Pradesh, PricewaterHouse Coopers has been appointed as the consultant. The Detailed Project Report (DPR) has been prepared, submitted and approved by Government of India (GOI) with a total project outlay of INR 54 crore for selection of private partner, who will be responsible for installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance of SDC. Accordingly, the Department of Information Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh (GoMP) has started the process of implementation of the project. The project SDC is being implemented in Bhopal for storing the data and applications of the various government departments. The tender process for construction of building work has been completed. The building plan has been made with complete security system in place which will not only prevent unauthorized access but also have the facility to detect fire and intrusion. The building will have provision for 100 percent power backup and will be connected to Madhya Pradesh State Wide Area Network (MPSWAN). The SDC will enable easy access to common data of the state in safe and secured manner. It will also eliminate the need for setting up of individual data centres. We will issue the tenders to Public Private Partnership (PPP) partner to set up SDC after a couple of months so that the two processes of construction of building and installation of SDC are synchronized and the whole project is completed by July 2009.

Once the building is in place we plan to make this SDC a central server where all e-Governance projects will find a place and delivery of citizen service will become faster, safer and reachable.

In Madhya Pradesh, major departments like Land Records, Transport, Commercial Taxes, Treasury and Accounts, Mandi have been computerised and this has naturally benefited the citizens. We believe that e-Governance or computerisation is crucial for bringing in efficiency, transparency and 24x7 availability to the governance.

This results in increased satisfaction level of the citizens who are the end customer to the services provided by the government departments. To my knowledge, MP was the first state to put cyber treasury in place. Citizens can avail the facility by making anytime, anywhere tax/fee payments. MPOnline is the portal to provide citizen centric services. At present approximately 700 kiosks are providing these services.

We have taken a decision to converge Common Service Centres (CSC) project with Madhya Pradesh Online (MPOnline). At present the major services provided by the portal are online payment of electricity bills, water tax and filling of forms online. Computerisation of Transport Department has really made tremendous impact on the way the business is transacted in Transport Department. People can pay tax online. The registration of the vehicle can be done at the dealer point. Thus one does not really have to go to the office of the Regional Transport Officer (RTO) physically.

Fire Alarm Alert System of the Forest Department is a very innovative project worth mentioning here. The satellite senses the fire and alerts the officer in-charge of the area where the fire has started. The response time has come down to a few hours compared to a few days earlier. This is definitely saving a lot of natural wealth.

There are a lot of private players in e-Governance projects in your state. How has been your experience with the Public Private Partnerships (PPP) so far?

The experience of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) is good in MP. Most of the projects have been implemented in the PPP mode. In our policy we have categorically stated to promote State Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) are been given PPP as a philosophy and have attempted to implement in the serious focus now. What is your agenda in this regard? e-Governance projects accordingly.

In Madhya Pradesh we are focussing on Mission Mode We are following the philosophy on PPP not only Projects (MMPs). Accordingly, we have developed the in the infrastructure projects like Common Service Roadmap for e-Governance in the state. Madhya Pradesh Centres (CSCs) and State Wide Area Network (SWAN).

Agency for Promotion of Information Moreover, our various projects like Technology (MAP_IT), a state owned e-Tendering, computerisation of HIGHLIGHTS society, has been made as the nodal Transport Department, Madhya • Approximately 1200 CSCs agency for implementation of the Pradesh Online (MPOnline) are also in have already become project. Consultant for implementation the PPP mode. operational of MMP has been identified and an • Five partners from the What are the other e-Governance MOU has been signed for carrying out Public Private Partnership projects in the pipeline for the year the computerisation work of MMP. (PPP) have been selected 2009?

Presently we are working on several to implement the eWe want to achieve full convergence projects like: Jail, Health, Forest, governance project in of CSC and MPOnline. We are also upgradation of Commercial Tax, Police different areas of the state working at state portal, ICT in school and Cooperatives. education, roll out of e-Districts, • Connectivity of Head Computerisation in Madhya Pradesh upgradation of treasury and commercial Quarters and District HQs has achieved many feats. Do you think taxes networks, Jail, Health, Forest, and with the State HQ has been the benefits have started percolating Police Departments computerisation. done with optical fiber to the citizens? egov Team network 68

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Computer Literacy Boosting e-Governance http://www.himachaldit.nic.in

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Non-Availability of enough funds is a magor roadblock in the implementation of e-Governance in Himachal Pradesh�

The Department of Information Technology has released funds for State Data Centre (SDCs) in 27 states and union territories of India, which includes Himachal Pradesh as well.

How do you plan to utilise these funds?

The State Data Centre (SDC) in Himachal Pradesh is under construction. We will soon be issuing Request for Proposal (RFP) inviting private companies to set up the SDC. The SDC will be owned and managed by the Department of Information Technology. However, regular maintenance and operation of the data centre will be handled by the private party involved. We will be spending approximately INR 50 crores on this project.

B K Agarwal Secretary, Department of Infomation Technology, Government of Himachal Pradesh ov

January 2009

A web based job portal for all stakeholders has been started in the state, how do you think the target audience is receiving these e-Governance initiatives?

The web based job portal has been a great help to the industry as well as the job seekers of the state. Due to rapid industrialisation in the state in the last few years, demand for manpower with various skills has also increased. This portal helps to match the requirement of the industry with the available skills without going through the process of advertisement 4th Anniversary Issue

or taking help of recruitment agencies.

The government is also able to monitor the actual number of job seekers and creation of employment. This initiative has been highly appreciated both by entrepreneurs and the unemployed youth.

In your view, how far has the telemedicine project benefited the common man?

Himachal Pradesh has a difficult geographical terrain due to which patients can not easily travel to the hospitals where specialists are available.

There are not many private medical institutions in the state. In such circumstances telemedicine project has proved to be a boon to the people.

At present 19 remote locations are connected to Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC), Shimla which is further connected to Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh.

The doctors in the remote locations are regularly making tele-consultation with the specialists in IGMC and PGI. Many critically ill patients have already benefited from this facility. Staff Clinical Pathological Conference (CPC) from PGI Chandigarh is also broadcasted through telemedicine network every wednesday for the use of Post Graduate students/ Resident Doctors of IGMC. 69

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In various e-Governance projects there is often a need for collaboration with private players. How has been your experience with private players in terms of partnership and performance so far?

Various projects like Himachal Pradesh State Wide Area Network (HIMSWAN), AGRISNET, and Common Service Centres (CSCs) are being implemented in collaboration with private companies in our state. Our experience has been that if rigorous screening is done before awarding the contract and terms and condition are laid down explicitly, there is no problem afterwards. Nevertheless, a project is implemented in collaboration with private players the department must have adequate technical capabilities and strict system of monitoring.

AGRISNET proposes to create an interactive interface for Government to Citizen (G2C) i.e. for Farmers; and Government to Government (G2G) services i.e. services for the Department of Agriculture, Horticulture, Animal Husbandry and Fisheries. In this project, we have provided training to around 500 employees of four departments involved in this project. Hardware and system software has been supplied and installed in all four departments up to district level. Agreement has been signed for the development of software. The Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India has approved funds for hardware to be given down to block level in the next phase.

In the implementation of the various e-Governance projects, what do you think have been the major What is the current status on the well–intended project roadblocks in your view? of setting up of 3,366 Common Service Centres for which In Himachal Pradesh computer literacy among the tender was floated on 9th February 2008 by Himachal government employees is very good. The political leadership here is committed to use Information and Communication Pradesh?

The objective of this project is to develop a platform that can Technology (ICT) for increasing the efficiency and transparency in the government. enable government, private and social However, a major road block is non sector organisations to align their social HIGHLIGHTS availability of enough funds. The and commercial goals, especially for the Government of India is in the process of benefit of the rural population in the • INR 50 crores to be spent on finalising policy guidelines for financing remotest corners of the country through SDC of Mission Mode Projects (MMPs). I a combination of IT-based as well as • 19 remote locations are hope that after this, more funds will non-IT-based services. The Agreement connected to Indira Gandhi flow to the state and e-Governance will has been signed with Service Centre Medical College (IGMC), get a further boost.

Agencies (SCAs). They have started the Shimla which is further process of identification of Village Level connected to Post Graduate In the next one year, what are the Entrepreneurs (VLEs) and we expect Institute of Medical major developments we can expect to that all the CSCs will be operational by Education and and Research witness in the area of e-Governance next year. To ensure delivery of more (PGIMER), Chandigarh in the state of Himachal Pradesh? and more services through CSCs, we • All CSCs will be operational Computerisation of Public Distribution have started process of creating a State by 2009.

System (PDS) is in pipeline, all the Portal and a State Delivery Gateway • State Portal and a State treasuries, a comprehensive web as well.

Delivery Gateway under enabled system of grievance redressal, process The state of Himachal Pradesh was computerisation of all the revenue also planning for AGRISNET for the courts, maintenance of land records, • G2C services through benefit of sectors like agriculture, property registration, Common Service AGRISNET Animal Husbandry, Horticulture Centres (CSCs) are some of the projects • Computerisation of Public and Fisheries. Can you provide us which are likely to be rolled out in the Distribution System (PDS) an update on the current status of next one year. is in pipeline egov Team this project?

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Tapping the Advantage of ICT Literacy http://www.manipur.nic.in

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Employment Exchange, Finance Department, e-Procurement, Land Records, Geographical Information System (GIS) for administrative planning will be given priority in the future�

Across the country, Common Service Centres (CSCs) are becoming a necessity. Kindly give us an update on the implementation of CSCs in Manipur? How many CSCs are operational?

A total of 399 Common Service Centres (CSCs) are to be set up in Manipur at the rate of one CSC for every 6 villages.

Out of this 360 will be new CSCs and 39 will be Community Information Centres converted into CSCs. The Service Centre Agency (SCA) for implementing CSC project in Manipur (in a Public Private Partnership (PPP)) model is Zoom Developers Ltd. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on August 28, 2008. We had expected that 80 CSCs will be operational by end of November 2008. However, the actual roll-out of CSCs is taking a little longer, but we hope that the delay will be made up once the arrangements are streamlined.

Ram Muivah Secretary- IT, Government of Manipur

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The DIT, Government of India, has released funds for State Data Centres in 27 States and UTs including Manipur. How do you plan to utilize these funds?

The State Data Centres (SDC) funds will be utilised as per the guidelines of the project. As we could not get room 4th Anniversary Issue

space in the existing infrastructure, a new floor is under construction in the Secretariat, for which the work is in progress. With the identified floor space, the consultant for the project Wipro Ltd. is preparing the Request for Proposal (RFP) for SDC, which will be issued in January 2009.

What is the status of implementation of Manipur State Wide Area Network (MSWAN)?

Manipur has decided to deploy National Informatics Centre (NIC) for the SWAN project. However, choosing NIC has some disadvantages as there is no consultant manpower who will be available to tackle the ground work for survey and identification of the SWAN Point of Purchase (PoPs), pursue and coordinate with the District Administration and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, make site preparation plans and cost estimates, work out costs for bandwidth. The District Rural Development Agencies (DRDAs) have finally been persuaded to take up the site preparation works. The NIC had informed that they would like to place orders for SWAN equipment only when at least about 10 sites are ready, to avoid delay in installation after delivery. The BSNL which is the bandwidth provider 71

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has completed work on 7 OFC lines and work is in progress.

Overall, the SWAN implementation in Manipur has lagged behind. However, the State Government and NIC are making renewed efforts to push the project forward.

at PPP as a very effective model, and we plan to extend it to e-Procurement as well.

We are aware that the North East as a region is lagging behind in the e-Governance road-map of India. Do you State Data Centre is an important arm of e-Governance. see any possibility of leap-frogging in the near future?

What in you opinion should be the government initiatives What are your states initiative in this regard?

The state government will set up the State Data Centre (SDC) in this regard? which will comply with the international standards. All data The Government of India is taking many initiatives to banks of the state will be hosted in the SDC for maximum bring the remote areas into the mainstream. The difficult efficiency and security of data storage and transactions. topography, poor road connectivity and absence of power supply are tremendous constraints in the implementation of Are there any initiatives taken by your department in IT projects reaching out to remote areas. The most significant regards to capacity building? Is the IT literacy among the initiative at present, are the towers (40 metre height) set up State officials in Manipur impressive? by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) which Information and Communication are to be used by multiple Service Technology (ICT) literacy of the state Providers. There is a need to extend the HIGHLIGHTS officials is good as they have been Optical Fibre Communication (OFC) over power lines down to the 33KV exposed to computer usage for several • 399 Common Service level on the state government power years now. Also the learning speed is Centres (CSCs) are to be set grids with assistance from Government quite impressive. This may be due to the up in Manipur at the rate of of India. fact that all government correspondence one CSC for every 6 villages The operation may be on a PPP model, is in English only. Apart from this, • Request for Proposal (RFP) with the State Electricity Boards also the NIC conducts IT related courses for SDC, will be issued in getting revenue for use of their power regularly. This department is also January 2009 grid tower infrastructure. The use of sponsoring various ICT courses such as • The BSNL which is the WiMAX and other new technologies to ICT security through DOEACC Centre bandwidth provider has reach the remote locations is also given at Imphal. A new computer centre is completed work on 7 OFC top priority. coming up at the State Academy of lines and work is in progress Training. All new trainees of accounts • SDC for maximum efficiency What are the major e-Governance training from government departments and security of data storage projects in the pipeline for the year are given compulsory computer literacy and transactions 2009? training.

• A new computer centre For 2009, the major activities will be is coming up at the State Public Private Partnership (PPP) the implementation of the National Academy of Training is gaining popularity among many e-Governance Plan (NeGP) projects states in India for e-Governance • The issue of smart cards for infrastructure, viz-a-viz State Data for driving licence by the initiative. Are you also looking at the Centre, State Wide Area Network, Transport Department of PPP model for increasing the reach of Common Service Centres and Capacity Manipur, has been done on e-Governance in your State?

Building. In the terms of application a PPP model The Common Service Centre project projects, Employment Exchange, is being rolled out on a PPP model in • WiMAX and other new Finance Department, e-Procurement, technologies to reach the Manipur. The issue of smart cards Land Records, Geographical Information remote locations is also for driving licence by the Transport System (GIS) for administrative planning given top priority Department of Manipur, has also been will be given priority in the future. done on a PPP model. We are looking egov Team

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Banking on Pawan http://www.doitpunjab.gov.in/

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All Tehsils will be providing computerised Land Records by March 2009”

Complete computerisation of Land Records in Punjab was expected by July 2008. Is this target achieved?

What are the key learnings from this project?

The phase I of computerisation of Land Records in Punjab project is slated to be completed by December 2009. There are several issues which are addressed in the implementation of the project.

There is some inconsistency in the Land Records under the Land Records Act and Manual. There are about 30 percent illogical and inconsistent data which would need more than 1 lakh Fard Badrs for correcting this data. In addition to this, there is huge work of standardisation of revenue terminology which needs to be carried out. The project also requires re-engineering the Revenue Sub-system. Lastly, the software development work is very complex for this project due to nonstandard procedures being followed in different areas.

Narinderjit Singh Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Punjab ov

January 2009

What is the status of e-District implementation in the pilot projects – Nawanshahr and Kapurthala? Are there similar projects planned for other districts as well?

The project consultant has completed the assessment study for various kinds of citizen centric services at the pilot districts – Nawanshahr and Kapurthala.

While doing so, SUWIDHA project was also studied from the citizen point of view to understand the service delivery mechanism. Individual and 4th Anniversary Issue

joint workshops were conducted at pilot districts and state departments for drawing up a common Government Process Re-engineering (GPR) framework applicable to all identified services in consultations with different stakeholders across the administrative structure. GPR framework encompasses technology enablers to fasten the internal work flow and enabling CSC for close proximity with the citizens. Suwidha/ Common Service Centres (CSCs) would act as interface from application submission till the final delivery of service output to the citizens. The state government has in principle accepted the recommended GPR framework with an objective to automate the service delivery for the convenience of the citizen. As a next step, the project consultant will design re-engineered (TO-BE) system for all the identified services and Functional Requirement Specifications (FRS) describing the functionality of the proposed automated services. In parallel, the process for selecting an agency would also be initiated for on-ground implementation of the project at pilot districts.

According to the e-District guidelines, the implementation of e-District project (Phase-I) is planned over a period of eighteen months for study, development, testing and roll-out in the two pilot districts. Thereafter, Request for Prposal (RFP) would be prepared for state wide roll out for the rest of the districts in the state in the next six months.

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What is the status of Punjab State Wide Area Network (PAWAN)?

The order for vertical implementation of State Wide Network called PAWAN was given in the month of January 2008 on Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) model for a period of 5 years.

So far, we have setup 193 (out of 196) Point of Presence (PoPs) in the state, including one at the state level, 20 at district level and 172 at Sub-division/ level. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is providing 2 Mbps bandwidth for this project throughout the network.

Apart from this, 21 Video Conferencing Centres have also been setup under the project. We are now providing links from these PoPs to government offices which are within 100 meters from each of these PoPs which is expected to be completed by January ‘09.

For the horizontal connectivity of other government offices with nearest PoP, the department has already started the bidding process for the selection of BOOT operator and I am hopeful that the entire horizontal connectivity would be done within a period of 6-8 months from now after which we can say that the entire important state administration is connected via PAWAN.

How many Common Service Centres (CSCs) are being established in Punjab till date? How many are operational?

We are carrying out the required ground work in the state. There are 2112 CSCs to be established in the state which is a vast number needing a lot of preparation on the part of government. You will agree with me that many of the states where CSCs have been established have not been able to roll out sufficient nunber of G2C services yet.

There has been a lot of learning from the other states in this regard.

Public Private Partnership (PPP) has been a success for rolling out Common Service Centres (CSCs) in India.

Do you see such partnerships in other sections of e-Governance? In Punjab, which are the departments which are following the path of PPP? For various e-Governance projects, the state government is opting for a PPP model for leveraging technical, managerial and financial potential of private sector for faster implementation of e-Governance projects and also to act as a first point interface to the citizen for the delivery of services.

In fact, the state government has been following the path of PPP in infrastructure based projects and citizen centric projects to give boost to e-Governance for better governance.

Such projects include SWAN, Land Records, Property Registration, Transport, School Education The projects in pipeline are SWAN-Horizontal, CSC, SDC, Police, Excise and Taxation and e-District.

How far has project SUWIDHA achieved its objective of providing a single user-friendly window help line to the citizens of Punjab? What have been your department’s efforts in popularising this service and other G2C services?

This is one project which has received many awards at the national level. Single window Suwidha Centres have been established in all the districts and sub-divisions of the There are several state Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) state. The project is highly successful in the delivery of that are already implemented in Punjab. What are the citizen based services by the district administrations but a key outcomes? lot of work is still required to be done for improving the After successful pilots, the Punjab government is implementing two state Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) namely Land Records, service level.

The centres are to be interconnected within the district Property Registration as part of the horizontal replication and with state Head Quarters (HQ) for better management. programme of Department of Information Technology (DIT), Some of the back-end services are computeris ed but there Government of India in the state.

Out of 153, two Tehsils have already been made live for are still many where this is to be done at the earliest. I am hopeful with the e-District project in the pipeline, the issuance of nakals for land records and all tehsils would be live by March’09. backend service departments would be computerised and their services Projects in Pipline for 2009 We have observed that negative integrated with Suwidha. bidding is becoming a trend in The connectivity with state HQ would • Establishment of 2112 acquiring government tenders. What also be established very shortly using Common Service Centres are your comments?

SWAN and once this is done, the present In my view a company bids negatively problems faced by the citizens would be (CSC) planned where it is totally confident that it will addressed more effectively.

• Computerisation of be able to earn sufficiently from the The overall citizen reaction is very Transport Department project and there is nothing wrong in encouraging and more and more soon doing so. citizens are availing services through • Pilot implementation of This will not adversely affect the Suwidha. Once CSCs are established, level of services delivery to the citizens the government plans to take e-Districts at Kapurthala since Service Level Agreements Suwidha to the village level probably and Jalandhar completed (SLAs) clearly specify all the criteria within one year from now and then • Horizontal Connectivity regarding this. large scale media campaigning would be with SWAN in 6 - 8 undertaken to popularise the benefits of Nilakshi Barooah months the project. nilakshi@egovonline.net 74

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Our Focus Capacity Building http://www.orissa.gov.in/informationtechnology/index.htm

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We have planned to float the RFP for the State Data Centre by the first week of January 2009 and completing all the tendering process by March 31, 2009”

Kindly give us an update on the roll out of 8,500 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in Orissa.

Common Service Centres (CSCs) are the front-end delivery centres of the government and private services to citizens.

As on date, 405 CSCs are in operation already, and we are expecting all the 8558 CSCs to be operational by June 2009. Awareness campaign is under way to create awareness among citizens about the initiative and objectives of CSC and National e-Governance Programme (NeGP). Efforts are also being taken to motivate stakeholders.

Training for Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) have also been planned for those who will be operating the CSCs.

Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra Commissioner-cum-Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Orissa ov

January 2009

What is the status of implementation of State Data Centre (SDC) in your state?

The State Data Centre (SDC) is proposed to be established in Bhubaneswar at Orissa Computer Application Centre (OCAC). The State Data Centre will provide the services like hosting options, data and application availability seven days a week all through the twenty-four hours of a day, centralised network management and operations capability, backup and archival services, disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

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Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India has appointed Wipro as consultant for SDC. The Draft of Request for Proposal (RFP) has been prepared and submitted to DIT, New Delhi, for vetting. We have planned to float the RFP by the first week of January 2009 and completing all the tendering process by March 31, 2009.

The State Wide Area Network (SWAN) in Orissa will connect 30 District Collector offices and 284 Taluka/Tehsil offices. How far has this been implemented?

Orissa State Wide Area Network (OSWAN) is a network to link all government offices at State Headquarters (SHQ), district headquarters (DHQ), and block headquarters (BHQ) including horizontal offices at each of these locations. ITI - Spanco has been selected to implement this project in our state. The first phase of implementation i.e. Vertical connectivity from SHQ to DHQ, horizontal offices at SHQ and 3 DHQ namely Cuttack, Berahmpur and Sambalpur will be completed by March 2009. The final phase will be completed by July 2009. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has emerged as the LI bidder for OSWAN Bandwidth Tender and Letter of Intent (LoI) for the same will be issued within one week.

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Orissa State MMPs Smart Panchayat Smart Panchayat, a PILOT for e-delivery of services of Panchayat. The Project aims to enabling e-delivery of various citizen centric services at Panchayat Level. In the first phase, the services of Public Relations (PR) Department will be addressed and services of other 17 Department will be added subsequently which we are targeting to cover. e-Municipality (Housing & Urban Development) Aimed at e-Delivery of all citizen centric services available at Urban Local Bodies (ULBs).

Property e-Registration The project objectives were to replace existing manual systems of verification and scrutiny of documents, valuation of properties, capturing and preserving copies of the documents, conducting searches and of maintaining back office records. Implementation will be done in a Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode, in a Build Own Operate Transfer (BOOT) model.

Agri-Portal and Help line The aim here is to conceptualise, design & develop a referral agriculture portal and a call centre for rural citizens.

A bilingual portal will be developed. The scope starts from generation of contents to manage the portal on day to day basis. Besides this a call centre will be set up, which will function as referral centre for Agriculture, Veterinary, Fisheries & Horticulture issues.

State Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) are given special priority now. What is your agenda in this regard?

The state is implementing State Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) and other e-Governance projects in the state and priority is given to the projects under which citizen will get maximum benefit like e-Registration, Smart Panchayat Agri Portal and e-District.

Also for speedy implementation of e-Governance Projects a Special Purpose Vehicle has been formed in partnership with Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS).

We have observed that negative bidding is becoming a trend in acquiring government tenders. What are your comments?

We are admitting that the quality of the work will be hampered if the bidding will be negative/lower than normal cost. However, we are giving emphasis to quality/better service delivery by adopting Quality Cost Based Selection (QCBS) selection method in most of the tenders.

Also negative bidding has not become a regular trend in Orissa. So far, only in one instance of the CSC tender, in one zone, we have encountered negative bidding.

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e-District e-District Project focus on e-enabling the delivery of majority of Citizen centric services that are administered by the District Administration.

Modernisation of Prison (MoP) This project is dedicated to application of ICT for proper security and Surveillance system in the prison of Orissa. e-Employment Exchange e-Employment exchange is an on-line recruitment service system where job-seekers can virtually meet and apply for job with several employers from a single place.

National Land Resource Management Programme (NLRMP) Major components of the NLRMP Project: • District Land Record Modernisation • Tehsil Modernisation with storage and Kiosk Facility • Modernisation of Sub-Division Level Land Record Office • State Training Centre Modernisation • Digitilisation of Cadastral Map • Modernisation of Sub-Registrar, District Sub-Register Office • Training and Capacity Building Measures • Setting of Revenue Data Centre, Connectivity & Security Measures

What are the emerging challenges that you are facing while implementing e-Governance projects in the State?

Lack of awareness among department employees and citizen, lack of infrastructure, lack of usage of Information Communication Technology (ICT) among stakeholders, problem of capacity building, lack of political ownership at highest level, common vision, lack of clarity in policy and legal framework are major challenges encountered in implementing e-Governance projects.

What will be your focus areas for the year 2009?

There will be a focus on implementation of Common Service Centres (CSCs), Orissa State Wide Area Network (OSWAN) and State Data Centre (SDC) in a timely manner to develop ICT infrastructure in the state and implementation of major Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) like e-Registration, Smart Panchayat, Agri Portal. Awareness and capacity building programme at both department and citizen level will be given priority as the success of the e-Governance projects hinges not only on accessibility and availability of information and services, but also on awareness regarding programme, effective branding and finally effective communication strategy.

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Tannu Singh, tannu@egovonline.net

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Enhancing Sustainability of CSCs http://www.dst.gujarat.gov.in/

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More than 90 percent of the CSCs have been completed in terms of installation of computers, furnitures and appointment of the operators by respective Service Center Agency (SCA) in four regions of the state�

Raj Kumar

The State Wide Area Network (SWAN) project has been in place in Gujarat for the last six years, so what has been its impact on delivering the services so far?

Gujarat State Wide Area Network (GSWAN) project has been the foundation of successful implementation of several other important e-Governance projects such as, Value Added Tax Information System, Land record information system and Record of Right (RoR) at village, State Wide Attention of Grievances by Application of Technology (SWAGAT), Gujarat Ration Card Computerisation, Health Management and Information System (HMIS). As a matter of fact, due to availability of GSWAN, all of the aforesaid projects could be rolled out in a very short time span of 3 to 9 months across the State and eGovernance applications were made operational in the District and Block level offices of the Revenue Department, Health Department, Commissioner of Commercial Taxes.

Secretary, IT & Science City, Department of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat

In Gujarat, State Data Centre (SDC) is already underway in the region of Gandhinagar with an estimated cost of INR 100 Crore. What is the status of other regions on SDC?

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Gujarat State Data Centre (GSDC) has been operationalised since October, 2008. Currently, we are in the process of shifting the existing e-Governance application servers from Server Farm area to the aforesaid State Data Centre facility. Further, we have suggested to other line departments of the government to plan out their server rack requirements and convey the same to us, so that rack space could be allotted to them in the State Data Centre.

Also, we are in the process of issuing tender bid for selection of Operations and Management (O&M) agency for GSDC. Six more Satellite Data Centres are also being planned in Gujarat, what is the roadmap in terms of when and how will these Satellite Data Centres get operational?

On the same lines as the Satellite Data Centres (SDC) in the State capital at Gandhinagar, Government of Gujarat has also set up 3 Mini Data Centres at Mehsana, Rajkot and Vadodara; while there is plan to set up a fourth Mini Data Centre at Surat in due course. Basic purpose behind setting up these Mini Data Centres in the above mentioned prominent regions of the state has 77

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been to provide reliable infrastructure for running localised applications and providing online services to urban and rural citizens of the respective regions. For instance, citizen centric services that would be delivered through Common Service Centres (CSCs) can now be provided through these servers, physically located in the Mini Data Centres.

Total number of Common Service Centres (CSCs) proposed for Gujarat is 6,000. How many out of these are already operating and by when can we expect to see all of these CSCs functional?

As against the norms laid down by the Government of India for setting up of CSC in one out of six villages, Government of Gujarat has decided to set up CSC in one out of three villages. Consequently, Government of Gujarat through the Panchayat Department, has decided to set up 6,000 CSCs across the state. So far more than 90 percent of the CSCs have been completed in terms of installation of computers, furnitures and appointment of the operators by respective Service Centre Agency (SCA) in four regions of the state.

Currently, we are in the process of starting the pilot run of the Gujarat Portal which has already incorporated more than 50 citizen centric services of various line departments of the state government. Once pilot run is successful, we will roll out the same across the state.

In various e-Governance projects there is often a need for collaboration with private players. How has been your experience with private players in terms of partnership and performance so far?

As a matter of fact, most of the citizen centric e-Governance projects implemented by the Government of Gujarat have been executed in collaboration with private sector players.

GSWAN, city civic centre, registration of property and e-Gram projects have been executed in Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode, while other e-Governance projects have been implemented through private players on outsourcing basis.

Our experience in the implementation of these e-Governance projects through private sector has been quite good so far.

In the implementation of the various e-Governance Gujarat was aiming to provide extensive services such projects, what do you think have been the major as issuing caste certificates, roadblocks?

In the implementation of various ewidow certificates, integration HIGHLIGHTS Governance projects, we have come of insurance schemes through across several hurdles. For instance Common Service Centres • GSWAN enabled the roll out of ehigh attrition rate of technical (CSCs). How far have these governance projects in a time span manpower, limited tenure of services been achieved? of 3 to 9 months As per the Common Service Centre project leader besides perceptible • Tender bids for selection of (CSC) scheme envisaged by the gap between the person’s Operations and Management (O & Government of India, such centres knowledge of governance and M) agency for GSDC to be issued are expected to earn a minimum technology. For overcoming these soon of one-third of their revenue out hurdles we are also implementing • Setting up CSC in one out of three of the delivery of government the capacity building project for villages services to the citizens. While Gram the government staff.

• 90 percent of the CSCs have been Panchayat level services such as completed in four regions of the What are the other e-Governance registration of caste, income, birth state projects in the pipeline for the and death are already operational; • City civic centre, registration of year 2009? so far only one block/district level property and e-Gram projects have Besides Gujarat Portal and service relating to the land records been executed Service Delivery Gateway has been made accessible through Project, Integrated Financial CSC. In order to expand the gamut • Projects for 2009: Integrated Management System (IFMS) and of citizen centric services through Financial Management System Home Department’s integrated IT CSCs, we have already developed (IFMS) and Home Department’s solution are other major projects the prototype of Gujarat Portal integrated IT solution in the pipeline for 2009. and service delivery gateway.

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Large State: Larger Challenges http://www.infotech.up.nic.in/

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17,909 CSCs will be setup during the year 2008-09�

The Uttar Pradesh State Wide Area Network (UPSWAN) was earlier, scheduled to get operational by January 2008. After its rescheduling of the deadline when can we actually expect it to be functional?

Uttar Pradesh State Wide Area Network (SWAN) has a 2 Mbps bandwidth up to the block level. There are a total of 885 Network Operating Centres (NOCs) which are being established.

All 70 districts are linked with the Head Quarters and the network is operational.

Civil work for all 885 Point of Presence (PoPs) is almost complete. Further, more than 75 percent of the total 241 Tehsil level NOCs and more than 85 percent of the block level NOCs are operational.

We shall be able to operationalise all the Tehsil and Block level NOCs by December 2008.

D S Srivastava Special Secretary Information and Technology & Electronics, Government of Uttar Pradesh ov

January 2009

How is the work on State Data Centres (SDCs) progressing in UP? The third major core infrastructure project under the e-Governance plan of the state government is the State Data Centre (SDC) which is being set up to consolidate services, applications and infrastructure to provide efficient delivery of Government-to- Government (G2G), Government-to-Citizen (G2C) and Government-to-Business (G2B) services.

The state government has taken note of the broad requirements of a typical data centre which include infrastructure facilities (physical, electrical, air conditioning) installation and integration of IT infrastructure 4th Anniversary Issue

(servers, telecom equipment, integrated portal/departmental information system, Enterprise and network management system, security, firewalls/ IDS, networking components) software and databases. The Uttar Pradesh state government proposes the establishment of shared infrastructure across various departments, centralised network management and operations capability, availability of high data and application and provision of infrastructure to build central repository of information/ data. Further, the SDC will provide a trustworthy environment, where citizens can conduct secure transactions with confidence and have easy and multi-channel access for interacting with the government.

Uttar Pradesh has chosen Wipro as a consultant for the SDC project. A Detailed Project Report (DPR) has been prepared and submitted to the Government of India. Government of India has given approval for establishment of SDC at a cost of INR 55.33 crores. The Data Centre will be installed at UPDESCO premises and a sum of INR 4.20 crores has been transferred to the state by the Government of India for the same.

The draft Request for Proposal (RFP) is also ready.

When can we expect the 17,909 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in Uttar Prades to be operational?

The state is implementing the Common Service Centres (CSCs) project in which a total of 17,909 CSCs will be setup during the year 2008-09. These CSCs 79

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Zone

Related Divisions

Moradabad

Moradabad and Saharanpur

Varanasi

Total No. Revenue Selected SCA Name of Jan Seva support (per CSC/Month) Kendra 1

Rs. 890/-

Varanasi, Allahabad SREI Infrastructure and Mirzapur Finance Ltd

2

Zero

Faizabad

Faizabad and Azamgarh

Comat Technologies Pvt Ltd

3

Rs. 2106/-

Lucknow

Lucknow, Gorakhpur and Basti

SREI Infrastructure Finance Ltd

4

Rs. 10/(-ve bid) i.e.

SCA to pay to GoUP

Bareilly

Bareilly and Comat Technologies Devipatan divisions Pvt Ltd

5

Zero

Agra

Agra and Meerut

6

Rs. 14/(-ve bid) i.e.

SCA to pay to GoUP

Kanpur

CMS Computers Ltd

3i Infotech Ltd

Zero

7

Kanpur, Jhansi and CMS Computers Ltd Chitrakoot dham

Zonal Division of Jan Seva Kendras

will be known as `Jan Seva Kendra’ in the state. These Kendras will act as the delivery points of various services to citizens at their doorstep. The CSC scheme has a 3-tier implementation framework which includes - State Designated Agency (SDA), Service Centre Agency (SCA) and Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE).

Master Service Agreement (MSA) with all the selected SCA’s has already been signed on April 8, 2008. As per the agreement 25 percent of the centres were supposed to be rolled out by September 8, 2008 and 25 percent by November 8, 2008 and the another 25 percent by January 8, 2009 and the rest 25 percent by April 8, 2009.

Zone

(2) Agra

Target for Ist phase (25%)

Type of Transaction

%age achievement

Nos

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

422

633

150.00%

470

In Uttar Pradesh there have been voices raised in favour of setting up of RTI call centres on the lines of the initiative taken by Bihar. Are we going to see any developments on that front in the near future?

The U.P. Government is considering to set up Call Centres for RTI and to provide informations.

In various e-Governance projects there is often a need for collaboration with private players. How has been your experience with private players so far in terms of partnership and performance so far?

In the state, lot of schemes are being implemented under the Public Private SCA/VLE’s Utility share (per provider to sale) pay

Charge to Citizen GoUP’s (per sale) share

e-Governance Services

INR 10/-

INR 0

INR 10/-

INR 0

Utility Collection

INR 0

INR 0

INR 4/-

INR 4/-

Land Record

INR 25/-

INR 10/-

INR 15/-

INR 0

Revenue Model of Jan Seva Kendras

Locations identified No. of VLEs selected till date in Ist phase till date by SCAs Nos

Since the revenue support is based on the availability of G2C services, the State has to develop appropriate G2C service enablement plans, at least for key government services. The service and revenue for the services to be provided from Jan Seva Kendra has been decided as follows:

No of CSC sites where construction work is on/ constructed

%age achiev- Nos ement

No. of CSCs fully established (operational/ to be operational)

%age achievement

Nos

%age achievement

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

111.37%

450

106.64%

131

31.04%

47.77%

0

0.00%

Mora-dabad

404

406

100.50%

331

81.93%

193

Kanpur

442

450

101.81%

405

91.63%

267

60.41%

0

0.00%

Lucknow

1112

4449

400.09%

695

62.50%

288

25.90%

136

12.23%

Varnasi

917

3669

400.11%

362

39.48%

55

6.00%

4

0.44%

Bareilly

530

650

122.64%

400

75.47%

578

109.06%

0

0.00%

650

650

100.00%

500

76.92%

649

99.85%

0

0.00%

70.65%

2480

55.39%

271

6.05%

Faizabad Total

4477

10907

243.62%

3163

Roll-Out Status of Jan Seva Kendras (as reported by SCA on 30.09.08) 80

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Partnership (PPP) model. All these schemes are running successfully. In the future, most of the schemes will be preferred on the PPP model.

In the implementation of the various e-Governance Projects, what do you think have been the major roadblocks?

Non-availability and maintenance of connectivity in rural areas has been a major problem in the implementation of e-Governance projects.

Most of the G2C e-Governance services are to be delivered through CSCs and all the CSCs are to be connected through the available service provider and in the last mile through wireless networks. Another roadblock is non-availability of IT personnels for monitoring e-Governance schemes. It is difficult for the state government, to get qualified IT professionals, as we can not match up to the salaries offered by the private sector.

• • • • • •

What are the other e-Governance project in the pipelines for the year 2009?

We are implementing several e-Governance project such as e-District Pariyojana which is being implemented in 6 districts of the state - Gorakhpur, Noida, Ghaziabad, Sultanpur, Sitapur and HIGHLIGHTS Rae Bareilly.

It will provide 10 services and 32 SWAN connecting 70 sub-services (as per list enclosed) to the districts in UP citizens electronically.

It will become INR 55.33 crores approved operational in December 2008. The

by GoI for SDC inauguration of the scheme was done by 17,909 Common Service the Chairman of Board of Revenue which Centres (CSCs) will be setup was scheduled on 15th December in during the year 2008-09 Sitapur District. The delivery of services e-District Pariyojana is has started from 19th December 2008 being implemented in 6 in Rae Bareilly and on 22nd December districts in Ghaziabad. Considering the success RTI Call Centres under of these initiatives, it shall be rolled out consideration in other districts of the state as well.

Difficulty in getting qualified These initiatives are the first of its kind in IT professionals for state the country.

Tannu Singh e-Governance tannu@egovonline.net

2008,

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Attracting investments in ITeS http://www.assamgovt.nic.in

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So far, 397 CSCs are operational and by March 31, 2009, the entire lot will be rolled out�

What has been the achievements of the IT Department of Assam?

In addition to the implementation of NeGP projects like SWAN/CSC/SDC the Department with support from AMTRON is also taking care of supply of Personal Computers (PCs) to needy institution, training to unemployed youth on ITeS, horizontal connectivity for SWAN and IT park in Guwahati.

Give us an update on the implementation of Common Service Centres (CSCs) in Assam?

Assam is going to establish 4,375 Common Service Centres (CSCs) covering the entire state. So far, 397 CSCs are operational and by March 31 2009, the entire lot will be rolled out.

What is the status of the state Mission Mode Projects in your state?

Mission Mode Projects are under way in the departments of Commercial Tax, Treasuries, Public Works and Transport.

Besides, e-District project is also being implemented in state.

V S Bhaskar Commissioner & Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Assam 82 }

What is happening in the SDC front in your state?

The Government of India have sanctioned State Data Centre (SDC) with an estimated cost of INR 49.04 crores. We have selected the site and we are in the process of selecting an architect for preparing the designs. The Request for Proposal (RFP) for SDC is also being prepared.

What are the initiatives taken by your state for attracting IT companies towards the North Eastern region?

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In order to attract investment in Information IT & ITeS Sectors, Government of Assam have taken up an IT Park. This location is very close to the airport and has all the necessary requisites for an IT Park. The RFP for having a consultant is being floated for the same.

What are the Public Private Partnerships (PPP) initiatives in the e-Governance domain of Assam?

We are in an embryonic stage as far as IT & ITeS sectors are concerned. However, we have been able to bring TCS as a private sector partner in the state.

Outside the realm of NeGP, what are the other e-Governance initiatives undertaken by your department ?

Government of Assam has taken up schemes for training the youth in IT & ITeS sectors and providing employment to them.

Besides this, there is distribution of PCs to needy institutions (both Government and Non Government), to students who secure first division in the 10th Standard, and in all the Higher Secondary Schools.

What is the e-Governance agenda for the next couple of years in Assam?

In the next couple of years, we propose to utilise the ASWAN, CSCs and SDC to the maximum extent possible and through e-Governance initiatives make the life of citizens easier. The business community should also find it simplier and easier to interact with the government. egov Team

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Roll Outs to happen in January’09 http://www.apit.ap.gov.in/

“

One Mandal in selected districts are proposed to be connected to three villages through WiMAX. New IP based video conference system is already in place”

What is the progress of the State Wide Area Network (SWAN) project in your state?

Tender has been released for new State Wide Area Network (SWAN) covering up to Mandal Head Quarters (MHQs).

The existing SWAN is based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology. The new proposed SWAN is based on Internet Protocol (IP) and the bandwidth can be more efficiently used. District Head quarters (DHQs) are connected to State Head quarters (SHQ)s with 8 Mbps bandwidth and each DHQ is connected to its MHQs through 2 Mbps bandwidth. The tender process is likely to be completed by mid June 2009 and will be in place by September 2009 covering all MHQs on experimental basis. One Mandal in selected districts are proposed to be connected to three villages through WiMAX. Furthermore, new IP based video conference system is already in place.

Ajay Mishra Principal Secretary, Department of Information Technology & Communication, Government of Andhra Pradesh ov

January 2009

Is APSWAN addressing the issue of connecting the Police?

The existing APSWAN is already connecting district level police stations and the Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) office. The APSWAN is also utilised for network purposes for sharing data on critical issues. We are planning to extend the network to the Mandal level through the new SWAN. It is expected that this system will facilitate the police department to reduce the response time.

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How do you plan to utilise the funds released by the Government of India for the State Data Centres?

DIT has released an amount of INR 4.15 crores as a part of the total allocation of INR 55.5 crores for setting up the State Data Centres (SDC). Presently, the Request on Proposal (RFP) is in progress and a System Integrators would be finalised after the bidding process is completed.

The amount would be utilised partly for capital expenditure and the balance amount for making the payment to the vendors on quarterly basis for the operational expenses in the next five years under the Build, Own, Operate, Transfer (BOOT) model.

An amount of INR 17,86,748 has also been paid to the Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC) towards mobilisation as an advance and for the preparation of the Detailed Project Report (DPR) on SDC. Andhra Pradesh has plans to set up a total of 4,687 Common Service Centre (CSCs), by when can we expect to see these CSCs actually getting operational?

We are planning to launch a total of 4,687 Common Service Centre (CSCs) in the state. We expect that by January 2009, approximately 800 CSCs will be operational. The remaining CSCs would become operational by August 2009.

Tannu Singh tannu@egovonline.net 83

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STATE GOVERNMENT CORNER

Quality of Services is Prime http://www.itngl.nic.in/

“

We have a very rich resource in the form of English speaking, technology savvy youthful population that is ideal for employment in Information Technology Enabled Services (ITeS)”

In the last one year, what is the overall progress in terms of implementing the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in your state?

In Nagaland, the core Information Technology (IT) infrastructure comprising of State Wide Area Network (SWAN), State Data Centre (SDC) and Common Services Centres (CSCs) are in the process of being implemented. For the SWAN, Request for Proposal (RFP) has been floated and bids are being evaluated. We expect the SWAN to be in place by June 2009. RFP for SDC has also been finalised and we expect the data centre to be commissioned

by June 2009 as well. Similarly, the state has already signed Master Service Agreement (MSA) with Terasoft, Hyderabad for establishing 220 CSCs

by June 2009. Mission Mode Projects (MMPs), System Software Development Group (SSDG), and Capacity Building programmes under NeGP are also being implemented.

Abhishek Singh Secretary to Governor & Secretary Information Technology, Technical Education, Government of Nagaland 84 }

What is the status of various state Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) in your state? What is the plan of action so far?

Mission Mode Projects for various departments are being implemented.

Project e-Mission teams have been formed and they are in the process of doing the ‘As Is To Be’ analysis and we hope that by the time core NeGP infrastructure is established, these projects will also be ready for rollout.

4th Anniversary Issue

The Government of Nagaland has declared 2008-09 - the Year of Capacity Building which will aim at reforms and renewing the system of governance and delivery of public services. What is the way forward from here?

The idea is to transform the way government functions and the way it interacts with citizens. As part of Capacity Building programme, we are trying to enhance the capacities at various levels in the government. by improving and re-engineering government processes and systems.

IT is playing a major role in this process as information availability and government processes for service delivery can be greatly improved by use of technology.

The government of Nagaland recently launched 220 Common Service Centres across the state in association with the Service Centre Agency (SCA). By what time will these centres be operational?

As per the MSA, the Service Centre Agency (SCA) is supposed to establish 25 percent CSCs in three months, 50 percent in six months and all the 220 CSCs in a span of twelve months.

Since we have only 220 CSCs we are hopeful of rolling out all of them by June 2009.

In the first phase, we are integrating the 52 Community Information Centres with the CSCs. www.egovonline.net

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You had told egov earlier, that in 2008 one district in Nagaland will be taken up as an e-District. Which district has been adopted and what is the status of the same?

Mokokchung district was proposed as e-District and we are hopeful of taking the project forward based on the learnings of the e-District pilot projects in other States.

How far has been the e-Modop project successful in providing the citizens of Nagaland with G2C services? e-Modop project has been the first project to offer e-Services to people of the state. It has changed the perception of how people look at government for availing services. Now we are in the process of integrating the services with mobile service providers to ensure offering Government to Citizen (G2C) services over the mobile phones for wider reach and easy accessibility.

Your government has invited bids for the NagaSWAN on the Build, Own, Operate, Transfer (BOOT) model. What is the response for the same?

We have already had the pre bid conference on 3rd December 2008. Last date of submission of bids was 19 December 2008. Many companies have expressed interest for the same.

We have observed that negative bidding is becoming a trend in acquiring government tenders. What are your comments?

Negative bidding is seen mainly in CSC projects in many states. This shows the opportunity that exists in G2C, G2B and G2G services. As a long term business strategy, companies are interested in getting contracts through negative bidding with the hope that volume of services and number of transactions will help them generate revenues. However, we need to be cautious to ensure that quality of services being offered is not compromised.

North East as a region is lagging behind in the e-Governance road map. Are there any specific strategies for attracting IT companies towards the region? What other initiatives HIGHLIGHTS the government should take in this regard?

• SWAN to be in place by We are in the process of establishing June 2009 an IT park in Dimapur for attracting • Data centre to be IT companies to establish base in commissioned by June 2009 Nagaland. We have a very rich resource • Plan to roll-out 220 CSC’s by in the form of English speaking, June 2009 technology savvy youthful population • e-Modop project is the first that is ideal for employment in IT, project to offer e-Services to Information Technology Enabled people of the state Services (ITeS) and Business Process • For uninterrupted G2G Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Infact, a services, all sub divisional majority of BPO workers in the country headquarters in the state are belong to the North East region. The networked with Very Small state government provides various Aperture Terminals (VSATs) tax concessions, subsidised power • Video Conferencing with and other subsidies to IT industry all district headquarters is for establishing base in Nagaland as functional per the IT and the Industrial Policy of the state.

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Outside the realm of NeGP, what are the other e-Governance initiatives undertaken by your department?

Our vision of e-Governance is to simplify government and to offer services that are reliable and always available. The state has also initiated projects in other government departments like transport, industries etc. Secretariat’s Local Area Network (LAN) is fully functional.

File tracking system project has been implemented. For uninterrupted G2G services, we have networked all sub divisional headquarters in the state with Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs). Video Conferencing with all district headquarters is also functional.

At the state level, all departments have been connected with Radio Frequency (RF) to facilitate connectivity. egov Team

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CORPORATE CORNER

e-Procurement Made Easy http://www.nextenders.com

“

Our e-Procurement solutions have reduced the tender cycle time significantly”

Elaborate upon the benefits that is accruing to the various government departments through your e-Procurement solutions? Which are the states where you are providing such services?

Our e-Procurement solutions have reduced the tender cycle time significantly. It has increased the competition among the bidders which in turn has resulted in savings for the state and central government’s public exchequer. For instance, a few of the tenders of the Water Resources Department of the of Chhattisgarh which were processed by using the e-Tendering System saved INR 27.43 crores for processing of tenders of estimated value of INR 105.81 crores. There has been an increase in the process of efficiency and increase in the budget and number of works to be executed. Our e-Tendering System in Chhattisgarh Rural Roads Development Agency has reduced more than 80 percent of the time involved in the evaluation of the bids.

Sumeet Bhatt Director, NexTenders (India) Pvt. Ltd. ov

January 2009

You have sophisticated e-Tendering solutions. What is the impact that it has created?

The introduction of our e-Tendering system in the various state government departments and Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) has been welcomed by the younger generation of contractors / suppliers especially because of the greater transparency and ease of use which gives them an equal opportunity to compete with their competitors. Our e-Procurement system has got a built in facility of evaluating bids online 4th Anniversary Issue

based on the parameters defined by the user departments implementing the solutions. It also has a feature to monitor the processing time of bid evaluation at each user level which monitors the excess time utilised by each user. This results in faster execution of each user’s role and fixing of responsibility which in turn results in faster award of Tenders to appropriate bidders.

Our e-Procurement system is also capable of being implemented in a state-wide environment for all the departments / agencies in the state, the historical data on the performance of the Vendor can be viewed and monitored by the departments and their bidding capacity can be calculated in real time. Because of the patented tamperevident security of the bidders’ data offered by our system, bidders have complete confidence in not being physically present during the tender opening events.

They are able to view the price bids of the other participating bidders online. Since our solution has a patented tamper-evident bid security feature, bidders do not feel compelled to be present during tender opening events. There has been a noticeable increase in the participation of vendors from other states to participate in the tenders processed.

For instance, due to introduction of e-Procurement system by the state of Chhattisgarh, many of the works contractors from the state of Andhra Pradesh are participating in the tenders of works department in Chhattisgarh.

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CORPORATE CORNER

>

You have partnered with several state governments for providing e-Tendering services. Which states and departments are the recent addition to your client list?

NexTenders is actively implementing e-Procurement (by itself as well as with partners such as Wipro and Satyam) in various state governments such as Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Haryana. We are also working with Municipal Corporation of Delhi and Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. More recently, NexTenders, along with Satyam, has bagged the order to implement our new version 3 e-Procurement system in one of the India’s premier strategic government agencies (the identity of which cannot be disclosed at this point of time since the contracts are still being negotiated).

One of the most important features of our new version 3 system that will be deployed for this client is a unique multilocation Intranet-Internet network security architecture with data synchronisation across multiple locations and multiple servers. This provides clients additional security since it ensures that their internal procurement servers are not accessible from the Internet, and their suppliers do not connect to their internal servers but work through an ‘external’ procurement portal. This is a critical requirement for security-conscious clients.

administrator not applicable to backed up copies of sensitive data; and “Principle of 4-Eyes” – defeated by collusion.

Another common problem that NexTenders has addressed is the transfer of access control and privileges from one official to another in an organisation, without the need to share passwords, digital certificates. The unique NexTenders document security management feature enables the secure transfer of such access and other privileges through PKI and therefore without compromising individual or organisational security at any stage.

This feature is presently patent pending in several countries.

NexTenders is involved with the development of the UN/ CEFACT TBG6 new worldwide standard for e-Tendering based on an eBXML schema which is now ratified worldwide; and the next version of our system (version 4 that is now in development and is expected to be released in Q2 2009) will incorporate this important new means of publishing standardised tender information.

What are your plans for the year 2009 with reference to e-Governance?

Within the broad area of e-Governance, NexTenders will focus on e-Procurement. The term has been much abused and is poorly understood. For instance, websites that merely provide tender documents for download in PDF format tout What are the measures taken by your company for themselves as e-Procurement solutions. It is very important to securing the e-Tendering process? What is your USP vis- have a base minimum standard of what constitutes genuine a-vis your competitors? e-Procurement. NexTenders plans to use all available forum Right from inception NexTenders realised that standard to educate government clients as well as the public at large. industry security measures for document exchange were NexTenders is soon scheduled to release Version 4 of its not adequate to meet the unique challenges of government e-Procurement solution which is a revamped version of its procurement. For example, in existing version of the solution. government procurement the Benefits of implementing our Whilst the work flow and the mere viewing of bid data is a security shall be continue to be e-Procurement System are fundamental compromise, which the core strengths of the newer standard security solutions do not version, the new system shall be • Reduction in administration and address completely. platform independent, browser communication costs The list of standard independent on the client side • Real time access to information for security measures offered by operations, modular, scalable, the decision makers e-Procurement / e-Tendering can be integrated with the present • Price savings through aggregation solutions and their vulnerabilities legacy systems, offer increased of volumes and ‘smart buying’ are SSL / HTTPS - data on the functionalities, better user interface • Instant and round-the-clock access server vulnerable; time - stamping and ease of use functionality. to publicly accessible information - defeated by bid substitution; The beta version of the software on the Internet standard encryption and double is expected to be released by April • Increased levels of accountability encryption - decryptable at any – 2009 and the final version by • Capability to monitor the time; digital certificates and July – 2009. NexTenders also performance of state agencies hashing - bid substitution defeats envisages to offer its data security • All transactions are truly auditable this; time locks - not part of module for other government • Enhanced security PKI and can be compromised applications and systems that • Demand aggregation across by anyone with access to the require the security and sanctity of different divisions/departments application layer of the system; their data. NexTenders also plans leading to better negotiating biometrics and other server access to target international market power with suppliers and process restriction - defeated by collusion with its newer version of the efficiency with the department and need for e-Procurement system with its • Supplier discovery / widening choice off-site data back ups; read only global partners in different regions and the supplier base logs and audit trails - oxymoron, of the world. logs and trails are written and • In-built document management/file Nilakshi Barooah hence can be edited by the system management system nilakshi@egovonline.net 88

4th Anniversary Issue

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CASE STUDY

Helping e-Government

Step Into Web 2.0

Broad Vision Powered IRCTC’s Portal with simple customer interface, thus integrating it to optimise the benefits of e-Commerce

D

igital government offers the prospect of public services that are easy-to-use; accessible, cost-effective; available aroundthe-clock; unified across agencies; and consistent in appearance and functionality. In addition to government-to-citizen interactions, the Internet offers new possibilities for governmentto-government (G2G); government-to-employee (G2E); and government-to-business (G2B) connections. G2G requires applications that share data across agencies as the foundation for knowledge management, content management, workflow management, and interinstitutional collaboration.

G2E requires intranet, project management and easy publishing, while G2B requires e-Procurement, MRO goods, contracting, e-Auctioning, e-Tendering, e-Procurement, and extranets.

CHALLENGE IN INDIA: “QUEUES-TOCLICKS” CONVERSION

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) is a public sector company, set up and fully owned by the Ministry of Railways. IRCTC quickly recognized the Internet’s potential to improve its existing operations and, in parallel, look at new horizons of revenues. IRCTC is changing with the times and has done the right thing by adopting the right kind of technology that provides IRCTC with multiple solutions on a single platform.

As the IRCTC site (www.irctc.co.in) has grown to meet business demands, the BroadVision agile business suite scaled to meet IRCTC’s growing traffic from 1 Lakh transactions in one month to over 1.75 Lakh transactions per day!

BroadVision’s highly-scalable and ov

January 2009

robust solution helped IRCTC to record a peak booking of more than 15,000 tickets in an hour – an average of 4 tickets per second! IRCTC leveraged BroadVision’s capabilities to the fullest extent and added other tourism and reservation touch-points services to enable its customers to plan trips and purchase the tickets online – creating great customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Solution: Agile platform grows with customer needs, scales to immediate growth and brings Indian consumers to forefront IRCTC’s BroadVision-powered portal integrates a simple-to-use e-Commerce customer interface with an existing passenger reservation system and payment gateway to enable customer self-service and increased convenience for Indian Railways’ passengers seeking to plan trips, book and receive tickets.

From “queues to clicks”, it has been a highly interesting and groundbreaking journey not only by its revenue success, but also for having a significant impact to increasing the Internet adaptation rate in India.

4th Anniversary Issue

HIGH-PERFORMANCE AND HIGHSCALABILITY

• Entire project completed within six months – including integration with legacy systems.

• One of Asia-Pacific’s largest e-commerce solutions.

• Covers 200+ cities/towns.

• Moved from a single-service offering company to a full-service tourism portal.

• Over 25 payment integrations including Credit, Debit and Cash Cards.

BroadVision Delivers • • • •

Low Total Cost of Ownership Easy Integration and Rapid Time-to-Market Proven Scalability Platform-Neutral Solution

RAISING INDIA’S STANDARDS

The Internet ticketing system has been awarded numerous “Firsts” in the Indian e-Commerce space. The solution received the Gold Award for 89

CASE STUDY “Outstanding Performance in CitizenCentric Service Delivery” for National Awards for e-Governance at the 11th National Conference on e-Governance.

BROADVISION’S GLOBAL E-GOVERNMENT SUCCESSES:

BroadVision’s solutions have supported local and federal government agencies globally for intranet/extranets; content management; logistics; e-Procurement; information distribution and permit processing from the resident to the government agency.

CITY OF TILBURG, NETHERLANDS

The city of Tilburg’s innovative site (www.tilburg.nl) serves over 2 Lakh residents. This city has been managed, to the greatest extent possible, as a business concern – public services are subsidiary companies of the local authority and must adhere to yearly contracts drawn up in operating budgets. The site, built on BroadVision’s Business Agility Suite solution, enabled the citizens to transact routine, administrative businesses online; enhanced communication between the government and the city’s inhabitants; and added to Tilburg’s reputation as one of the most technologically-advanced cities in the country. The site has extensive personalization capabilities. Users can visit a WebShop to request passports, permits and other city documents and search for documents of any kind on the site containing specific text. Each user will be able to create a Personal Internet Page and elect to receive news feeds, RSS feeds, Tilburg-specific news, on-line videos of meetings, Tilburg On-Line TV and other information streams. In the Netherlands, government organisations are regularly assessed and ranked for “Best Governmental sites.” At the project’s start, Tilburg’s public site was in 60th position; and their strategic aim was to establish a position in the Top 10.

The new site climbed Gemeente Tilburg to the 14th spot – then, one week later, 5th position. Being the 6th largest city of the Netherlands, this is an excellent achievement – Tilburg’s priority is to retain this status and improve.

STATE OF VIENNA, AUSTRIA

The state of Vienna powers all of its sites with BroadVision’s Business Agility 90 }

Quote Unquote “Our online commerce sales have seen exponential growth on a yearly basis starting from monthly online sales of approximately 3,300 tickets in August 2002 and growing to over 2.4 million online tickets in March 2008. BroadVision has been our technology solution provider since the beginning and has made an important contribution in our efforts.”

Dr. Nalin Shinghal Managing Director, IRCTC “We will scale to meet IRCTC’s increased load needs. At the same time we are committed to helping IRCTC to enhance customer satisfaction; increase self-service by automation; and increase access options. We are elated with IRCTC’s accomplishments and to be a part of their success.”

Subir Agrawal Director Business Consulting, South Asia-Pacific, BraodVision “We’ve established that BroadVision’s solutions are globally proven and cost-effective. Our localization forays with Indian Government agencies and PSU’s have been nothing short of spectacular. We are eager to participate in the next wave of Web 2.0 e-Government initiatives.”

Biplove Belwal Regional Director South Asia-Pacific, BroadVision Suite platform with over 13 independent services on a single platform installation.

A centralized database enables these sites for media management. Moving to BroadVision gave this organization reduction of infrastructure, platform maintenance and barrier-free websites.

BroadVision’s self-service Web applications enable government agencies to provide citizens, suppliers and employees with one-stop, personalized self-service access to information, transactions and business processes.

BroadVision solutions support the complex relationships, processes and interactions necessary for e-government and make it possible for government 4th Anniversary Issue

agencies to reach its goals for 24/365 availability, paper reduction, citizen participation in governance, knowledge transfer, and cost reductions.

GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION (GSA)

GSA Advantage (www.GSAAdvantage. gov) operated by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Federal Supply Service, is the largest federal government, Internet-based, e-Procurement site. The GSA Advantage e-Commerce market allows government agencies such as the Department of Transportation, the Navy, and the Veterans Administration to order products and services from a database that contains over five million products and services that fulfill 11,000 Federal Supply Service and Department of Veterans Affairs schedule contracts.

Before GSAAdvantage.gov launched, government employees seeking to complete procurement had to review paper catalogs from vendors, call vendors, and wait several days to complete the contact process and receive telephone or paper quotations.

Additionally, procurement research was only a limited number of vendor catalogs.

Once deployed, GSAAdvantage.gov enabled the government to scale quickly and increased the personalisation capabilities. GSAAdvantage.gov also gave the government a more flexible and easy-to-update system to handle changes in laws and procurement regulations.

Today, GSA Advantage has more than 275,000 registered customers and is used by federal civilian and military personnel located throughout the world who conduct more than 100,000 searches for products and services each business day. The site’s volume of transactions has grown at a triple-digit rate for years, and more than 400 new federal customers register every day.

More capabilities include product and service categorisation, virtual stores for customised agency access, single login with other major federal portals, and XML capabilities for vendors. A major initiative was to deploy GSA punch-out/ punch-in capability to enable agencies to access GSAAdvantage.gov from their e-Procurement systems and seamlessly integrate their back-end financial systems to automate reconciliation. www.egovonline.net

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Village Phone Programme One approach to universal access (UA), which springs from the user side of the network—even though the first international case and several current initiatives involve leading mobile operators—is the village phone concept. This has emerged in several forms around the world, sometimes organised by a Micro-Finance Institution (MFI), sometimes by a private enterprise, or sometimes by the operator with financial partners.

The village phone concept began with the launch of the village phone programme in rural Bangladesh in 1997 as an initiative of the Grameen Bank. The Grameen Bank provides impoverished village women with financial support to develop sustainable income generating activities. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the bank, and the Grameen Bank itself, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.”

Women clients of the Grameen Bank who show the initiative to become local Village Phone Operators (VPOs), receive training and are loaned funds to purchase a mobile phone set-up (phone with special in-built pricing software) suitable for rural areas, as well as airtime credits. Through the network of VPOs, vending affordable airtime denominations and facilitating individual calls, residents enjoy better access to communication services.

The success of the programme at generating sustainable business

and social empowerment opportunities for women, and high performance in the recovery of loan disbursements, led to the replication (with variations) of Grameen’s initial Bangladesh model, in the African countries of Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda.

At the core of a generic village phone programme is a viable business model for local entrepreneurs (women and increasingly men) to provide telecommunications services to their community.

The entrepreneurs are offered a telephone operator business kit consisting of a mobile phone, external antenna (in the African cases), business management materials, a marketing poster, and usually some introductory training via the telecommunications service provider alone or in partnership with supporting organisations, which include microfinance entities, banks and non-government organisations (NGOs).

FLIP SIDE by Santulan Chaubey

Right Sir, He is BPL. But he is not carrying the Ration. On his back are smart cards, ration cards, identity cards, Multi purpose cards, etc. He is searching for a ration shop sir….

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12 National Conference on e-Governance e-Governance: Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges e-Governance Compendium 2009 Themes Building Assistive Technology Services Local Governance: Reaching Services to the Under Served Building Capacities, Forging Partnerships Legal Issues in Process Reforms Managing SUAs: Lessons from the Past Putting Governance before ‘e’ Evaluating the Impact Translating objectives into outcomes: Priorities, Challenges and Solutions RTI and e-Governance: How to Synergise

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