50th Issue: May 2009 Issue

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www.egovonline.net Volume 5 | Issue 5 | May 2009

VISION

7

e-Governance to Power e-India

R Chandrashekhar, Special Secretary, DIT, GoI

iNSIGHT

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Quintessential Device S R Rao, Additional Secretary, DIT, GoI

20

Policy Makers

23

Pioneers

26

Politicians

27

Thought Leaders

28

Policies

29

Central Projects

30

State Projects

31

Hurdles

32

States

40

Upcoming Projects

42

16

Tapping ICT Potential S Ramakrishnan, DG,C-DAC Sandeep Budki

Municipalities

46 Emerging States

interview

for All 48 Technology Rajan Anandan, MD, Microsoft India Sandeep Budki

opinion

52 NeGP: The Challenge Ahead Arup Roy, Senior Research Analyst, Gartner

special features

54 CDAC: Catalysing Country’s Computing Competence

News & Views

66

Rishi Jaitly Senior Policy Analyst Google Inc.

Nandwana 66 Dinesh Chairman, Vakrangee Softwares Ltd.

68 70

N S N Murthy Director – Sales, MphasiS

Ask SAP www.egovonline.net

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editorial

50 issues young!

50 issues and four and a half years has been our journey so far and it could not have been possible without the love, encouragement, appreciation and support of our authors, readers, advertisers and supporters from all across the globe.

President Dr. M P Narayanan Editor-in-Chief Dr. Ravi Gupta Group Directors Maneesh Prasad Sanjay Kumar Assistant Editor Sandeep Budki Correspondent Vikram Pratap Singh Research Assistant Tannu Singh Dy. General Manager - Marketing Gautam Navin mobile: +91 9818125257 email: gautam@egovonline.net Sr. Manager, Marketing Debabrata Ray mobile: +91 9899650692 email: debabrata@egovonline.net Sr. Executive, Business Development Santosh Kumar Gupta mobile: +91 9891192996 email: santosh@egovonline.net Anuj Agrawal mobile: +91-9911302086 anuj@csdms.in

Going down the memory lane, when we thought of brining out an e-Government magazine in 2005 many people thought it’s an idea well ahead of its time. But in the present scenario i.e 2009 people tell us that this is an idea whose time has come.

Although a lot has changed in the e-Governance scenario in the last five years one thing that has perhaps not changed is the value of knowledge sharing in e-Governance. It was a big issue in 2005, and is even bigger in 2009. In spite of the long journey we have had, our efforts are a drop in the ocean of lack of effective knowledge capturing, recording and dissemination mechanism for ICT implementation for the masses in the country.

In our journey of last 50 issues that had its share of happy and sad moments was a amazing learning experience for us! It is not easy for implementers of e-Governance projects to be easily convinced to document and share what they are doing. We had made it our mission to chase them and convince them to share their ideas with the larger community of readers, though we still have a long way to go! We commit herewith to strive harder to fulfill the expectations of our readers to give them updated information on the world of e-Governance, month after month, issue after issue!

In this issue, we have tried to encapsulate the journey of e-Governance in India by bringing to you the ‘chosen five’ in the categories of who’s who, e-Governance policies, thought leaders who gave the critical impetus to the growth of e-Governance, state initiatives, policies in pipeline, and so on. But in doing so, it is not our wilful intention to leave out those hundreds and lakhs of Indians who may have contributed in some way or the other to the spirit and growth of e-Governance in our country.

We look forward to your support and blessings for the next 50 issues!

Sales Executive Sonia Parmar mobile: +91-9899845203 sonia@egovonline.net Sr Graphic Designer Bishwajeet Kumar Singh Graphic Designers Om Prakash Thakur, Chandrakesh Bihari Lal (James)

Dr. Ravi Gupta Editor-in-Chief Ravi.Gupta@egovonline.net

Web Zia Salahuddin, Amit Pal

Editorial & Marketing Correspondence

Subscription & Circulation Lipika Dutta +91-9871481708 Manoj Kumar +91-9971404484

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May 2009

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VISION

e-Governance to Power e-India:

15 Goals for 2015

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

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The first IT revolution took Indian IT to the whole world.

The second IT revolution should bring the world of IT to the whole of India 7

R

ecent experience in India has amply demonstrated that, at the ground level, the boundaries between e-Governance, e-commerce and esociety fade away. The same physical infrastructure is used by all of them.

Where assisted access is available, the same people facilitate all of them.

Each propels the others to greater speed of adoption and wider usage.

The distinction remains useful as an analytical construct and sometimes for policy purposes, but it is important to note that these three domains are inextricably interwoven strands permeating the same cyberspace.

Fortunately, at this point in mid 2009, India has shown itself to be an aggressive adopter of technology as evidenced by the boom in mobile telephony and the proliferation of services riding on it. This is perhaps the only field where we have outpaced every other nation in the world including China. e-Services in general, seem to be entering an exponential phase of growth in the country and India has become the recognised leader in the world in innovation in the use of ICT for development, especially in fields that figure prominently in the millennium development goals like education, health and agriculture.

The vision for 2015 therefore needs to take into account these two key features and be translatable into an aggressively ambitious, yet realisable set of goals which all the stakeholders can relate to.

While working out lofty, yet achievable goals, it is important to factor in the difference in the roles of government, businesses and people in these three areas. The role of government is direct and decisive in e-Governance but facilitative in e-Commerce and eSociety through policies, regulation and promotion. The role of business, as implementers, users and promoters is direct and decisive in e-Commerce, but supportive in the others. The role and attitude of people holds the key to ushering in an e-Society, but their response can provide a huge stimulus in the other two areas.

While drawing their motive power from different sources, these three segments have huge synergies as well as interdependencies and progress in one without commensurate progress in the others will stall very quickly. of necessity, therefore, the goals for

e-Governance for 2015 must in some ways at least, overlap the other two domains. In as much as e-Governance is the only segment which is relatively demand inelastic, its goals set the tone for realising the vision of e-India.

Against this backdrop, I have tried to put together 15 goals for 2015 for e-Governance.

1 Wireless Broadband and Mobile

Access in all towns and villages The first prerequisite for entry into the digital world is connectivity. None of the ambitious aims can be realised without this. Fortunately, we are on track, although roadblocks and speedbreakers are not lacking. Three gigantic initiatives of government are acting as propellants in achieving this, of which the first is the Common Service Centres project elaborated below, as a part of which, funding has been provided to BSNL to provide wireline and

e-Governance is the only segment which is relatively demand inelastic, its goals set the tone for realising the vision of e-India wireless connectivity to 100,000 village locations dispersed equitably across the country. This connectivity is expected to be in place as early as March, 2010.

Since much of it is wireless, it results in coverage of the entire surrounding area rather than a single point. The second is the already approved National Mission on Education through ICT, as a part of which, a dispersed and massive demand for broadband connectivity across the country has been generated thereby resulting in a sound business case for BSNL or other service providers to provide Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) at an accelerated pace in the hinterland. The proposed National Knowledge Network is also expected to trigger a further demand for connectivity from more than 1,50,000 educational institutions in the country.

Thirdly, the USOF has taken some important steps to create shared passive

infrastructure thereby lowering costs, improving affordability and facilitating penetration in rural areas. Once spectrum issues are resolved in the near future, USOF would also be able to utilize existing fund balances with it to provide financial support to service providers to provide BWA in rural areas.

Creating a competitive environment in the provision of BWA in rural areas is essential to ensure reliability and quality of services, apart from affordable cost.

A concerted move using already available funding by DOT, USOF, BSNL and other service providers would enable this goal to be reached by 2012, if not earlier. This is necessary if the other goals are to be met by 2015.

2 Common Service Centres (CSCs)

in all villages Under the CSC Programme, 100,000 CSCs are being set up to provide assisted access in 100,000 rural villages dispersed equitably across the 600,000+ villages in the country. Around 40,000 are already operational and the rest are expected to be in place by March, 2010.

This is expected to create a spurt in eservices, both government and private.

Since CSCs are being implemented on a Public Private Partnership model that is entrepreneur driven, it is expected to result in proliferation of services and continuous value addition to the services, creating a seamless merger between eservices and extended physical services.

An example is home delivery of all kinds of goods, services and communications as a value addition. Another example is local customisation and extension of a nationally or regionally available eservice. Increasing number of services and increasing coverage would lead to accelerating availability and exponential growth of both. Once the number and availability of services increases above a certain minimum level, the viability and sustainability of CSCs would improve substantially and enable penetration to enter the next phase by 2012 eventually leading to access through such shared, assisted infrastructure in all villages by 2015.

3 All major public services available online As an initial step, all public services that cater to a large number of people www.egovonline.net

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services to authorised agencies would have tremendous impact on the ease of providing and availing such services.

It is also envisaged that biometric information would be collected under UID/ NPR and would be integrated with the database before 2015. This would relieve people of the burden of complying with cumbersome procedures to establish identity and enable e-Services to be provided with a high level of security. By 2015, the goal would be to integrate this ID into the delivery of all government, banking and other services including flagship programmes.

would need to be made available electronically. The definition of “large� could be services that cater to more than 10,000 people at a state or regional level or 100,000 people at a national level.

Given that the common infrastructure required for this purpose in the shape of SWANs, SDCs, State Portals and Service Delivery Gateways is well on the way to being in place in 2010, services such as college admissions, caste certificates, birth and death certificates, land records, bill payments, etc. many of which have already commenced in some states/ regions could progressively brought online by 2010-2012, starting with the top 5. This would pave the way for legislative enforcement which is elaborated as a separate goal later.

4 All major public services available through call centres Apart from services being available on line, services made available on mobile/ landline through call centres is already being planned. Obviously, e-enabling the service is a condition precedent to making available through a call centre the whole or such part of the service as may be feasible. Given that mobile ov

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phones and voice communication will continue to dominate the Indian market in the near and possibly medium term as well, establishment of such call centres is critical for enabling a far wider cross section of people to derive the benefit of e-services. The availability of a service through a call centre could move in lock step with its e-enablement, possibly within 6 months of the latter.

5 Individual ID scheme fully operational Currently, the Unique ID scheme approved by the Government in 2008 is entering the implementation phase.

A strategy has also been evolved to collate the UID scheme with the National Population Register being prepared alongside the Census 2011.

The UID scheme envisages a number of identity related services being available electronically, thereby enabling fast, convenient identification of persons and facilitating delivery of e-government and other e-services especially those involving specifically targeted services as well as normal services like banking, credits cards, etc. Availability of such electronically accessible identity

6 Integrate Financial Services and Mobile telephony Two major problems confronting the country are financial inclusion and poor rural mobile and broadband wireless penetration. The former has proved intractable because extending banking services in the traditional brick, mortar and people mode to the rural areas is unviable. Equally, extending telecom services, including wireline to rural areas on a financially sustainable model has proved to be a monumental challenge.

There have been certain fledgling efforts to provide certain limited financial services through mobile telephones.

However, several regulatory hurdles remain to be overcome if such services are to proliferate and have widespread impact. The remedy would appear to be in converging banking and mobile services and allowing mobile service providers to provide a range of banking services either on their own or through suitable business arrangements with banks on terms approved by regulators.

The result required is, however, clear. A person should be able to use his mobile device as a banking instrument to pay and receive money, at least small sums of say, up to Rs. 10,000/- per transaction.

Secondly, a person should be able to not only run up a telephone bill on his mobile but also accrue positive cash balances on his account through payments received which can, in turn, be used to make payments through the mobile itself or converted into cash at a conventional bank branch. It is highly desirable that as far as the individual user is concerned, he should not be required to open a conventional bank account for these services to be availed of from the

mobile service provider. Initially, the amount that could be accumulated in this manner without the need to open a separate bank account could be capped at say Rs. one lakh.

Three immediate benefits accrue from such an arrangement. The first is a huge leap in financial inclusion. The second is a sudden spurt in coverage of mobile services because of better profitability at far lower population densities due to the superior business mix. The last, but by no means the least, is the transfer of a mind boggling volume of financial transactions that are currently off the tax radar onto it by creating a record of each such transaction. The tax buoyancy that could result from the latter should be more than enough to overcome any reluctance to abandon conventional methods and practices.

school and college level available online and integrated into the regular curriculum Much of this is already planned and being funded under the National Mission on Education through ICT. Critical success factors include: complete coverage of the curriculum, adherence to projected timelines and ensuring high quality of the content by leveraging the services of the plethora of world class educational content creation companies in India.

A number of other concomitants like modification of pedagogy, etc. are being addressed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

The potential for these steps to transform the quality of education in rural areas and minimize urbanrural divide in this respect cannot be overstated.

7 Integrate ID services with mobile telephony The creation of an ID database in the country and the creation of an array of ID related services around it leads inevitably to the question of an identity card – smart or not so smart – that can be used by an individual as a proof of his or her identity. The explosive growth of mobile telephony, the suggested merger of limited banking services and mobile telephony and the creation of an eenabled ID database for the country leads to another breathtaking possibility: the merger of identity card and mobile telephony device. Of course, this does not preclude some persons from having a simple paper or non-smart card ID. The utility of the mobile telephone increases manifold when it serves all three purposes and it is not difficult to envisage a situation where every head of household, if not every individual, has such a multi-purpose device. The other attraction of this option is that it has negligible cost implications for the government. Cost is a show stopper for many other solutions at whatever cost per person in which government has to pick up the tab for over a billion people.

This device can easily link to the database of government as well as incorporate photographs and biometric attributes like fingerprint.

9 Major agriculture sector services including consultancy, credit and insurance available online Considering the agrarian nature of our economy, it is vital that the IT boom should reincarnate the agricultural revolution of the 60s and the 70s. Such a paradigm shift would be possible only if agricultural extension services and other inputs and marketing related services take full advantage of the power of the IT revolution. This requires a complete review of current methods and practices and putting in place a new system. The enormity of the task dictates that it would take at least five years to put all the pieces in place. Encouraging steps have been taken in the form of establishment of the agricultural marketing network (AGMARKNET), Kisan Call Centre, etc. The challenge now is to evolve to a more comprehensive coverage of sector specific services based on a holistic view of sectoral needs.

8 Create complete range of high quality educational programmes for 10

10 High quality medical services available in villages through telemedicine There are many similarities between the problems faced in the educational and medical sectors in reaching high quality services to the rural and far flung areas.

To the extent that these are problems related to distance, lack of high quality, skilled manpower at the remote location or even lack of appropriate equipment at such locations, ICTs offer great hope for

breakthrough gains. There are enough instances on the ground in India today to form a reliable basis for extrapolation and assessment of the strengths and limitations of ICTs in providing high quality medical services in rural/ remote areas. A more proactive effort on the part of telemedicine and IT experts and medical policy makers is called for to bring in a new paradigm in the sector and integrate ICTs into health sector service delivery. A National Mission on Health Services through ICTs on the lines of the Mission in Education is perhaps called for to accelerate adoption and proliferation of benefits across the country.

11 Provision of Insurance services (crop, health, life, etc.)

Many people in rural areas do not have access to modern services like insurance and are therefore either unable to withstand vagaries of nature or fall into the clutches of usurious local moneylenders or both.

Availability of such services through appropriate ICT intermediation in even far flung and remote locations would greatly ameliorate living conditions for impoverished people there. But ubiquitous availability of such services to eligible persons in villages requires almost as fundamental a rethink in the sector as in the case of financial services.

One year to think it through, five to make it happen by 2015!

12 Create an open technology generic integrated platform for e-Governance that can be used by governments worldwide backed by strong support services by Indian IT industry and manpower The time has come in a global context for such a platform based more on a service model rather than on a product or proprietary model. Many countries are seeking such models and India could become a leading player in this space. This would need to be funded by government initially as a research project with strong industry participation and later to be maintained and proliferated under a suitable framework, possibly one in which government owns the IPR or it is open sourced, but a strong government industry partnership maintains, propagates and supports it.

A five year time frame within which www.egovonline.net

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15 Goals for 2015 F Wireless Broadband and Mobile

two or three clear milestones could be set should be adequate for reaching a takeoff stage.

13 Position India as a hub for a number of ICT-related technologies F Common Service Centres (CSCs) in relevant for developing/ multi-lingual all villages countries There are a number of technologies F All major public services available that need to be developed to facilitate online proliferation of ICT based solutions in a developing country environment. India F All major public services available could position itself as a hub for such through call centres R&D by undertaking path-breaking research projects in areas like: F Individual ID scheme fully • Voice and graphics based technolooperational gies and devices that can be easily used by non-IT literate, non-literF Integrate Financial Services and ate or differently abled people Mobile telephony • Language technologies and devices that enable people to access content/ F Integrate ID services with mobile services in their own language telephony irrespective of the language that they are provided in F Create complete range of high • Handheld devices that are lowquality educational programmes for power consuming, preferably school and college level available solar-powered, rugged, work in a online and integrated into the multi-lingual environment in both regular curriculum connected and non-connected modes for specific tasks for usage F Major agriculture sector services at the last mile including consultancy, credit and • Medical instruments for facilitating insurance available online conduct of all kinds of tests on patients by local technicians with F High quality medical services minimum training, supervised available in villages through remotely by a doctor to whom the telemedicine results are transmitted for diagnosis and treatment F Provision of Insurance services • Modified mobile telephone device (crop, health, life, etc.) incorporating biometrics that would enable it to serve as a secure F Create an open technology generic instrument for financial transactions integrated platform for e-governance and proof of identity that can be used by governments • Other devices for which the need may emerge from experience as we worldwide backed by strong support services by Indian IT make progress industry and manpower 14 Draw up and implement a national F Position India as a hub for a number programme to position India as a of ICT-related technologies relevant global centre for IT security services for developing/ multi-lingual which also support a secure cyber countries space in the country As more and more information and F Draw up and implement a national services, especially critical services are programme to position India as a brought online, we are bound to become global centre for IT security services a target for all types of cyber attacks. which also support a secure cyber This would be true for many countries space in the country around the world as well. We need to create an army of skilled manpower to F Adopt an E-Governance Law secure our own cyber space. As a part Access in all towns and villages

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of the same effort, the country could be positioned as a provider of such manpower and services to the rest of the world in pretty much the same way as it has in IT, ITES and R&D. 15 Adopt an E-Governance Law With the consensus that has emerged in the country on the need to adopt e-Governance for the convenience of citizens as well as for many other reasons like access, speed, efficiency and so on, the time has now come to start the process of formulating an e-Governance law. Some of the key provisions of the law could be the following: • Making it mandatory for all forms relating to citizen and business services to be available online and with a facility to submit it online (this could also be made mandatory at a later date through service providers or assisted access); • No form to be legally valid unless this is done first; • Making it obligatory for the authorities concerned to take up for consideration electronically filed applications; • Making it mandatory that all major government schemes (especially citizen oriented ones) should be implemented on an e-Governance format with online reporting systems • Linking the process of budgetary provisions, sanctions and releases in an online environment to the online reporting system • Linking the implementation of individual-oriented government schemes to the individual ID to plug leakages and improve targeting Each of the 15 goals outlined above requires drawing up of detailed implementation plans with specific milestones and timelines. Such a focused pursuit would surely help in our quest to leverage ICTs for the economic development of the country and become a world leader in this field.

The first IT revolution took Indian IT to the whole world. The second IT revolution should bring the world of IT to the whole of India. It would be the most fitting successor to the first one.

(Note: These are the personal views of the author and should not be construed to represent the views of the Government)

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insight

quintessential device A

s the New Year grew a month old and took stock of trends and patterns in technology, a statistic that really stood out was “15 million new Indian mobile subscribers in January 2009”. Incredible!

“Start Small, Scale Gradually” may actually be the apt mantra to usher in this new way of interaction between government and citizens

S R Rao Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India

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So many more hands, so much more connected, so much more enabled. With almost 375 million mobile subscribers across the Nation, and growing, the mobile phone is the quintessential device that will most effectively realize the vision of technology being a great leveler. Especially since it knows no boundaries or class distinctions.

Costs are not prohibitive—there’s always one model just right for your pocket and needs—and there’s always a service provider with just the right rental or prepaid plan for you. And so, cutting across all possible sections of the Indian society, the mobile phone is reaching more and more town-dwellers, villagers, daily-wage earners, salaried employees, small and big businessmen, shopkeepers, electricians, cab and rickshaw drivers, grocers, students, doctors, elected representatives, administrators, farmers, men, women, children, and elders.

The biggest sign of long-term sustainability and future potential of this mode is the way the youth have taken to it, and how they manoeuver along like second nature.

We are surely creating a massive user-base of individually enabled, individually connected, citizens. And in this compelling paradigm that totally lends itself to individuality, individual space, individual privacy and freedom, lies the cue for reengineering governance and public services to make them mobile-ready. After all, what better way, what cheaper technology, to create a two-way service delivery platform between the government and (each) individual.

The success of Mobile Governance would largely depend on our ability to focus on reaching the maximum number of mobile users. In the Indian context, it may be inappropriate to peg the basic service delivery model around anything other than Voice and the no-frills “short messaging service” (SMS).

For, even though WAP- and GPRS-enabled mobile phones can

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offer internet access, that is something not every subscriber may opt for or may even be comfortable using.

Amongst the foremost benefits “Push” services via SMS can bring is safer, better lives for citizens. Lifesaving alerts broadcast during natural disasters, suggestions to farmers on which crops to plant given the current weather conditions, how to protect your family from the new pandemic that’s surfaced, which roads to take during emergency situations, who to contact when facing domestic violence, are some examples. In terms of “Pull” services, things can head off to a great start by enabling queries from citizens related to Right To Information (RTI), status of their submitted applications, vaccination schedule for a child who’s details are registered, and so on…

Mechanisms can also be evolved that will issue token numbers and “delivery date” to citizens interacting via the mobile phone for a service to be delivered at a certain location. Showing the token number received via SMS on the “due date” would enable the citizen to claim what’s waiting and ready at the delivery point, thus reducing the need for elaborate paperwork and continuous follow-ups that may require numerous physical visits. The latter is quite a formidable task when the notso-navigable road ahead of the citizen residing in a village is three to four hours long to the nearest semblance of public administration. Guided voice-based services in a citizen’s local language may even be used to fill up forms completely, using the subscriber’s “Voice” itself as a signature alternative.

The possibilities are immense, and the platform is ready. The demand side visà-vis citizens is also considerably high - mobile technology has demonstrated very effectively that change for the better can happen, and happen fast leaving citizens demanding even more change for the better, and even more services. Administrators and elected representatives with their ear to the ground are no doubt scribbling notes about this “item” on their “To Do Lists”.

The action that would or should follow would still require strong will and extra effort. For, the movement towards mobile governance will, arguably, call for even more intensive reengineering ov

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than other modes of e-Governance. And even greater levels of transparency and accountability. Which, at the end of the day, is even more compelling reason we start going down this path sooner than later.

“Start Small, Scale Gradually” may actually be the apt mantra to usher in this new way of interaction between government and citizens. Successful small-to-medium scale implementation models can be found across the globe.

Citizens in Singapore regularly receive passport renewal notifications via SMS. A city in Estonia has introduced municipal m-Governance services wherein citizens can enquire about security, law and order, utilities, and disaster management by way of SMS; Citizens can even make appointments with government officials via SMS. In rural parts of South Africa, domestic violence against women and children can be reported via SMS. I take a moment to pause and reflect

on general elections happening this very moment - and on the two players - the candidate, and the voter. While the savvy candidate has very naturally taken to SMS technology to reach out to the voter-base with his manifesto, the voter too could benefit in various ways.

SMS communities, as and when they are formed, can enable the voter to inquire about the antecedents of a candidate via Push/Pull. The voter may even be able to locate his exact booth by way of SMS inquiry.

Meanwhile, even with all the data and all the technology, at some booths, the local bully may be too insurmountable a reality. Now, if only the voter did not have to face this bully - If only, this voter could vote without visiting the booth gheraoed by the bully. If only, all that was needed was an SMS message from the mobile phone that would count as a vote - mobile voting - now that would be democracy at its participative best and truest!

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INTERVIEW

www.cdac.in

Tapping ICT potential C-DAC’s PARAM series of supercomputers have already made mark on the global scenario. What next we can expect on the same pattern from C-DAC to make an impact on Global ICT Scenario?

C-DAC has completed over two decades of journey. In fact, we celebrated our 22nd Foundation Day only recently. While Supercomputing, and more recently Grid Computing, continue to be strong drivers of C-DAC’s R&D work, we have added many more critical enabling technologies of national importance to our portfolio.

Each of them has come to be of great relevance today.

As Indian IT revolution has been spreading in multiple ways, growth in domestic IT applications and services has been growing at a phenomenal pace only in the last decade. E-Governance and mobile telephony symbolize these and have caught the attention of the public. Our foray into the areas of language computing, open source, e-Governance – especially redeployable & packaged products based applications and cyber security have reached critical mass. In fact, in some of these C-DAC has already made a significant mark.

High-end education and training is another area, which has been received extremely well, meeting the needs of the industry. We have also made some moves outside India as well setting up centres in some of these areas and hopefully we will look for getting greater opportunities in the future.

S Ramakrishnan Director General, C-DAC, India

“

C-DAC was given the mandate and privilege to take the initiative for aggregating a minimal set of Indian language software tools and fonts in all the 22 languages and release them free in the next couple of years

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How can the Government use advanced technologies for transferring benefits to the society in terms of improving health care, education, administrative and citizen interface services?

Investing in advanced technologies is indeed a crucial differentiating factor, which can prepare a country like India which faces soaring aspirations amongst its citizens. It is unbelievable how much faith public placed on IT and Telecom in changing the way of life. While government has put a lot of faith in technology over a long period of time, our continuing faith in the last two decades with addition of well identified topics from time-to-time as well as major programmes such as NeGP means we can hope to get services in a much more efficient, transparent and cost effective way, often leap-frogging even advanced countries in many areas. The underlying issues are often very similar in all cases, except that legacy domain expertise and capacity may vary from vertical to vertical or domain to domain. NeGP has given a great momentum through definition of architectures, open & interoperable standards and deployment of critical, common infrastructural elements (SWAN, Data Centres, CSC programs). These have been done with quite a bit of thought and technology inputs for building services around these, using critical technologies have come into play. You have referred to health care, education administration and citizen interface services. Local language interface and contents get referred to repeatedly in all fora. C-DAC’s work in these areas over the two decades gives it a unique opportunity and has helped to address these issues in quick time frames. Over the last three years, we have demonstrated repeatedly the value of these and have initiated efforts in specific areas by architecting suitable programs. www.egovonline.net

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In health care, our work in kind. Viability of industry and start underlying technologies over the ups can depend on the size of the In health care, our last decade has given us opportunity market – the way regional radio to address both back-end as well and TV channels have blossomed. work in underlying as front-end health informatics C-DAC has been more than willing technologies over services. Again, standards and to address any issue in this regard.

EMR/EHR (Electronic Medical the last decade has given us In respect of other topics as such a Record/Electronic Health Record), Machine Translation, OCR (Optical contribution towards preparation/ opportunity to address both Character Recognition), OHRS development of EMR/EHR in back-end as well as front-end (Online Handwritten Recognition conjunction with DIT as well as System), CLIR (Cross Lingual Ministry of Health have been of health informatics services Information Retrieval System) as unique value that C-DAC has well, a consortium based program brought to the table. What is to be had been undertaking R&D during remembered is that India has a unique opportunity at this the last three years. C-DAC has played an important role stage to avoid the huge health care costs that some advanced in working in all these consortia to develop practical tools countries including US have landed themselves in, because and raising the bar for achieving practical results in respect of deployment of incompatible systems and equipments. of Indian languages.

We can leap-frog these by right sizing and suitable use of In addition, C-DAC has also been actively working in areas technology and standards. of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Open Source Software is another area in which C-DAC has Speech and Search Engine tools for Indian languages. Our taken significant initiative in the last couple of years. There focus has been to see how well contemporary search within is an opportunity to put India in a leadership position in this C-DAC and academia in the Indian language field can be area - given over half a million developers community in converted into usable practical tools at the earliest or to ensure India - next only to USA. that foundational research work of value is contributed as well. We have deployed or released, many successful tools Localization of language seems to be the key mantra for and solutions in practical situation – Mantra Rajyabhasha expanding e-Governance initiative. What do you feel at Rajya Sabha for over two years, IDN (Internet Domain about the current localization scenario in India?

Name) for Indian languages (for deployment in many Indian Many years ago, around 2004-2005, Department of IT looked languages) along with contribution to standardization efforts, at the issue of localization with a fresh perspective. The scenario Text-to-Speech systems, G-CLASS tools for Search Engines was like this. India has 22 official languages, hundreds of being some. scripts, over billion people with a possible installed base of 100 million desktops & laptops by 2010-2012 – with a very How is CDAC approaching go green strategy it terms of likely situation of e-gov services under ambitious programmes solutions and services? such as NeGP bypassing a large number of people, if the We have recently completed, in November 2008, a 54 localization issue was to be ignored.

TeraFlop PARAM Yuva Supercomputer ranked 68 globally.

The result was a concerted focus on the localization issue. And our roadmap is to move towards PetaFlop/Sub-ExaFlop I am happy to report that C-DAC was given the mandate range in the coming years. Our experience in building and privilege to take the initiative for aggregating a minimal large systems has taught us that cooling system efficiency set of Indian language software tools and fonts in all the 22 and power availability are limiting factors to realizing large languages and release them free in the next couple of years. systems. This is in addition to the traditional technology We could begin the exercise with the first launch in less limits imposed by network and software scalability. We are than a month and have already done it in over 16 languages looking at the road map of processor vendors and are also covering almost all the major languages (except Bengali in actively exploring possibility of using a large number of low which also we have been) ready for sometime to launch the power, low-end processors for building C-DAC’s next system. tools. The initiative has been a tremendous success - one This new approach could result in savings of operational cost of its kinds in the world. Not only 7 lakh CDs have been and capital cost. shipped against request, but also 30 lakh downloads have “Go Green” can go beyond chip, architecture or computing taken place since then. systems level. Virtualization can bring better utilization of Apart from this, C-DAC has continued its efforts to provide resources. Grid computing, and cloud computing and other local language support for integration in all platforms from virtualization technologies can be of value in realizing this. desktops and laptops to web, video (including DTH) and In addition, suitable practices for optimizing of power need mobile. Perhaps India is the only multilingual country of this to be adopted in the entire eco-system. kind with such language diversity, attempting to address these We have not yet comprehensively looked at technology issues so effectively. And so many players are also involved and practice initiatives in this area. We are likely to do so in now at every stage of the value chain. As a result localization a concerted effort soon. is not a serious issue in technological terms for e-Governance but more an issue of well architected programs at the state Sandeep Budki and local levels, attractive service offerings and things of that sandeep@egovonline.net 18 }

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SMART IT

Infrastructure for Governments

The need to maintain smart, robust and optimized IT set up, while keeping an eye on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been a challenge for IT managers across segments, in enterprises and medium businesses. Besides, striking a balance between organizational IT needs, and compliance with global industry standards on one hand and investment on the other has always attracted brain storming across industry segments and verticals. Though most of these issues are being addressed with the convergence and innovations in technology, there are some factors that have come up in recent times and that demand regular contemplation. And now with governments foraying in to IT driven administration and governance, the concerns (mentioned below ) are equally being shared by the government bodies too. Have a look.

Smart storage solution According to analysts reports, in 2008 the amount of data over the world was 161 Billion Giga Bytes and by 2010, with exponential growth in data proliferation, it is expected to touch 988 Billion GB mark. Moreover, data being one of the precious assets of any organization, the need to have a secured, efďŹ cient and optimized storage system assumes great signiďŹ cance, which may also streamline the total cost of ownership to organizations. Also with the initiation in use of ICT application into governance in India, which would transform the mode of working of the public departments, lying heavily on ill-manged storage mechanism in documents, has drawn the government bodies desperate for a smart storage solution. Eventually, for a government body, its all about quality citizen service.

Resilient IT Frequent occurrence of man made and natural disaster has posed a serious threat to Business Continuity these days. Governments need to prepare themselves for coping up with any possible down link in to the systems. In given situation, Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity mechanisms are a must for any departments IT set up.

Reducing carbon footprints For every unit of heat emitted out of any system, couple of unit of

energy is used to compensate it, through air cooling. Considering the growing physical IT infrastructure across the globe and the consistent rise of CO2 across the planet, use of IT products with low energy consumption and less heat emission are an imperative of our times. And eventually reducing carbon emission is key to sustainable development.

Interruptions and critical operations To ensure 99.99% of uptime is a necessity that is felt by most of the CIOs and IT mangers in a business, government or institutional setup. To maintain redundancy or a backup for IT systems is vital to maintaining the continuity of the critical operations.

Optimize information content and availability For any given web portal, uploading and updation of content at regular and supposedly at short intervals, are the features which characterize it in a frequently, moderately, and least updated category. Besides, the user friendliness and easy-to-access features help in getting more hits for the particular portal.

Protecting conďŹ dential data Robust data security system is critical to the functioning any organization. Insulating valuable data from external security threats such as Virus, Trojan, Spam, Phishing ands as well internal threats from in house members through enabling user access system is critical to the functioning of the Government departments.

policy makers

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he formation of public governance system is largely dependant on its contextual parameters incuding policy patterns and technology trends. But the nature of governance changes depends on the people leading the implementation of change missions and converting contextual thoughts to contextual phenomenons.The egov 5 policymakers have been identified as people adding to significant contextual phenomenon in egovernance policies.

N Vittal

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n laying the foundation for an IT savvy India, N Vittal has a tremendous role to play. An IAS officer from the 1960 batch, he has held several significant posts in the Government. He has initiated policies that boosted the software industry in a way that led to setting up of software technology parks across India. He was the Chairman of the Telecom Commission through which he initiated the process of liberalisation in the telecom sector and played a major role in getting the National Telecom Policy 1994 approved and announced.

Narasimaiah Seshagiri

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arasimaiah Seshagiri is one of the better known technocrats of India’s ICT journey.

He has held several important positions in the Indian government and shaped many policies and acts. He was the Director of Information, Planning and Analysis Group of the Electronics Commission in 1971. In this capacity, he founded National Informatics Centre (NIC) in 1975 and was its Director General till year 2000. NICNET (the first VSAT Network outside US with over 1,200 VSATs) and ERNET are his brain child which was implemented successfully under his guidance.

He was the key person who drafted the first liberalised Computer Hardware Policy of India in 1984.

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R Chandrashekhar

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he real mastermind behind the NeGP is R Chandrashekhar. An IAS officer of the 1975 batch, he has held several key positions in the states as well as the central government. He founded the Department of Information Technology under the Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India. The comprehensive IT plan formulated by him for Andhra Pradesh was clearly regarded as path breaking and catapulted the state to the forefront of IT development in India. Further to that he has been a key resource person with vast experience in the field of IT in conceptualisation, formulation and implementation of NeGP.

J Satyanarayana

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Satyanarayana is the former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of National Institute for Smart Government (NISG), Hyderabad and is currently the Principal Secretary of Health, Medical Education and Family Welfare Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh. In the journey of India’s march towards e-Governance, he has been part of many of the key initiatives and projects. He has implemented popular projects like e-Seva, Computer-Aided Administration of Registration Department (CARD), e-Procurement, and APOnline. Satyanarayana has been associated with developing some of the flagship e-Governance projects, such as MCA21, BangaloreOne, e-Procurement for the States of Karnataka and Chattisgarh etc.

Rajeev Chawla

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ajeev Chawla, the Commissioner, Survey Settlement and Land Records, Government of Karnataka is the man behind Bhoomi. Project Bhoomi led to the computerisation of 20 million records of land ownership of 6.7 million farmers in the state. Bhoomi is considered one of the most successful eGovernance implementations in the country. This project has helped immensly in reducing corruption in land record access and property regsitration system in Karnataka.

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PIONEERS

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n this section, we present those personalities whose pioneering efforts have helped promote ICT for inclusive development. Their visionary mission has facilitated the transformation of the country towards an IT revolution. In true sense, these are the ICT Pioneers who have built a strong foundation of ICT adoption by the masses.

M.S. Swaminathan

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onkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is known as the “Father of the Green Revolution in India”. He was also the pioneer of the telecentre movement in India which can be traced back to 1998 when the MSSRF started three Village Knowledge Centres in Pondicherry with support from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Canadian International Development Agency.

He lead the Mission 2007 movement which created a huge awareness among the political class to embrace ICTs in their respective ministries and constituencies.

Verghese Kurien

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erghese Kurien is called the father of the White Revolution in India. His professional life has been dedicated to empowering the Indian farmer through cooperatives. He was the chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF). He is recognised as the man behind the success of the Amul brand. The use of Information Communication Technologies in rural areas of Gujarat by GCMMFL has made the operation of the dairy industry different. Amul has become rural India’s flag bearer in the IT revolution.The movement is now replicated in 70,000 villages in about 200 districts of India. The dairy sector already uses computers in 4000 rural locations for processing milk buying/selling transactions in a transparent manner and exposes 50,000 people daily to the benefits of IT.

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Dhirubhai Ambani

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hirajlal Hirachand Ambani was an Indian ragsto-riches business tycoon who founded Reliance Industries in Mumbai. He wanted Reliance to spearhead a communications revolution that would dramatically cut down the cost of connectivity, and propel India into the digital age. His ultimate ambition: To make the cost of a phone call cheaper than that of a post card. It was therefore entirely logical for Reliance to enter the telecommunications space when the sector was opened up for private participation in the 1990s.

The Reliance Communications group brought the mobile telephony at very low prices points which significantly improved the mobile penetration to the lower income strata of the society.

Azim Premji

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zim Premji, is the Chairman of Wipro, one of the largest software companies in India. Under his leadership Wipro, the fledgling US$2 million hydrogeneted cooking fat company has grown to a US$ 1.76 billion IT services organisation serving customers across the globe. In the year 2001, Premji established Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation with a vision of significantly contributing to quality universal education to build a just, equitable and humane society. This foundation has played an exemplary role in propogating ICT for school education in the country.

Narayana Murthy

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. R. Narayana Murthy, is an Indian industrialist, software engineer and one of the seven founders of Infosys Technologies. He set new standards in corporate governance and morality when he stepped down as the Executive Chairman of Infosys at the age of 60. With the liberalisation of Indian economy in 1990s, Infosys grew rapidly. In 1995, Infosys set up development centres across cities in India. He is the person responsible for bringing India on the IT world map. Due to his initiatives the world recongnised India as a super power in the software market.

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Please note that the designations against the contributors are of the time the contribution was sent to us.

A K Srivastava, Principal Secretary DIT, Government of Meghalaya

A P S Solanki Joint Director (MIS), Madhya Pradesh Agricultural Marketing Board, Bhopal

Abdul Rauf Ambali, Faculty of Administrative Science and Policy Studies UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia

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

Ajay Bhattacharya Administrator, Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund Department of Telecommunications, Govt of India

Ajay Bhushan Pandey IT Secretary Government of Maharashtra

Ajay Kumar IT Consultant to Department of Agriculture Madhya Pradesh

Ajay Mishra, Principal Secretary, Department of Information Technology and Communications, Govt of Andhra Pradesh

Ajit Kesari, Secretary to Government of Madhya Pradesh

Alka Mishra Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Delhi

Aman Kumar Singh, Secretary Incharge (IT) and CEO Chhattisgarh Infotech and Biotech Promotion Society (CHIPS), Chhattisgarh

Amarpal Singh Technical Director National Informatics Centre Uttar Pradesh

Amit Dudeja DGM Tolling Operations Delhi, Gurgaon Expressway

Amit Kumar Jain Deputy Chief Operating Manager Planning, Northern Railways

Amitabh Pandey Group General Manager (IT Services), Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd.

Amitav Nath Business Development Executive, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Bangalore

Amod Kumar District Magistrate Sitapur Uttar Pradesh

Anil K Sharma Superintending Engineer Central Public Works Division, Siliguri, West Bengal

Anoop Kumar Srivastava Principal Secretary to Government of Meghalaya Information Technology and Health and Family Welfare Departments

Our Journey...

Aparna Ramamurthy Senior Staff Scientist, Center for Advanced Computing (CDAC), Mumbai

Archana P Nagvekar Scientist National Informatics Centre (NIC), Goa

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

Arti Mehra Mayor of Delhi, Elected member of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) Delhi

B P Mishra Scientist-D Government of India National Informatics Centre, Bhubaneswar

...Our Contributors Anthopoulos Leonidas ScientiďŹ c Coordinator, e-Trikala Project for the Municipality of Trikala, Greece

Anurag Jain Secretary, IT Government of Madhya Pradesh

Anurag Rastogi Special Secretary and Director IT Government of Haryana

Awdhesh K Singh Addl. Director Directorate General of Systems and Data Management, Customs and Central Excise, New Delhi

Arun Kumar Executive Engineer (Civil) Municipal Corporation of Delhi

B S Bindhumadhava Group Coordinator, Real Time Systems Group, Center for Advanced Computing (CDAC), Bangaluru

Ashish Sanyal Senior Technical Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India (GoI)

B V Selvaraj Administrator, Government of Union Territory of Lakshadweep

Ashok Jhunjhunwala Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai

Barun Kumar Sahu Director (Personnel), Ministry of Home Affairs Government of India

Dr Ajay Kumar Secretary, IT Government of Kerala

Besri Ram Supervisor, Sampark Centre Chandigarh

Dr Anupam Saraph Chief Information OfďŹ cer, Pune City

Bimal Pratap Shah e-Government Strategist National Information Technology Centre, Ministry of Environment, Science, and Technology, Nepal

Politicians

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e grow great by dreams. This is the section where we are presenting the people who not only are dreamers, but also come with visions that count- the ‘politicans’ who have shown their ability to forsee the future.

We present the five politicians presented in this section are the few amongst others, who showed the way for everyone to make a difference, to make a committment to leave the world better than we find it, and to take forward the legacy of governance that they triggered with their vision.

Jawaharlal Nehru

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awaharlal Nehru was one of the few Indian statesmen at the time of independence who understood the need of proper intellectual development of the Indian populace in order to run the nascent Indian state. Nehru stressed on teaching of science and its practical application fields. He took cognizance of the need of learning vocational science. Special focus was put on the development of technology. The famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institute of Management (IIMs) were conceived and established during his Prime Ministership. The establishment of such learning centres also indirectly contributed to the emergence of the Indian Republic as a software major and the back office of the world.

Rajiv Gandhi

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ajiv’s big thrusts were in the telecom and IT sectors which came with the launch of various initiatives in what came to be known as the “mission mode”. In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi announced a “national education policy” to modernise and expand higher education programmes across India.

During the five years that he was Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi took many initiatives, which are coming to fruition now and placing the country ahead in the world in many spheres.

PCO revolution was his brain child. Rajiv had also backed to the hilt the strengthening of the National Informatics Centre.

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Atal Bihari Vajpayee

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s a first step towards promoting IT, A.B. Vajpayee, during his Prime Ministership, set up the National Task Force on IT and Software Development in May 1998. He established the Ministry of Information Technology to put weight of official government policy squarely behind the information strategy. Almost all the state governments in India had established IT departments and instituted IT policies, especially an overarching phenomenon of this phase of late 1990s, which coincides with the time when A. B. Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India. The seeds of NeGP were also sown in his tenure.

Chandrababu Naidu

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all him IT Naidu or even the former CEO of Andhra Pradesh, the fact remains that he ushered in the IT revolution in Andhra Pradesh and laid the foundation of a management-centric governance.

He modernised administration by computerising a number of government operations and took initiatives for the convenience of public like eSeva. Moreover a new era in rural empowerment, through ‘Cyber Gramin’, aimed at providing IT benefits to rural people, was also launched in Naidu’s tenure. On the rural front he launched schemes like ‘Janmabhoomi’ (Motherland). During his period, the state of Andhra Pradesh became the leading ICT related investment destination in the country through his reformist policies.

Narendra Modi

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odi has taken many initiatives like evening courts, interlinking of rivers, jyotigram, and grievance redressal through SWAGAT online. Under his tenure Gujarat has become one of the few states to witness the successful implementation of key e-Governance projects like SWAN, SDC and CSC. CSCs have been implemented almost ninty percent and e-Panchayats are in its advanced stages of progress. Even the availability of basic infrastructure like electricity, absolutely essential for the execution of the e-Governance projects has been ensured in rural areas as well by Modi. In Modi’s leadership, Gujarat has made quantum jump in ICT implentation for G2G and G2C services.

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Thought Leaders

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adical changes are always commissioned by few eminent men. These founding fathers foresaw betterment of their fellowmen through ICTs. We salute these thought leaders and introduce to you some of their masterstrokes in field of ICTs in India.

Apj Abdul Kalam

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propounder of fusion of NeGP and RTI, an enthusiast for ICT pnetration, the missile man of India has played a role of a pressure group in the propogation of ICT4D in India. A scientist by profession and a true visionary by nature, Dr. Kalam has been a pioneer in various scientific escapades of his times.

As a Project Director with ISRO, he was the man behind the India’s first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle and also responsible for the evolution of ISRO’s launch vehicle programme. He mooted the idea of India Africa cooperation in ICT, National Knowledge Network, knowledge connectivity for the rural masses and PURA among several other pathbreaking ideas.

Aruna Roy

Dewang Mehta

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f there was one person who was the unofficial brand ambassador of the Information Technology industry of India, it was Dewang Mehta. In his short but eventful career with NASSCOM (premier organisation that represents and sets the tone for public policy for the Indian software industry), he build a global brand equity for the Indian software industry and advocated the increase of software exports. As a member of the National Task Force on IT and Software Development, and the advisor to erstwhile IT Minister - Pramod Mahajan’s advisory group, he was an asset in the true sense for software industry as a whole.

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Sam Pitroda

am Pitroda is best known to us as the father of telecom revolution in India. He is the man responsible for the mushrooming of PCO telephone booths across India. Although the political lobbyists of those times could not understand the need for a ‘connected India’, he braved such opposition and kept fighting for bridging the digital divide not just across India, but also globally. Dr Sam Pitroda, chairs National Knowledge Commission (NKC), a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India. is working on to guide policy and direct reforms, education, science and technology, agriculture, industry, e-governance. His recommendations at the NKC have been quite revolutionary in nature with long term implications for knowledge society in India.

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ne Act which is a milestone in the eGovernance scenario of India is the Right to Information Act (RTI). Like any revolutionary milestone, RTI too has some forces behind it whose struggle has brought it into effect today.

The Magsaysay award winner for community leadership and international understanding, Aruna Roy is a social activist and a thought leader whose unabated perseverance has made RTI see the light of the day. Aruna Roy was an officer with the Indian Administrative Services (IAS). But within six years of her work in the Indian bureaucracy she quited her much coveted job to start grassroots activism and joined her husband’s social Work and Research Center in Tilonia, Rajasthan.

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Vikram Sarabhai

alled as the father of Indian Space Programme Vikram Sarabhai gave India an international standing in the field of space research. Pioneer of the Indian Spapce programme has to his credit establishment of Indian Space Research Organisation (1969), Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, first indegenous satellite Aryabhata (1975), inter alia, which has laid the foundation stone of the information and communication technology in India. A rare combination of a scientist, industrialist and a thought leader, Sarabhai is the man behind the establishment of many well known institutions of repute in the Indian sub-continent.

His role as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India after the sudden death of Homi Bhaba is laudable.

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policies

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he usage of ICT for improving governance is an agenda with large ramifications. This needs policy enablements from various parts of the governemnt. It needs broader ecosystem of laws of the land, policies in various arenas which directly or indirectly help set the stage of ICT implementation for the masses. Here we identify 5 policies which have had a landmark effect on access to government information, public access to information technology and a broader governance framework in the nation.

Community Radio The Cabinet on November 16, 2006 declared that the registered non profit organization can apply for the broadcast licenses.

The adoption of Community Radio (CR) in NGOs is still to take off, due to lack of awareness, cumbersome process of granting permissions for giving licenses, lack of ecosystem for the growth for Community Radio etc. If these aspects get addressed in the implementation of this policy, this could bring in the long needed information revolution in the rural areas.

The educational instituions have been starting to have CR in their campuses for some time now, but this revolution is yet to take off in the country.

Indian Space Programme The Indian Space Program began in 1963. Undre this programme, INSAT series of satellites made an major impact on telecom scenario in India. Since August 15 1969 the management of space research and its utilization for peaceful purposes has been controlled by ISRO. In 1972 the Indian Government set up the Space Commission and entrusted a Department of Space (DOS) with responsibility for conducting the country’s space activities.. Under guidance of domain experts like V Sarabhai and S Dhavan from the very beggining of the programme, India has excelled in technologies in remote sensing, satellite launching, education specific satelites (EDUSAT) and broadcasting, among many other. Viewing in totality, the advancement in space programme has been a corner stone in furthering ICT in India.

National e-Governance Plan

NeGP has been articulated as to make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man.Under NeGP, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, has laid down guidelines for the setting up of core infrastructure, that is, establishment of SWAN, SDC and CSC, putting in place robust public service delivery mechanism with designing and crystallization of 27 Mission Mode Projects and 8 components, and conducting capacity building and training at Central and state level.

National Telecom Policies (NTP) NTP of 1994 has clear objectives of improving the teledensity and providing telephone connections on demand. To meet consumers demand at reasonable prices it had set up particular targets, akin to covering six lakh villages and one PCO per 500 of population. Besides covering the uncovered milestones of this policy, the technological innovations and convergence necessitated the formulation of NTP1999. It encouraged development of telecom in rural areas making it more affordable by suitable tariff structure and making rural communication mandatory for all fixed service providers. As an outcome of these policies, teledensity in India has leaped from 1.56 in 1997 to 4.29 in 2002 and to a startling 36.98 in March 2009.

Right to Information Act 2005 With its roots in a movement started by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan [headed by Aruna Roy] to bring in transparency in village accounts for minimum wages in early 1990’s, RTI since its inception (2005) has helped India transition into a “advanced democracy”, arming citizens with information to fight against the malfunctioning widely prevailing in the government system. The act has a provision which provides for a speedy access to files and records that are gathering dust in government offices so that searching and processing of information can be done quickly. Resultantly, it has been a driver of transparency and accountability into the system, and making the bureaucracy and public bodies and institutions as a whole, accountable to the citizenry.

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central projects

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entral government has taken many initiatives in the form of project for delivering citizen centric services using ICT. Some of these projects standout in delivering quality services and thus making life of people hassel free. Acknowledging such projects egov discusses 5 egov projects.

MCA 21

MCA (Ministry of Corporate Affairs) has a web portal which provides all the possible services to the business community as can be given in office premises. Services available of MCA 21 portal includes: availability of e-Forms, convenient multi modal methods of payment encompassing payment mechanism and electronic payment options, option to use credit cards and Internet banking including an expanded nationwide network of Bank branches for challan payments. After its implementation the project has resulted in online dealing of 8.6 lakh companies since 2007.

www.mca.gov.in

With seven lakh railway tickets being booked every day across the country, e-ticketing, an imperative in these times, has proven to be one of the best citizen centric project in egovernance in India. It has virtually brought Passenger Reservation Centers (PRS) to citizens door step. IRCTC has highest success rate of on line booking and payment. IRCTC has associated with 27 banks for credit debit payment as well as 4 credit card payment gateways and 3 cash cards which itself is a tremendous achievement.

IRCTC

www.irctc.co.in

TINXSYS

A Rs 30 Crore project being executed by ICICI Infotech, National Tax Information Exchange System (TINXSYS) facilitates information exchange between all states’ and Union Territories’ sales tax department and provide for a huge database for inter state transactions. Besides integrating all the state tax transactions, it provides digital access to all inter-state transactions, a precursor to the VAT regime. TINXSYS also provides MIS and Business Intelligence Reports to the Commercial Tax Departments.

www.tinxsys.com

Common Service Centers (CSC) are the information and communication technology enabled kiosks that provides government services to the rural India. It is also, delivering quality health care, education, and relevant information on agriculture to rural masses who usually finds it inaccessible and unfordable. Under National e Governance Plan (NeGP), 100000 CSCs are to opened in rural areas with equitable geographical spread, covering 6,00,000 villages villages and 2,48,000 panchayats. Around 40000 are alredy operational and the rest are expected to be in place by March, 2010. It is also biggest rural ICT programme in the world.

india.gov.in

www.india.gov.in

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CSC

www.mit.gov.in

The Portal has been developed as a Mission Mode Project under the National E-Governance Plan of the Government. The objective behind the Portal is to provide a single window access to the information and services being provided by the Indian Government for the citizens and other stakeholders. An attempt has been made through this Portal to provide comprehensive, accurate, reliable and one stop source of information about India and its various facets. Links at various places, too, have been provided to other Indian Government Portals/websites. The content in this Portal is the result of a collaborative effort of various Indian Government Ministries and Departments, at the Central/State/District level.

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state projects

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ndia is considered a country of graveyard of pilot projects in e-Governance. But there are some projects which have scaled up from pilot stage to a level where they have been able to impact the citizen in a big way. Here, we present five such projects which have made a big difference!

Akshaya

Government of Kerala rolled pilot of ‘Akshaya’ project in Mallapuram district on November 18, 2002. Under this public private partnership (PPP) project, ICT kisoks have been opened across the state, run by local entrepreneurs in their community with the primary goal of making a person from each family computer literate. It also provides a G2C interface and offers several online services to the public. Akshaya has 3000 centres popularly known as e-Kendras covering whole of the state.

Collection of utility bills and taxes done through FRIENDS centre is integrated with Akshaya has 3000 centers popular as Akshaya e-kendras thereby minimising transaction cost and time of the citizens. e-Kendras covering whole of the state

Bhoomi

This project in Karnataka has facilitated the computerisation of land records which are provided to the farmers from government run kiosks. Earlier the farmers had to deal with corrupt village accountants who were inaccessible and demanded speed money of thousands of rupees. But now with this project the malpractice has come to an end. Started in 2000, Bhoomi has 177 project locations covering farmers from 27000 villages. With computerisation of 20 million land records, it caters to almost 7 million farmers directly and 35 million beneficiaries as a With computerisation of 20 million land records, it caters to almost 7 Million farmers directly and 35 million whole. While implementing the project, 10000 officials underwent beneficiaries as a whole training on data preparedness and validation process.

eSeva In December 1999, a pilot of eSeva was launched in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad. Subsequently, the state extended it to the twin cities (Hyderabad and Secunderabad) and Ranga Reddy district. Currently there are 46 eSeva centres operational in three districts of the state, offering a one stop shop solution for over 66 G2C and B2C services. This project is now being expanded to the sub-urban and rural areas of Andhra Pradesh. Several other states like Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Maharashtra, etc., have tried to replicate this project with varying levels of success.

All service counters are facilitated with electronic queuing system

Jaankari

Facilitating RTI through phone and operational since January 29, 2007, Jaankari is a call centre service in Bihar in which RTI applicant just has to make a phone call from anywhere in the state and rest is taken care of by the call centre. The RTI fee is deducted from the phone call charges; the application is generated and sent to the relevant Public Information Officers (PIOs) and a copy to the applicant. The entire process roughly takes five minutes. As an impact of this service, public authorities are now much sensitised and responsive to RTI applicants. Currently, the facilitation centre is equipped with at least 30 set of computers and operators, The facilitation center is equipped with 30 set of computers and operators necessary software for application, telecom interface and voice recording systems.

PDS Online For 37 lakh poor families in Chattisgarh, which constitute almost 70 per cent of the state population, PDS Online has brought transparency and change in the allotment of food grain quantities to Fair Price Shops (FPS) and their timely and genuine distribution. Earlier, the district food controllers alloted the food grains manually, and hence there were possibilities of getting higher allotment to any particular shop which could be later sold by the FPS owner. With the implementation of PDS Online, and the digitisation PDS Online has brought transparency and change in the allotment of food grain quantities to Fair of records of 37 lakh beneficiaries, the amount to be alloted to 10427 FPS can Price Shops authority be easily calculated.

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hurdles

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he journey of e-Governance in India has not been smooth. It has seen it’s ups and downs in states and at the central level.

We identify the 5 key hurdles in e-Governance implementation in the country.

Corruption

O

ne of the main aims of e-Governance is to provide good governance. And one of the most important aspects in that becomes to cut through the web of corruption. India has slipped further in the global corruption perception index released annually by corruption watchdog Transparency International. In world rankings, India came down from 72nd to 85th slot in a list of 180 countries, according to the 2008 report.

ICT Infrastructure

T

here is a huge ICT infrastructure gap existing in the country. Our educational institutions, health centres, government offices, especially in the rural areas, are still not among each other and with each other. The public access to ICTs through telecentres is still at a nascent stage in the country. Although, things have rapidly changed in last five years due to the mobile revolution, there is a long way to go in terms of broadband penetration in the semi-urban and rural areas of the country.

Political Will

C

handrbabu Naidu, S M Krishna, Narendra Modi – the Chief Ministers from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujrat – all are glaring examples of what political will can do to make eGovernance happen in a state. Same thing is applicable at the central level where the change in political leadership has decided the momentum of e-Governance implementation.

Capacity Building

C

apacity building has emerged as one of the most critical components in the management of various e-Governance projects. This pertains to two major areas of management which are human resources and training. The nature and scale of e-Governance initiatives planned within the domain of state governments present major managerial and technological challenges. This requires capacity building in terms of necessary knowledge and skills to sustain e-Governance initiatives. It is equally important to foster an attitude and mindset that is receptive to ICT based administration and ICT based delivery of services.

Business Continuity

B

usiness continuity refers to the fact that those important officials who are acting as the key drivers for e-Governance should be retained in order for e-Governance projects to see a smooth take-off and functioning.

There are always problems, and one concern is that the key people involved are shuffled off to other posts. People inside the government change frequently as they get promoted, or transferred.

If these people are in fact the key drivers, then the whole chain gets affected and this brings the system back to its starting point. ov

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STATES

A

part from national level initiatives, lot of initiatives are taken at the state level for the overall development of citizens using ICT by state governments. Acknowledging such states which have stood out in ICT deployment for the welfare of the masses, we present to you 5 egov states which stand out among other states.

Andhra Pradesh

The eGovernance in Andhra Pradesh (AP) can be traced back to the day of inauguration of the Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City in the year 1998. Projects like eSeva, have produced excellent results with pan Indian acknowledgment and recognition.

Apart from its 46 centres (with 400 service counters) that are spread over the Twin Cities and Ranga Reddy district, Government of AP has also opened Institute for Electronic Governance. Besides, AP has to its credit projects like Computer-aided Administration of Registration Department and ICT@ Schools.

Gujarat

Gujarat has the largest optical fibre wide area network in the whole of Asia, stretching over as long as 50,000 km. Gujarat has made e-Governance functional in all its 141 municipalities. The Citizen Facilitation Centres are now functional in all the major centres of Gujarat. At the district level, taluka level and in municipal areas, computerised civic centres have been established where the concept of one-day governance has been implemented. This experiment has been further taken up to the village level by establishing e-grams equipped with computers and Internet Connectivity. All the 14,000 gram panchayats have been made e-Grams.

Kerala

In Kerala, some of the more successful e-Governance applications are: AKSHAYA- e-Literacy project which has since evolved into citizen service centre including e-Pay; FRIENDS- Single window utility payment; State Data Centre; MESSAGE- Digital work-flow system; INSIGHT- using ICTs to train visually impaired; IT@school Project for introducing IT education at high school level; SMART move - Motor vehicles application; KVATIS - Kerala Value Added Tax Information System; PSC - Online application; Online counselling for entrance examinations; Video-conferencing facility across the state and SPARK- Digital Human Resource Management System for government employees.

Karnataka Karnataka belongs to the category of Indian states, which have spearheaded the e-Governance drive in the country. Bhoomi (an on-line management system of land records delivery through computerisation of 20 million records of ownership of 6.7 million farmers), a project that made states realise the potential of ICT, is an initiative of the state. With the launch of Nemmadi telecentres across the state (initially 800, and later up to 5000) as a one-stop-shop solution to 39 government services, the state has made a mark in e-Readiness among other states.

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu has a well-established e-Governance network in place. The State Data Centre is being upgraded and all the blocks and taluks are e-Connected. Also, 6 mission mode projects viz., enhancing e-Services of civil supplies, registration, municipalities and town panchayats, taluk (block) offices, collectorates and transport departments are being rolled out. A large number of innovative and pioneering e-Governance applications have also been developed in areas such as treasuries, registration, land records, transport, municipalities, agriculture, etc.

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C K Mathew Principle Secretary IT, Government of Rajasthan

C S R Prabhu Deputy Director General and State Informatics Officer National Informatics Centre, Hyderabad

C Umashankar Indian Administrative Services Officer Cadre Tamil Nadu

C V S K Sharma Special Officer And Municipal Commissioner Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation

D C Misra Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, DIT, Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India

Lt Ed Possey Executive Lieutenant, District 3, Gainesville, Florida

D P Bobde Deputy Director General National Informatics Centre, Pune

Francis Rajan Head – ICT Bengaluru International Airport

Deepa Tyagi Deputy Director General (M), Department of Telecommunications, Government of India

Deepak Chanduka Group General Manager (IT & NW), TCIL Government of India Enterprise

Chandrasen Kumar Manager, Food Corporation Of India Government Of India Undertaking

Dhrupad Mathur Senior Consultant, Programme Management Unit, NeGP, Department of IT, Government of India

Chang Hak Choi Director General, Presidential Committee on Government Innovation and Decentralization, Korea

Dibakar Ray Scientist-D, NIC, DIT, Ministry of Communications & IT Government of India

Chola Pratapa Singh Chhetri Assisting the Government of Nepal in its use of Information and Communication Technologies

Dr C Chandramouli Secretary IT, Government of Tamil Nadu

Dr Devendra Pal Singh Regulator and Member, Telecom Commission of India (TCIL), and CMD, BSNL

Dr N Mathiyalagan Reader, Department of Communications PSG College of Arts and Science, Tamil Nadu

Dr. Gulmammadov R H Ministry of Communication and Informational Technologies Republic of Azerbaijan

Our Journey...

G C Bharuka, Chairman e-Committee, Supreme Court of India

Dr Kshatrapati Shivaji Secretary IT, Government of Maharashtra

Ghan Shyam Bansal Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre (NIC), State Informatics OfďŹ cer, Haryana and Heading the Haryana State Centre of NIC at Chandigarh.

H K Misra Associate Professor (IT), Institute of Rural Management, Anand, Gujarat

...Our Contributors

Kamal Dave Advocate Supreme Court of India, New Delhi

J Satyanarayana CEO, National Institute of Smart Government (NISG)

Kemal Bajramovic Head of IT, Department of Civil Service Agency Bosnia and Herzegovina

J J R Anand Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Goa

Kiran Bedi Director General Bureau of Police Research and Development

Dr GD Gautama Principal Secretary, DIT Government West Bengal

G Satheesh Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Tiruvantpuram, Kerala

Ganga Prasad GL Centre Head, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Bangaluru

K T Vijaya Krishna Kumar Deputy Director of Treasuries Government of Karnataka, Bangaluru

Jantima Sirisaengtaksin Chief Information OfďŹ cer, Revenue Department Government of Thailand

Jeongwon Yoon Director, National Computerisation Agency Korea

K Bikshapathi Project Manager, e-Procurement Government of Andhra Pradesh

Krishnan Dharmarajan Principal Consultant, Programme Management Unit, National e-Governance Plan, DIT, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Govt of India

Lalhma Chhuani System Analyst National Informatics Centre (NIC), Mizoram

Laurence Millar Deputy Commissioner, ICTs State Services Commission, Wellington, New Zealand

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Mohammad Elias Eusuf Bangladesh Computer Council, Ministry of Science & ICT in Bangladesh

Mohandas VS Scientist D and Senior Designer, National Informatics Centre

N K Das, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, GoI

Nripendra Misra Chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)

P Govind Raj Programmer, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Noida

P H Kurian IT Secretary, Government of Kerala

P K Gupta Advisor (IT) , Department of Information Technology, Municipal Corporation of Delhi

P M Kuriakose Commissioner, eSeva, Government of Andhra Pradesh

P Srinivasa Rao Project Manager (eDev Cell), Centre for Good Governance, Andhra Pradesh

P V Bhat Technical Director (Bhoomi), National Informatics Centre, Government of Karnataka

P M Sasi Additional Director (e-Governance), CDAC, Tiruvantapuram

Partha Bhattacharya Chairman, Coal India Limited

Parthasarathi Banerjee Director, National Institute of Science, Technology & Development Studies, New Delhi

Parvez Iftikhar CEO, United Students Federation (USF), Pakistan

upcoming projects

C

an you imagine a developing country like India with a billion plus population, where availing and delivering government services are neither a nuisance for people nor the administration, no long queues at windows of public offices, precise and transparent delivery of goods and services to the poor and people residing in the countryside region, apart from the urban masses; each citizen carrying just a single multi-purpose national ID card with a national ID number; sophisticated monitoring of trade and transactions across states leading to minimum tax evasions; electronic passports with biometric features to ensure security and safety? Oh! Yes you can. Take a reading of the 5 egov ambitious upcoming projects deemed to transform system and bring change in governance.

The National Mission on Education Through ICT The National Mission on Education through ICT scheme, submitted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), aims to enhance access, equity and quality of higher education in the country by leveraging on ICT and providing e-Content and connectivity to all institutions of higher learning. Computer infrastructure and connectivity will simultaneously be extended to over 18,000 colleges and 400 universities across the country. The scheme will cost a total of US$950,000 and is expected to involve active participation of state governments. Under this scheme, the central government will provide new generation knowledge modules and e-content and bear 75 per cent of internet connectivity cost while the rest will be borne by the state governments. The main objective of the programme is to bridge the digital divide and use computing devices to help learners in the rural areas and in the higher education domain.

National ID Cards The Government of India is planning to launch a Multi purpose National Identity Cards (MNIC) to every citizen and non citizen living in India by 2011. Each MNIC will have a 16-digit ID number with tamper-proof customized cover, besides being waterproof and able to sustain extreme temperatures. Its a 16Kb chip that contains biometric data of the card holder, and has three specific usages: validation, updating and additional applications, for which space between 6 KB to 8 KB would be available. All welfare payments including widow and old age pensions, through the wide range of schemes such as mother and child support, kisan credit, student assistance and micro-credit will be channelised through MNIC. The card will make it easier for farmers to get bank credit. MNIC, through a comprehensive database of every resident in India, will enhance the security assessment and measures. Simultaneously, it will also complement and expedite the pace of e-Governance mechanism in the country.

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ePassport With a microprocessor chip at its back with a 64Kb space, new passports will have biometric recognition features that will make easier for the authorities to check its validity. On June 25, 2008, the first ePassport was launched by the Government of India. Initially its being offered to diplomatic passport holders, and by the last of 2009, GOI is planning to provide it to every passport holder. An e-Passport supports passive and active authentication, basic access control, extended access control and biometric features like facial, IRIS and fingerprint.

The authentication features protect against forgery where the access control mechanisms control access to the chip embedded in an e-Passport. The e-passport prevents impersonation and forgery.

eDistrict Going with objective of digitization of records, automation of workflow and value addition to services through process redesign to efficiently deliver government services and disseminate information on government schemes, Government of India is funding an approximate amount of Rs 4 Crores per pilot district to open front ends at district, tehsil, sub division and block level, in the form of citizen facilitation counters. The services include issuance of certificates (income domicile caste birth death), arm licenses, ration cards, facilitation of social welfare schemes, redressal of complaints, utility payments and linking with other e-Governance projects. e-District pilot project is currently being implemented in the 14 States covering 36 Districts.

ESIC Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) has 5000 offices across the country. In March 2009, ESIC opted for computerization of its paper based system in to a paper less eGoverned system, benefiting to 4 Crore people enrolled with it. The ESIC scheme is being operated jointly by both state and central governments, sharing the costs on a 1:7 ratio respectively. Also recently ESIC gave aorder to Wipro Infotech, to implement ESIC’s Project Panchdeep, which is aimed at improving healthcare services to its beneficiaries. The five project would include identification of more than one crore subscribers and their family members covered under ESIC, connecting all locations of ESIC, Datacentre, Disaster recovery, Hospital Information Management System, ERP and maintenance services.

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Municipalities

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roviding e-Government Services in any place does not happen in vacuum. There are certain interfaces that connect the government to its citizens for the purpose of service delivery. In most of our cities we have certain civic bodies which deliver services such as registration of births and deaths, payment of property tax, etc.

Most of the civic bodies have undergone major shift in terms of delivery of these citizen services by bringing in the benefits of Information and Communication Technology. egov highlights the 5 municipalities of India which have made an impact in citizen service delivery mechanism.

Delhi Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) are Delhi’s pride. MCD is the second biggest civic body of the world and is providing civic services for nearly 94 per cent of the geographic area of Delhi. 97 per cent of the population of Delhi resides within the jurisdiction of MCD. The MCD portal offers a host of online services to its citizens. The municipality also has some of the services in the pipeline such as - bulk mailing service, courier service, to-let service, mobile top-up service, e-Ticketing service, drop-box service, bill payment service, movie ticketing service, gift and greeting delivery service, advertisement in government website, and educational form and prospects us availability. It is worth mentioning that NDMC is offering its citizens to register complaints through SMS. Both the civic bodies are using GIS for mapping and utility management in the city.

NDMC is offering its citizens to register complaints through SMS. Also, both the civic bodies have used GIS for mapping the city

www.ndmc.gov.in, www.mcd.gov.in

Hyderabad

GHMC also happens to be the first municipality in India to introduce (RFID) technology for their solid waste management

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Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is offering a lot in one platter. It has a host of online services for the citizens accessible from the Internet. GHMC also made it sure that those who do not have access to Internet, are not left out of the process.

For this, fully computerised e-Seva and citizen service centres are made available, which serve as the all in one kiosk for all the utility purposes of the citizens, such as payment of bills and remittance of all municipal taxes. GHMC also happens to be the first municipality in India to introduce RFID technology for their solid waste management, which improved the efficiency in lifting and movement of garbage. www.ghmc.gov.in

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Mumbai Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) is one of the largest municipal corporations of India and is spread across 24 ward offices and 550 locations in the financial capital of India. The civic body launched its interactive portal in 2007 and today offers several citizen services through its portal. MCGM has over 3500 IT users and 200 locations connected on a state-of-the-art data centre.

Through its online property in water billing. MCGM has more than INR 22,000 crore worth financial transaction per year in addition to all the citizen services. The entire e-Governance initiative was steered

by MCGM through the project management task force formed more than 2 years back. By appropriate usage of IT through portal and walkin 24/7 citizen facilitation centres, MCGM is trying best towards making itself a true global city.

The civic body launched its interactive portal in 2007 and today boasts of several citizen services through its portal

www.mcgm.gov.in

Nagpur

NMC is a pioneer in providing health care services to its citizens. It runs free ambulances and also provides free delivery for pregnant women in the Nagpur

Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC), apart from the regular online services of registration of births and death, lodging complaints, paying property, water taxes online, also has some of the innovative services to make the participation of the citizens interactive. NMC has introduced opinion polls in its website. It has e-Tendering facilities whereby registered users can view tenders online, check their status and also purchase form of tenders. It has also listed the details of various ongoing projects through its portal. NMC is a pioneer in providing health care services to its citizens. It runs free ambulances and also provides free delivery for pregnant women in the Nagpur Municipal Corporation-run hospitals.

www.nmc.gov.in

Pune The municipality has adopted e-Governance in a serious manner and offers a host of information to its citizens through its web portal such as detailed list of kiosks in the city, Right to Information, various development plans, budgets, etc. In terms of services, the municipality has made its property tax payments online. Citizens can also report any change in use of property through online assessment. Citizens can also lodge their complaints online and also check the status of the same. One can also take out print-outs of these certificates from the portal. Under the Jawaharlal Nehru Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, PMC has established a dashboard to monitor the progress of all development works.

PMC has established a dashboard to monitor the progress of all development works

www.punacorporation.org

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Patrick O Tammur Hon’ble Minister for Communication and Information, Papua New Guinea

R Chandrashekhar Special Secretary, e-Governance, DIT, Ministry of Communication and IT, GoI

Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra Commissioner-cum-Secretary, DIT, Government of Orissa

Prakash Kumar IT Secretary, Delhi Government

R D Shinde Commissioner, Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation, Mumbai

R K Senthil Kumar Project Leader – Advanced Business Computing Group, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Bangaluru

Pratibha Lokhande Scientist D, Agricultural Informatics Division, National Informatics Centre, DIT, MCoIT, GoI

Praveen Singh Pardeshi Commissioner, Pune Municipal Corporation

R K Upadhyay Chairman and Managing Director, Telecommunication Consultants India Limited (TCIL), GoI Enterprise

R N Dash Commissioner-cum-Secretary, Panchayati Raj Government of Orissa

Dr P R Gupta Associate Professor, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Noida

R P Sinha Deputy Managing Director (IT), State Bank of India

Pameshwor Singh State Informatics Officer, National Informatics Centre (NIC), Mizoram

R Subramanian Engineer-in-Chief, Public Works Division, Government of NCT, Delhi

Dr Peter Sonntagbauer Sr Advisor, Federal Computing Center and PR Director of the EU-project ‘Pan European Public Procurement Online - PEPPOL’

Raj Kumar Secretary, IT & Science City, DST, Government of Gujarat

Rajeev Chawla Secretary (e-Governance), Government of Karnataka

Rajendra Kumar Secretary, IT, Government of Delhi

Our Journey...

Rakesh Shrivastava Chief Executive Officer, MAP_IT, Bhopal

Ram Muivah Secretary- IT, Government of Manipur

Ram Sewak Sharma Principal Secretary, Information Technology Department, Government of Jharkhand

...Our Contributors Rajinder Kumar Vij Inspector General of Police, Bastar Zone, Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh

Rajni Razdan Secretary, (AR & PG), Ministry of Personnel, PG & Pensions, GoI

Rajwant Sandhu Additional Secretary, Ministry of Pachayati Raj, GoI

Roberto A. Cabarrubias Incumbent Barangay Chairman and President of Barangay, Philippines

S Aparna Municipal Commissioner, Surat Municipal Corporation

S D Parkhi Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, DITy, Ministry of Communications and IT, GoI

Neeta Verma Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Department of Information Technology, MCIT, GoI

S Jethwani Director (Works) Public Works Department, Delhi

Rama Hariharan Technical Director, NIC, New Delhi and Incharge, Panchayat Informatics Division and CRISP Division at NIC Headquarters

S P Singh Senior Director, DIT, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology

Rehab Lootah Director, e-Services, Dubai Government

S R Das e-Governance Group, DIT, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, GoI

Reiner Dölger Chairman, Centrico Project, Coordinator, Road Telematics, Western Europe

Sampo Hietanen Head of Unit, Traffic Information Services, The Finnish Road Enterprise

Renu Budhiraja Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of IT and Communications, GoI

Sandeep Kaur Department of Communication, PSG College of Arts and Science, Tamil Nadu

EMERGING STATES

T

he diverse land of India has diverse states. Since the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was implemented in 2006, Indian states have tried to reap the benefits of electronic governance in their various spheres of activities. Some of the states took some great initiatives to bring smart governance into force. Grappling with their own unique set of problems and challenges, some of the states emerged as champions in the speedy implementation of e-Governance, while some others proved to be the promising front runners. Acknowledging such states, egov discusses the 5 egov emerging states which one should look forward to in the years to come.

Bihar The state has undergone statewide computerisation of registry offices. Bihar has also started its land record computerisation called “Bhu-Abhilekh”. Patna High Court happens to be the first court in India to be computersied, done way back in 1990-91. The government of Bihar has some innovative ways of saving money through the usage of ICT. Moreover, the state has computerised all its treasuries. Another e-Governance project which has caught the eye of many is Jaankari. A brain child of the Chief Minister of Bihar – Nitish Kumar, Jaankari is a facilitation centre that helps the citizens to have access to government information.

e-Governance project which has caught the eye of many is Jaankari, a brain child of the Chief Minister of Bihar - Nitish Kumar

www.gov.bih.nic.in

Chhattisgarh Chhattisgarh has several firsts to its credit in terms of e-Governance.

The Chhattisgarh Online information system for Citizen Empowerment (CHOiCE) is a revolutionary approach to citizen services and provides one stop solution for anywhere-anytime government. A Geographical Information System (GIS) having 70 layers for land records in the state is being initiated based on data retrieved from satellites. Natural resource mapping has been carried out on 1:50,000 scales based on satellite imageries and digital processing. Chhattisgarh is also proud to have the largest WiMAX 802.16d deployment under the Asia e-Procurement project which automates the whole purchase cycle in the entire state and major works departments. The state has digitised its entire treasury operation and the commercial tax.

www.chhattisgarh.nic.in

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Chhattisgarh is the largest WiMAX 802.16d deployment in Asia which connects 3000 government offices in the state through its state wide area network

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Delhi Delhi embarked on the IT path way back in 1995-96 when it computerised its Transport and Sales Tax Department. Being the hub of political activity, the state announced its IT policy in August 2000 with the objective of using IT as an enabler for the people. The city has over 34 Citizen Service Bureaus (CSBs) which are functional. The city has facilities for online payment of electricity, water bills, property taxes, application for ration cards, and various other certificates. Delhi Police plans to bring in electronic round-the-clock surveillance in bustling marketplaces and other sensitive and vulnerable places where terrorist strikes are at high risk. On the other hand, Delhi High Court is planning to install Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) in the court premises to promote e-Filing of cases. To the driver’s delight, Delhi has started computerisation of learner’s driving licence test.

The city will soon have over 2000 Government to Citizen (G2C) kiosks called “Aapke Dwar”. The project is under the Delhi Municipal Corporation in the municipal limits of the national capital

.www.delhi.gov.in

Goa

Under the state-owned Goa Broad Band Network (GBBN), Optical Fibre Cables (OFC) have already been laid to provide connectivity to 189 Village Panchayats, 143 Lok Seva Kendras, all talukas and district headquarters with the state portal. Currently, 28 CSCs are operational providing various B2C services. Government of Goa through its Tourism Department has already set up surveillance cameras on beaches in order to enable monitoring. Also, government of Goa is in process of expanding surveillance system across the state, starting with the integrated border check-posts. Some of the major e-Governance projects in the pipeline for the year 2009 are asset management, Geographical Information System, IT Knowledge Centre, State Portal and State Service Delivery Gateway (SSDG), Cyber Treasury, and On-line payment of Government dues.

www.gao.gov

Under the state-owned Goa Broad Band Network (GBBN) Optical Fibre Cables (OFC) have already been laid to provide connectivity to 189 Village Panchayats, 143 Lok Seva Kendras, all talukas and district headquarters with the state portal

Uttaranchal All the treasuries of the state are already computerised. They also have their pay rolls being completely digitised. They are in fact the first state in the country to do so. On November 9, 2006, the state launched its Citizen Centric Land Records Website of Uttarakhand – “Dev-bhoomi” - which aims at making online the entire Land Records Data of all the 13 districts of the state. The portal consists data of about 16,618 revenue villages. It is also worth mentioning that the Aarohi project brought computers to villages. Project Aarohi’s aim is to impart basic computer education to all government and government-aided schools, from classes VI-XII. The monthly cost to the student is Rs 10. Uder this project government aims to provide four computers to every school in the state.

Understanding the need for capacity building, the state is running a project called ‘Saksham’ whereby all the 55,000 government employees will be trained in basic skills and computer literacy

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www.gov.ua.nic.in

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www.microsoft.com

INTERVIEW

Technology for All Give us an overview of Microsoft India’s participation in making India e-Governed country.

Microsoft has been working in partnership with the Government of India to provide Innovative egovernance solutions that takes IT to the grass root level. As leaders in the Indian e-governance space for over 17 years, Microsoft has been engaging closely with various departments of the Central and State Governments, and Public Sector organizations and has developed more than 300 applications.

Microsoft believes that technology ensures high quality cost effective services, especially when there are budgetary constraints.

Today the government aims to develop a common infrastructure which would result in a series of benefits. It is also looking to create a vibrant economy through effective business friendly policies and services, as well as infrastructure support.

This empowers case workers, back office staff and executive management to concentrate on their professional roles even as Microsoft software automates the information flows; and provides the infrastructure to allow work to be carried out wherever the service is required.

Rajan Anandan MD, Microsoft India

“

We expect to spend almost 60% of our investments towards promoting innovations in India while the remainder will be focused towards our special programs for digital inclusion and towards expansion

48 }

What are the emerging segments for Microsoft India?

India is essentially a growing economy, though the current economic situation has impacted the pace of growth. In order to increase the pace of economic growth [of India], it is imperative to come up with innovative business models and products. Some of the unique segments emerging here are SMB market, online and mobile computing.

What role can Microsoft play in developing applications for urban local bodies?

Microsoft along with its partners addresses the specific requirements of the urban local bodies (ULBs) in the gamut of property tax, birth & death certification, licensing, works management, building plans, rent & lease, tender management, citizen grievances etc. The solutions address three key challenges of the ULBs, viz. citizen facilitation, revenue maximization and enhancing efficiency of internal processes of the ULBs. The solutions have already been deployed in couple of States and Microsoft is spearheading the percolation of these www.egovonline.net

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solutions to all the States in the country with the help of its partners.

What are the challenges in working with the government?

Through its ambitious e-government plans, the Government of India over the years has undertaken various projects that meticulously work towards uplifting the local IT ecosystem; and Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the government in the technological progress of the country.

However, some of the challenges that we experience are during implementation. For instance, certain mandated operational systems can sometimes pose a technical barrier. As is the case across all business enterprises, limited transactional experience with buying of enhanced external ICT services, procurement process, sales cycles and price sensitivities are some of the other key concerns.

established, but things are definitely bound to change, though the time period is uncertain. It is this uncertainty that is urging organisations to control/cut unnecessary costs.

We are seeing this translate into companies investing in solutions and processes that enable them to deliver immediate productivity and drive cost efficiencies. For instance: Reduced travel and communication costs, cutting back on plane trips and hotel stays is one of the most obvious ways for companies to save money, but that must be balanced against the value of person-to-person interaction. Today, video conferencing and new collaboration tools are making virtual meetings much more like face-to-face interaction and companies are finding that in many cases, information sharing and collaboration can be accomplished more efficiently and for much less cost when done virtually. A prime example of this would be Raymond Limited which has reduced costs by 30% using Microsoft UC solutions.

In addition, highly skilled IT workers are inclined to work with IT software and services companies, which What are the plans/goals in the near and long term for pose the challenge of having the Microsoft India? right ICT talent pool at all times.

Our long-term business and What’s heartening to know is citizenship commitment is that there are plans to build to bring forth the benefits of The key to transform ICT capacity for government technology to those who are yet agencies as part of the NeGP. The to experience it. A vast majority of challenges to government in the long run plans the global population (estimated opportunities is to address the skills shortage in its five billion), live in countries with 11th five-year plan, with focus on a developing economy. These to invest heavily in greater investment in establishing countries are they key markets and putting together IT-related for Microsoft. We will continue innovation, which, in turn, courses. The government is also to innovate our products and working steadily at developing business models to ensure that will ensure consistent stable modern transportation benefits of technology are enjoyed growth systems, enhanced power supply by everyone, and not limit it to and reliable telecom and Internet the developed economies. networks across the country, There are other opportunities which will benefit the industries as well: the domestic IT uptake in across board.

India is low and therefore the environment is far more ready and open to change. Likewise, poor IT infrastructure means How has the slowdown affected IT market in India? an opportunity to further unleash the IT potential. For Economic slowdown is a reality that has brought numerous example, we believe that the three screen strategy- Mobile, challenges. However, the current situation should also be TV, PC (in chronological order) will work very well. viewed as an opportunity to initiate a meaningful dialogue In the next phase of our growth, we will expand our with customers vis-a-vis optimal use of IT and how we can reach across the country and work with system integrators, help them manage their costs efficiently.

ISV partners and the developer community to develop With increased focus on cost control, companies today are solutions and services which will enable growth of the investing in solutions and processes that enhance productivity, Indian IT market. Our recently launched initiatives like thereby ensuring cost effectiveness. Â Companies today have DreamSpark and BizSpark have been introduced to reduced travel costs, communication costs, electricity costs encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship in the country by etc. Microsoft with its unique IT solutions is helping its providing a range of software to students and startups at no customers sail through these testing times. charge.

Rather than viewing the glass as half empty, it is essential Further, we expect to spend almost 60 % of our investments to view it otherwise. The key to transform challenges to towards promoting innovations in India while the remainder opportunities is to invest heavily in innovation, which will in will be focused towards our special programs for digital turn ensure consistent growth. inclusion and towards expansion of our sales and marketing business.

What is your take on the recession affecting costs i.e. do you think companies will be able to do cost cutting?

Sandeep Budki Economic slowdown is a fact and reality that has been sandeep@egovonline.net

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Sanjay Aggarwal General Manager (Operations), IRCTC Limited

Dr Sanjay Dahasahasra Member Secretary, Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran, Mumbai

Sanjay Jaju Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Infrastructure Corporation of Andhra Pradesh

Sanjeev Chopra IT Secretary, Government of Uttaranchal

Sanjeev Kumar Sinha Secretary, Science and Technology, Government of Bihar

Satyaveer Singh Assistant Director, IT, National Institute of Agricultural Marketing, Rajasthan

Shahid Ahmad Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Jharkhand

Shahid Khan Director, Income Tax Systems, Government of India

Shankar Aggarwal Joint Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India

Shefali S Dash Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Delhi

Shigeru Kumakura Vice Chairman of the board for the NPO Higumi, Maebashi, Japan.

Shree Kant Singh Additional Municipal Commissioner, West Sub Station, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai

Dr Srinivasan Ramakrishnan Director General, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Pune

Shyamalima Banerjee Director, DARPG, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, GoI

Siddharth Principal Secretary, DIT, Government of West Bengal

Somboon Mekpaiboonwattana Director, e-Government Promotion and Development Bureau, MICTRoyal, Thai Government

Sonal Kalra Scientist B and Editor of Informatics, an E-Gov Bulletin published by NIC

Subas Pani Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India

Suchitra Pyarelal Technical Director, National Informatics Centre (NIC), New Delhi

Our Journey...

Suresh Chanda IT Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh

Suresh Pachouri Hon’ble Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, GoI

Susant Kumar Panda Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Orissa State Unit, Bhubaneswar

...Our Contributors

Suwipa Wanasathop Director, Software Park, Thailand

Syed Murtaz Ali Rizvi Joint Collector, Ranga Reddy District, Andhra Pradesh

U V Deo Senior Technical Director, NIC, Pune

Uddipta Ray Secretary, IT, Government of Goa

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

V S Kundu Managing Director, HSEDC Ltd., and Special Secretary, IT, Government of Haryana

Vivek Mittal Administrative Officer - IT Department, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Central Zone Office, New Delhi

Dr V Prithiviraj Director, DIT, Government of Pondicherry

Supachai Jongsiri Information and Communication Technology Advisor, Chief Information Officer, Ministry of Finance, Royal Thai Government

Syedain Abbasi Director, DIT, Ministry of Communications and IT, GoI

Surbhi Jain Deputy Director, Department of Commerce, Government of India

Dr Tarun Seem Director, NRHM, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

Wajahat Habibullah Chief Information Commissioner Government of India

Surendra Nath Tripathy Commissioner and Secretary Panchayati Raj and IT, Government of Orissa

Th Pameshwor Singh State Informatics Officer, NIC, Mizoram

Zohra Chatterji IT Secretary, Government of Uttar Pradesh

With this issue we have started a coverage of contributors to the egov magazine in a series. We begin this series with the contributors from the government sector.

The next three issues of egov magazine will have coverage of contributors respectively from the corporate, academia and the civil society/NGO sector.

opinion

NeGP: The Challenge Ahead S The government of India (GOI) is embarking on an enormous, wide-ranging set of e-Governance projects to achieve extensive government reform. The journey is full of challenges and mid course correction is due

Arup Roy Senior Research Analyst, Gartner

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uccessive governments have committed to addressing the inequalities that exist in India. The GOI sees e-gov as an important vehicle for introducing administrative reforms to improve the quality of life for underserved sections of society and provide more equitable access to economic opportunities across the nation.

In recent years, most governments in India have undertaken a variety of e-gov projects.

India’s experience in e-gov and ICT initiatives, in what can be described as a “phase of experimentation,� has shown that significant benefits can be derived from improving accessibility, tackling corruption and giving assistance to deserving groups.

Different e-gov projects have demonstrated that improved access to information and services can yield economic and social development opportunities, facilitate participation and communication in policy and decision-making processes, and help to empower the weakest groups. A number of states and territories in India have pioneered this approach, most notably Andhra Pradesh Chandigarh and Tamil Nadu. But efforts so far have been somewhat fragmented and not extended across multiple jurisdictions.

Central and state governments now reportedly spend 3,000 crore INR ($754 million) annually on e-gov initiatives.

With this backdrop, a new phase is occurring in India. E-gov is being positioned as a strategic mechanism for more substantial transformation of government across the whole of India. The task of transforming the largely manual methods and procedures of government service delivery across all tiers of government is monumental. www.egovonline.net

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It is within this context that the NeGP initiative was conceived.

Current Position Assessment for the NeGP

Gartner believes that realizing egovernment strategies is a balancing act between maximizing constituency service, realizing operational proficiency and achieving political return.

An assessment framework needs to capture whether an entity’s egovernment strategic objectives demonstrate an understanding of constituent needs and priorities, the most effective communication means, and the right combination of service delivery channels and mechanisms. Also, it must examine whether organizations involved in implementing the e-strategy have the right tools, resources, processes and political support required for a future-state vision to be realized. So the assessment needs to consider both the completeness of vision and the ability to execute.

Prime Challenges Facing the NeGP

The NeGP must address many challenges if it is to create and sustain real progress and improvement. The GOI is placing considerable faith in the NeGP to improve government service delivery, streamline internal processes and reduce the incidence of endemic problems such as corruption. But given the scale and complexity of India’s NeGP and its commensurate risks, failures in the NeGP will inevitably occur during the years ahead. When such failures become publicly known, great political commitment from central and regional governments will be required to ensure that appropriate course corrections are made. The resolve of politicians at all tiers of government will be sorely tested.

Also, there is no single person or role that has single and focused ownership of NeGP outcomes. Accountabilities are spread across many separate government stakeholders, and this will require excessive amounts of time and energy to come to “accommodations” between participants in the variety of projects in the program.

As a matter of fact, the NeGP sets out to vastly change the nature of work done by people in government across India. But transforming business ov

May 2009

processes and practices, as well as automating manual practices, will confront formidable resistance and change obstacles, usually in situations that will be new and worrying for government staff. It is not clear yet that the resource and project mechanisms, plus skills and receptiveness of involved staff, will be anywhere near sufficient to deal with this.

In 2009, there is a high likelihood that the overall NeGP program and the manner in which it is being executed will have to be rethought Other challenges that needs to be addressed are related to several projects, vendor and ICT with several key aspects being as follows: • Project approval and funding through multiple departmental budgets will yield wide variations in the approach to project objective setting, without a clear focus on outcomes or on building sustainable services. The service needs of citizens/businesses and those of other departments tend to be either overlooked or given lower priority in relation to internal needs.

• Project objectives tend to be couched in ICT terms that are specified in great detail, while government business process outcomes either are absent or are vaguely defined and don’t lend themselves to post-implementation measurement.

• The current system of project formulation (based on budgetary allocation or grant) places little or no pressure on departments to develop arrangements that can attract private capital and resources, a necessity that has been identified for the NeGP. To achieve this, more focus and rigor will be needed at the formulation and development stages of projects.

•

The GOI tendering process is complex and a major hurdle for vendors to navigate. There have been significant issues with this in the past, especially with highvisibility projects. On the positive side for vendors, the drive for so-called “bottom of the pyramid” service improvement in India, mainly relating to constituents in rural areas, is of prime importance. Vendors willing and able to leverage this opportunity will find strong favor with the government.

• A further specific challenge relates to localization of ICT solutions that have been mostly developed with an English-language interface. In India, most people will want to use their local language, but this consideration does not appear yet to figure strongly in the NeGP’s implementation strategy.

Although e-Gov programs in other countries have their own peculiarities that depend on political priorities and current achievements, several areas that have emerged as critical for sustainable success are having a deeper understanding of citizens’ desires and behaviors with different channels, establishing an effective governance structure for whole-of-government initiatives, using an enterprise architecture approach and focusing on results and performance management .

India’s e-gov planners, IT leaders and project managers need to strongly convey these lessons to their colleagues with business responsibilities for e-gov initiatives.We believe that, while good progress will be made in areas where there is definite political support, adequate resourcing, and sound project ownership and management, progress will be very uneven across the range of NeGP projects across India. Success is most likely to occur with infrastructureoriented projects, but failures will be mostly associated with process changeoriented projects.

In 2009, there is a high likelihood that the overall NeGP program and the manner in which it is being executed will have to be rethought.

The program will be reformulated, the outcome of which will be heavily dependent on the political environment existing in India.

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Catalysing Country’s Co “In more than two decade, C-DAC has achieved many laur

C-DAC and Indian Language support to e-Governance Initiatives The Indian subcontinent is characterized by diversity in languages and cultures.

This atmosphere of diversity is an opportunity as well as a challenge in terms of spreading IT and its usage in India. The learning and utilization of information happens primarily through the local languages. Therefore it is important to develop innovative egovernance solutions that help it to reach to the grass root level. Localization of language in the domain of e-governance will make the citizens aware of the government policies and planning and will also be a significant factor in increasing accessibility of information to the masses.

C-DAC, has taken a number of Initiatives to proliferate the language role in the e-Governance and provided numbers of solutions in the field of knowledge-based understanding systems vis-à-vis Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation System, Information Extraction & Retrieval, Language Tutors, Webbased solutions, Multilingual Data Management & Analysis.

Small Scale Industries, Information Technology, Healthcare, Education and Banking domains. MANTRA Rajya Sabha is also customized for the Rajya Sabha Secretariat to cater the needs of the translators who are translating the documents of the Rajya Sabha. The system is in use at Rajya Sabha for the last 3-years and works for Paper to be Laid [PLOT], List of Business [LOB] and Bulletin Part-1 domains. The MANTRARajya Sabha System was handed over to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat on 29th August 2007 after it has tested and achieved the accuracy of 90-95%. It was in the extension of that English to Indian Languages Machine Translation system, ‘EILMT’ is a state-of-the-art solution that allows translating the text from English to six other Indian languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil and Oriya) in a multi-lingual format in the specified domains. This is a consortium based Project of Department of Information

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Cross lingual Information retrieval

The development of online information repositories, due to the current expansion of the World Wide Web, is creating many opportunities and also problems in information retrieval. Numerous documents are available online in many different languages. These documents should be made available for all users to access, irrespective of the language of the user. However in conventional information retrieval systems, the user must enter a search query in the language of the document, in order to retrieve it. This restriction clearly limits the amount of information to which an individual user has access. CrossLanguage Information Access enables a user to enter a query in a language in which he is fluent, and read documents from the web, that are written in a different language. Keeping this in mind C-DAC has also taken initiative to work in the field of Information Extraction & Retrieval in both individual mode and consortia mode projects.

The CLIA (Cross Lingual Information Access) Project is a mission mode project to be executed by a consortium of academic and research institutions and industry partners for tourism domain.

The final deliverable of the project at the end of two years will be a portal where:

Machine Assisted Translation Technology related to e-governance

In the area of Machine translation, C-DAC had developed MANTRA technology, which is acronym of MAchiNe Assisted TRAnslation Tool. This technology is developed to facilitate users to translate English text into Hindi. MANTRA uses the Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) formalism to represent the English as well as the Hindi grammar.

The accuracy rate of translation in these languages is considerably high. Besides, it is also being expanded to translate Hindi text into English in the different domains. Based on the MANTRA technology MANTRA-Rajbhasha and MANTRA-Rajya Sabha systems had been developed. MANTRA-Rajbhasha system works in the Administrative, Agriculture,

Technology where 10 academic institutes are working together to meet the goal.

MANTRA is a recipient of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award and a part of the ‘1999 Innovation Collection’ in the National Museum for American History.

1.A user will be able to give a query in one Indian language and 2.S/he will be able to access documents available in a.the language of the query, b.Hindi (if the query language is not Hindi), c.English 3.Results will be presented to the user in the language of the query. The results can also be presented in the language in which the information originally www.egovonline.net

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mputing Competence els in its endeavour towards building nation’s IT economy” resided. The languages involved will be Asian Nations) seminar Held on January Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil 18-19, 2007, which was organized by and Telugu.

C-DAC and ASEAN Secretariat. This seminar aimed at providing a platform for Web-browsing through listening for the Indian and the ASEAN community e-governance applications to explore the feasibility and usability Importance of web surfing for study of the Shruti Drishti software for their material and other relevant information respective organizations / countries. is increasing day by day. Every moment hundreds of web pages are updated Learn Indian Languages through or dumped in the ocean of Internet. Artificial Intelligence Shruti Drishti, a cost effective system Today’s world is fast and always changing. for browsing conference web site is Changing in thoughts, perceptions and developed for visually impaired users. executions. Keeping pace with this is Shruti Drishti is a web page browser for a challenge to any human being. It is visually impaired users, which allows important to notice how we learn from a simplified representation of textual these and effectively implement them. information available on the Web. A We have busy schedules to be balanced, speech synthesizer can then speak out meet the hard core reality of meeting this information or it can be represented the deadlines and be contending with in Braille form. The text can also be prosperity. Normally it is observed presented on the screen according to the that one performs or excels in any needs of partially sighted people. execution of a job if the work inspires It is a keyboard event driven web them. And also, if it touches the roots of page browser for blind and visually their existence. Among many systems impaired users, providing keyboard developed by C-DAC is its effective SHRUTI DRISHTI is a recipient of GOLDEN ICON AWARD from Department of Administrators reforms and Public grievances (DARPG), Govt. of India & the Government of Orissa presented at the 8th National Conference on e-Governance.

only accessibility using minimal keys.

It also provides a large text window for partially sighted users and a standard web page browser so that users can work together with sighted workers.` Shruti Drishti software, 48 packages along with the hardware has been delivered to Blind women’s schools across India (New Delhi, UP, Hyderabad, Banglore, Agartala, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Assam, and Chennai) under “Visually Impaired Women Empowerment through Shruti Drishti” programme.

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May 2009

The requirement for the high-speed connection helps maintain video quality, because students are not only learning a language, but also the proper facial expressions that go with it. The system also journeys through the cultural and traditional inputs wherever required.

It is bundled with a huge data bank of

Language Tutoring system, code named LILA (Learn Indian Languages through Artificial Intelligence).

LILA has been proven to be an efficient tool for both students and teachers.

The system imparts teaching of Hindi Language (the official language of India).

The efficacy of this tutoring system is to train the learners through the medium of their mother tongue or the local regional (state-level) languages. The system is currently implemented to teach Hindi and train learners through the languages which include English, Assamese, Bodo, Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepalese, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

The challenge faced by many working professionals is in doing their business or official work in Hindi. Luckily, there are technologies and solutions that cater to their needs and prepare them for the inevitable. LILA stands out as Users can see, hear, speak and practice with the tutoring system using full-motion video and audio streamed through Internet.

practice and exercise sessions that make learning fun.

A Hindi tutoring system namely LILA-Rajbhasha was developed for the government official to impart Hindi training. It is a 3-level courseware for Prabodh, Praveen and Pragya. The system is available in the form of CDs and on the Internet.

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Open Source Software and e-Governance

F

rom many perspectives, the application area where ‘open source software’ (FOSS, henceforth) has the greatest significance is e-Governance. It is one class of application which needs to reach all the strata of society, irrespective of their education background, language literacy, economic background, etc. Enabling them to access the e-Governance offerings seamlessly is critical. In turn, this requires the software components to be cost wise affordable, linguistically and culturally accessible, not be tied to particular vendors or hardware / software platforms, and support accessibility guidelines as far as possible. FOSS provides the ideal solution from all these perspectives.

Most FOSS softwares are available free of charge, and usually downloadable from the web. There is a rich collection of high quality softwares available from well recognized repositories to meet the variety of demands for developing e-Gov applications.

These include browsers, document processing tools, multimedia tools and desktops at one end and web server, mail server, application development frameworks and IDEs, on the other. There are also many domain specific packages. Full access to source code and the freedom to make modifications and distribute them enables a high degree of localization linguistically and in other aspects. Not surprisingly, a number of popular FOSS

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systems are available in many languages.

Even a small community of interested people can localise a FOSS application to their language.

Another, perhaps less discussed aspect is use of open standards. Documents, databases, multimedia content, etc, containing precious information, are often stored in proprietary formats. These data can be accessed only by using the corresponding proprietary software products. When you use a system on which that software does not run, or a decade down when that company is no longer alive, your data, for all practical purposes, is lost for ever.

This is a threat, that people across the world are only beginning to notice and hence, the rapidly increasing interest in open standards. FOSS systems generally follow widely publicized, community owned formats for such purposes protecting you from such grave dangers.

C-DAC has been active in the FOSS space for many years now, playing various roles, starting from the attempt to provide Indian language support at the X-level through the Indix project.

The Janabharati project at Mumbai was aimed at promoting open source and localisation.

One major milestone in C-DAC’s journey with FOSS was the establishment of the Open Source Software Resource Centre (OSSRC – http://ossrc.org.in) as a joint effort between C-DAC (Mumbai), IIT Bombay and IBM India. As the first of its kind effort in India, the centre initially focused on building a knowledge repository for FOSS related information, along with playing a strong advocacy role. Through development of proofof-concept applications and a number of training and awareness programs, the centre contributed to building up a FOSS ecosystem in India. There are, today, other State level resource centres modeled along this idea.

OSSRC

built an EMR system for a major eye hospital in Coimbatore and a number of portal based systems including the teacher collaboration portal for the CII Shiksha initiative, all using only FOSS. The ‘demystifying e-Learning’ workshop series aimed at introducing teachers to e-Learning technologies, clearly demonstrated the quality and variety of FOSS softwares available for e-Learning requirements. The list includes ‘Moodle’ for learning management, ‘Drupal’ for content management and portals, multimedia editing/creation tools, etc. This workshop has been quite popular among teachers. OSSRC also localised Moodle, a very popular and powerful learning management system, into Hindi. A compilation of resources on localisation led to the ‘Guide to localisation’ book covering the entire process of localisation – an initiative supported by the International Open Source Network of the UNDP. At present, the team at OSSRC is looking at e-Learning and health as two primary verticals for focus and accessibility as a major cross cutting concern trying to reach ICT to the various disadvantaged sections.

Around the same time, DIT set up a national resource centre for FOSS (NRCFOSS) at Chennai jointly between C-DAC and Anna University. This initiative also attracted a number of major industry players including Intel and IBM. The Anna University component of NRCFOSS (http://nrcfoss. org.in) contributed to HR development for FOSS by building up two elective courses for undergraduate engineering curriculum covering FOSS productivity tools and enterprise application development. Including the text books composed for this program as well as the software resources, full information is available on above mentioned web site. The C-DAC component focused on e-Governance and device drivers.

Lack of drivers for common devices like printers, web cam, etc was seen to be a major hindrance to FOSS adoption.

At this time, came a suggestion from

www.egovonline.net

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DIT on bringing out an Indian Linux distribution. One intention was to have a single platform across India supporting all Indian languages, and one that can be customised to our local requirements.

This would help in economising support and training expenses, instead of having to deal with multiple distributions. This would also make it easier for nation wide initiatives such as e-Governance. BOSS – Bharat Operating System Solution – was the result of this thought process. Built from the common Debian base, BOSS today has been localised to multiple Indian languages (to varying extents) and provides input/output in most official Indian languages. Accessibility support through Orca is also available.

A number of state governments and academic institutions (particularly schools) are showing interest in adopting BOSS as the platform for their

desktop requirements. A strategic tie up with National Informatic Centre is promising a number of existing e-gov projects to move to BOSS based servers and desktops. A nation wide network of support centres and a toll free help line is already operational to help address concerns of support from users.

Enhanced language support for covering all official Indian languages, better accessibility support, BOSS based certification for professionals, etc are some of the things in pipeline from the NRCFOSS team.

The national e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway (NSDG) project – meant to be the backbone of e-Governance services in India – is running on Linux platform and developed completely using FOSS tools and frameworks including JBOSS, Axis2, Jasper reports, PostgreSQL, etc. Some of

the e-gov projects at state / central level developed by C-DAC are also based on FOSS components.

All these efforts go to show the importance that C-DAC has given to FOSS recognising its high importance and potential to enable ICT reach across every nook and corner of the country.

As e-Governance applications spread through all the strata of the society, language and accessibility will become major concerns. C-DAC is well on its way to ensure that FOSS technology is ready to meet these challenges. The large number of FOSS applications in use today, the growing attention to FOSS from governments across the world and the high quality of software components available in FOSS have convincingly shown the readiness of open source for large scale applications in the e-gov space.

Cure@Home

Promotive, Preventive & Curative HealthCare Solutions for a Common Man Cure@Home is a Decision Support System with a knowledgebase of integrative (Allopathy, Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Yoga) medicine to address the healthcare needs of a common man. It is a health educational tool, which can be deployed on personal computers (Desktops, Laptops) or at KIOSKs (Touch Screen) and used at homes, clinics, hospitals, healthcare centres, public places and schools. Cure@Home educates you on promotive health and disease prevention. It offers the following applications addressing requirements of a common man: • • • •

My Care: Helps you analyse your constitution & health status and also store your electronic health records Diet & Lifestyle: Guides you in therapeutic application of Pulses, Milk Products, Meat, and Recipes as well as application of Yoga and exercise Home Remedies: Provides you with information on holistic solutions for primary care and prevention of symptoms & diseases Encyclopaedia: Contains a multimedia gallery of Images, Audio clips, Video clips and articles, which increases your awareness about various aspects of health.

Salient Features: • Primary care of diseases • Home remedies for minor diseases and symptoms • Diet and lifestyle according to constitution and diseases • Interactive applications like Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, Waist Hip Ratio (WHR) calculator, Immunisation Scheduler, Expected Date of delivery calculator • Detailed information of Spices, Fruits, Recipes, Yogasana, Exercise with their therapeutic uses • Multimedia gallery for easy perception • Images of diseases, medicinal plants, vegetables • Audio clips of various subjects related to health • Video clips of emergency conditions, therapeutic procedures, yoga....

• Available on Desktop & KIOSK (Touch Screen)

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Cyber Security and Cyber Forensics

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he global (un-controlled) network of networks ‘the Internet’ and the World Wide Web (WWW) have added new dimension to the way computers are being used. The prolific use of Internet for applications such as e-Governance, e-Commerce, e-Banking etc has made e-Security an important aspect of computers and networks, connected over Internet. India made its mark in IT as a global player. Barring the recent setback, resulted due to economic recession, IT industry in India created innovative business models and provided unprecedented benefits for the Nation’s economy The growing importance of information technology and the Internet in our businesses and daily lives renders us increasingly vulnerable to anti-social elements seeking to exploit the weaknesses and gaps in our information systems. The security and safety of various IT platforms and projects in India must be considered on a priority basis before any e-Governance base is made fully functional as the information technology can be used for constructive and as well as destructive work. The technology may fail to bring desired and much needed result if we do not adopt a sound and country oriented e-Governance policy. A sound e-Governance policy believes the existence of a sound and secure e-governance base as well.

The reports on cyber-security threats such as spam, phishing, botnets, social engineering techniques and reputation hijacking etc., warned us that Internet based attacks were becoming increasingly sophisticated and specialised. India ranks fifth among countries reporting the maximum number of cyber crimes, the latest report released by Internet Crime Complaint Centre of the United States.

The US report analyzing Internet crime in 2008 compiled by experts from FBI, Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) and other agencies shows the number of complaints from victims shot up by almost a third since 2007 with whoping 58

275,284 cases in which about USD 265 million were lost globally.

A number of initiatives were taken by Department of Information Technology (DIT) towards many dimensions of e-Security field such as, Controller of Certifying Authority for digital signatures through PKI, National Assurance framework for Cyber Security through STQC labs and Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-IN) in implementing proactive measures to reduce the risks of computer security incidents C-DAC’s R&D develop solutions/ products, create e-Security resource centres in the areas like Cyber Forensics, malware etc. beside education and training programs.

C-DAC has identified e-Security as one of the focus areas. C-DAC’s role in the e-Security Ecosystem (Fig. 1) is to carryout research, develop indigenous products/solutions, design and offering of various education, training and awareness programmes and services.

C-DAC is involved in different technological areas in information

security (Tab. 1 Cyber Security Solutions of C-DAC) such as : Cryptanalysis, Steganography, Steganalysis, EndSystems Security(Products like EnSafe, Real Safe), Intrusion detection and prevention(Products like N@G, Adrisya etc), Cyber Forensics, end system security, Malware Prevention, Biometric based identity management( Face Recognition, Bharatiya AFIS ), Honeynets / Honeypots (Solutions like Gen-III Honeynet, Dynamically Configurable Honeypots) , PKI Awareness and Solutions, Wireless and Mobile security. C-DAC is also actively involved in National program on Information Security Awareness for various stake holders such as students, teachers, home users etc. and through ISEA, C-DAC has also provided training for 1 week, 2 week, 6 month courses in IT Security as part of Information Security Education and Awareness (ISEA) Program.

The law enforcement agencies have to investigate, capture the culprits and bring them into court of law.

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S.No

Category

Solution/Product

1

Collection

2

Detection

Dynamically Configurable HoneyPot: The configuration of the Honeynet nodes decides the type of the attack data captured. For achieving these objectives, the distributed nodes would be made dynamically configurable in terms of Contents of the Honeypot, Configuration of Honeypot and Network Distributed HoneyNet: A Distributed Honeynet System is a collection of Honeynets that are distributed throughout the Internet or other large network and sends data to a central analysis point.

N@G (Network@Guard): Analysis network traffic and detects intrusions and takes response actions after analysis.

Adrisya (Anomaly Detector and Traffic Information System): It is a web based traffic monitoring and anomaly detection tool.

3

Protection

Face Recognition: It Identifies suspects in missing person enquiry, sieving duplicate entries in large facial image database like electoral card, passport etc.

EnSAFE (End System Suraksha Framework): It is integrated end system based security software for TCP based applications by supporting various services like authentication (user and machine), access control, confidentiality and integrity.

RealSAFE (Real-time Suraksha Framework): RealSAFE is end system based security software for UDP based audio and video streaming applications

Detection

Mobile Security Solution This solution provides security for email application and voice communication.

4

Tab. 1 Cyber Security Solutions of C-DAC

Gen-III HoneyNet: Implemented mechanisms and schemes for attack analysis, attack methodology and attack modeling.

S.No

Category

Bharatiya – AFIS (Bharatiya Automated Fingerprint Identification System): This is a biometric solution used for establishing the identity of a person using fingerprint.

Malware Prevention System: Malware Prevention System is an unified approach is used to deal with malware. Behaviour modelling of Application is carried out by representing the various OS resources used by the application and this model is enforced at runtime for preventing the malicious behaviour Hardware Based Network IPS: Research in intrusion & content analysis and to build hardware based network IPS Solution / Product StegoCheck: Analyzing different multimedia formats for detection, extraction and reconstruction of hidden text messages for digital forensics.

CyberCheck: An indigenous cyber forensics tool for analyzing and viewing evidence files.

TrueBack: TrueBack is a DOS application for disk imaging. It will be supplied on a DOS Boot Floppy / CD. True Imager: This is a cyber forensic Hardware tool dealing with the Digital Evidence data Imaging.

Response

True Lock: This is a hardware forensic tool to monitor and filter the activities that are transmitted and received between it’s interface to the computer and the protected disk 6

Tab. 2 Cyber Forensics Solutions of C-DAC

EmailTracer: Tracking the anonymous and threatening email sender’s easily.

CyberInvestigator: This is a tool for network forensics. The analysis involves tracing down the intrusions, usage of network, creating a detailed forensic report.

Hasher: This cyber forensics tool enables the user to verify the integrity of any file.

PDA Analyzer: This cyber forensics tool is used for analysis of digital evidence taken from PDAs. Network Session Analyzer (NeSA): Network Session Analyzer (NeSA) is a Network Forensics tool for analyzing network packets.

NeSA accepts packet dump file in the pcap format, generated using any third party packet capturing tool. It rebuilds TCP sessions and recreates files in HTTP, FTP, SMTP and POP3 sessions.

Enterprise Cyber Forensics (Being Developed) Enterprise computer forensics is a strategic security measure that not only ensures integrity and availability of the corporate information system but also saves millions of rupees if applied in-house.

Advanced Cyber Forensics Tools (Being Developed) To meet the emerging requirements like Malware analysis, Software Forensics, Windows Vista Forensics, Live Incident Response, Anti Forensics Detection, Large Storage analysis and also advanced Forensics Hardware tools.

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There should be efficient methods and procedures to prevent and punish culprits. Many countries including India have developed cyber laws to deal with this situation. Government of India has already initiated a two, pronged strategy to effectively counter the menace of cyber crimes by enacting Information Technology Act 2000 which provides rules and regulations for dealing with cyber crimes especially e-Commerce and setting up CERT – India to effectively monitor and sustain critical infrastructures.

Cyber forensics is the acquisition, authentication, analysis and documentation of evidence extracted from and/or contained in a computer system, computer network, computer media or computer peripheral. The challenge is to find, collect and preserve data in a manner acceptable to a court of law.

Electronic evidence is fragile and can

easily be modified. Additionally, cyber thieves, criminals, dishonest and even honest employees hide, wipe, disguise, cloak, encrypt and destroy evidence from storage media using a variety of freeware, shareware and commercially available utility programs.

Cyber Forensics is required to be used in corporate/enterprise organizations for various purposes like copyright, trademark and other legal issues in IT competitive world. In Criminal justice system, it will be used in investigation, prosecution and jurisdictional dilemma.

C-DAC is involved in developing various products in enterprise forensics such as Cybercheck(analyzing and viewing evidence files), Stegocheck (Analyzing different multimedia formats for detection, extraction and reconstruction of hidden text messages for digital forensics), EmailTracer (e-mail forensics), Disk imaging

tools(TrueBack, True Imager, True lock), PDA Analyzer, Network Session Analyzer and doing research in Advanced Cyber Forensics such as live incident analysis, malware research analysis. As part of this programme, C-DAC has established Resource centre for cyber forensics and Malware Research Centres in Tiruvanantapuram and Hyderabad respectively. conclusion:

One can see that C-DAC is working into important categories of security like collection, detection, prevention, protection and response. Most of the products are well-tested and matured.

The requirements of securing the networks and systems are not static.

C-DAC continues to work in improving and bringing out dynamically much needed solutions to secure the important applications like e-Governance.

Capacity Building for e-Governance through Education and Training

C

-DAC initiated IT education IT training to over 3,00,000 IT through its Chain of Advanced professionals through various courses Computing Training School designed and developed by ACTS, (ACTS) in 1993. C-DAC has provided Government of India has over 13 Lakh

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employees in the Central Government only. Total population of employees in Government institutions, PSU’s etc. is significant. and for the success of

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A Comparison •

•

e-Governance initiatives there is a massive need to educate its employees in IT & ITES areas. To proliferate e-Governance initiatives, C-DAC has trained over a lakh employees of Government institutions including officers of Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Airlines, various Government Agencies such as Employee Provident Fund, Public Works Departments, Railways, Universities, through its own training centre network comprising of over 50 training centres throughout India to empower the professional for improved e-Governance. It has provided short term IT familiarity course such as Diploma in Information Technology (DIT) and Advance Diploma in Information Technology (ADIT)

to government employees. These courses focus on office automation tools and operating system and usage of internet.India is one of the hottest locations for offshore outsourcing with software exports to the tune of $6.2 bn in 2000-01. with Cumulative Annual Growth (CAGR) rate of 62.3% for the last five years • F o r t u n e

unDer THiS ProGraMMe, a PrinCiPalS’ MeeT WaS ConDuCTeD on noVeMber 27, 2008 aT SeaSonS HoTel, Pune THiS MeeT WaS a PlaTforM for THe PrinCiPalS anD DireCTorS of VariouS enGineerinG ColleGeS aCroSS inDia To inTeraCT WiTH eaCH oTHer anD DiSCuSS abouT THe TraininG neeDS of THe forMal eDuCaTion SeCTor in THe CurrenT inDuSTry SCenario.

•

•

• • • • C-DaC HaS SiGneD Mou WiTH MoTilal neHru naTional inSTiTuTe of TeCHnoloGy (MnniT) allaHabaD for ProViDinG THe PoST GraDuaTe ProGraMMeS for STuDenTS in THe reGion.

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500 companies outsource their software requirements to India in a significantly large proportion.

According to a Mckinsey-Nasscom study, the potential for software services exports from India will be USD 50 billion by 2008.

A recent NASSCOM survey indicates that the demand for IT professionals in India over next years would grow at rapid rates since India’s share in total IT turnover is growing at rapid rates and India is moving upwards in the value chain.. Effectively in

•

terms of numbers we need 1000000 IT professionals in the country by the year 2010.

Responding to this, it is observed that the universities and colleges in India are growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 6%. This year it has grown at 14%.

Out of these institutes there are over 7000 institutes focusing only on Technical education are churning out 400000 lakh engineers every year.

What this means to the capacity building is.

People still need employable IT education to add value and be employment ready.

Create young entrepreneurs Bridging digital divide of urban and rural education Multiplying the knowledge capital of the country.

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C-DAC has taken a national initiative to get connected with the universities and colleges through its “C-DAC Tech Sangam Programme”. Through this programme we have connected more than 250 Engineering colleges all over India. As of now 251 colleges have participated in the various programmes organized by C-DAC under Tech Sangam Programme.

Following programmes have been conducted as part of the Tech Sangam initiative:

• • •

•

Faculty Development Programmes (Prepare Future) to the existing • faculties of the institutions • Seminars on latest technology trends in the IT field with the help of C-DAC R&D experts.

• Customised modular IT Training programmes with the help of CDAC experts for the students all across India through C-DAC ACTS and its authorized training centers.

Faculty orientation programmes to the faculties of the institutions interested in Customised modular

IT Training programmes TechPrakalpa contests & awards Scholarship for meritorious students in Post Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing (DAC) In keeping pace with the latest trend in morden education, C-DAC designed, deployed e-Learning solutions for various e-Learning initiatives like e-Campus and so on

GIS Enabled Road Information Management and Monitoring System (GRIMMS)

G

overnment of India has launched a national programme ‘Bharat Nirman’ under the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) for reduction of poverty in rural India. The ‘Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana’ (PMGSY, Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Programme), is an important component of Bharat Nirman, to provide connectivity to unconnected rural habitations of the designated population size through good all-weather rural roads. Management and monitoring of this ambitious project was made handy by the development of ‘Geographic Information System’ (GIS) Enabled Road Information Management and Monitoring System (GRIMMS) (standalone as well as web enabled) by (C-DAC) on behalf of MoRD. The system has already been developed for the state of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan and being developed for the state of Orissa.

Prior to implementation of GRIMMS The National Rural Road Development Agency (NRRDA) under MoRD had an ‘Online Management, Monitoring and Accounting System’ (OMMAS) but it was not GIS enabled and hence lacked

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the power of graphical visualization (map). Map is worth thousand words, which makes GRIMMS a useful tool for planners, decision makers and general users.

The standalone version has been developed using arc editor 9.0, using arc objects and VB.NET. User need not to understand the ARCeditor features in order to run GRIMMS; instead userfriendly customized menus have been developed which facilitates management and monitoring (Sajeevan et al. 2006).

However, system can automatically activate the ARCeditor and use its objects to run desired GIS functions.

Different demographic (population size, population type), topography (plain/ hilly), administrative (panchayat headquarters), distance, ownership, financial and planning criteria etc. were considered while developing the system. These criteria were helpful in designing the query shell. Some of the important functionalities of the system

are as under (Johnson et al. 2006).

• Classification of habitations based on population criteria (1000, 500999, 250-499, <250) in plain/hilly, desert and tribal areas.

• Connectivity status of habitations in plain/hilly, desert and tribal areas, before and after the implementation of PMGSY, based on different population criteria (Fig. 1).

• Connectivity status of Panchayat headquarters, before and after the implementation of PMGSY, based on different population criteria, and geographic distribution of

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habitations within it.

Display habitations within a specified distance from selected roads (Fig. 2).

Connectivity status of market places.

Display places of tourist and religious importance and their connectivity status.

Search and display habitations based on name (Fig. 3).

Display roads based on category and ownership.

Type of pavement (metalled/nonmetalled) with length of selected roads or 0.5 km road segments.

Available land/formation/ carriageway/shoulder width of selected roads or 0.5 km road segments.

Display roads based on quality (poor/bad/good) and road-wise SQM (State Quality Monitor) and NQM (National Quality Monitor) reports.

Display roads on the basis of traffic intensity.

Number of cross drainages and bridges with details on selected roads or 0.5 km road segments.

Year-wise sanctions of roads under different project heads.

Year-wise completion status of roads for new connectivity as well as up-gradation.

Year-wise status of expenditure against sanction amount of roads.

Year-wise time and cost over-run cases of projects.

Project cases pending for execution because of forest clearance/land acquisition/legal case.

Year-wise physical and financial

• • • • • • •

•

• • • • • • • •

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May 2009

• • • •

• •

progress of ongoing works. of • Prioritization project proposals as per PMGSY guidelines.

• Prioritization of maintenance strategies on the basis of Pavement Condition Index on selected roads or 0.5 km road segments.

• Roads with level crossings (manned and unmanned).

Location and number of approved sand/stone quarry sites.

Display 0.5 km road segments with arboriculture.

Display 0.5 km road segments with natural hazard prone areas.

0.5 km road segments with roadside amenities – rest house, circuit house, rain/bus shelter, parking place, railway station, rest place, water spring.

Status of patch repair works for 0.5 km road segments.

Details of periodic renewal/ maintenance of existing roads (repairs done and due and type of treatment) for 0.5 km road segments.

The system provides the user a flexibility to view and save the results of the complex query.

For example a user interested in knowing the settlements having population between 250-499 in Jhunjhunu and Khetri Blocks of Jhunjhunu District in Rajasthan state the system will select the desired settlement along with the block and district boundary (fig. 1).

The user can also identify the link roads in a particular administrative unit (block, district etc.). Fig. 2 shows available link roads in the areas mentioned above. It is seen that only few villages were not connected with link roads.

The web version of the GRIMMS has been developed using ASP.NET, JavaScript, objects of MapXtreme 2004 and SQL Server 2000. Microsoft Web control is used for the Tree and Tab controls (Sajeevan et al. 2006). The spatial data in .shp format is converted to .tab (MapInfo) format. The web page of GRIMMS displays different selectable layers, legend, map display frame, icons, query display dialogue box and attribute data display sections. The care has been taken to provide similar appearance as that of stand-alone version. User can fire simple and complex queries to get the desired information. For example, if user is interested in knowing the habitations where population is in between 400 to 600 in a particular block, he will have to select the desired district and block boundary from the menu and enter the desired range of population. The selected boundaries and habitations following the criteria will be highlighted with different color (fig. 3).

References G. Sajeevan, Sushant Baliga, Ashok Kaushal, Sandeep Srivastava, C.P. Johnson, Pradeep Kumar, Yogesh Singh, Upasana Dutta, Jitendra Mhatre, Bishwarup Banerjee, V.K.M. Raja and Asima Mishra (2006). Integrated use of Standalone and Web GIS Software - A Case Study. International Conference on b-GIS, 7-8 December 2006, Technopark, Trivandrum.

C.P. Johnson, Sushant Baliga*, Ashok Kaushal, Sandeep Srivastava, Sajeevan G., Pradeep Kumar, Yogesh Singh, Upasana Dutta, Bishwarup Banerjee, Jitendra Mhatre, V.K.M. Raja, Asima Mishra (2006).

Development of a GIS-based Decision Support System for Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Programme in India.

Map Asia 2006.

Kaushal Ashok and Sandeep K. Srivastava (2009) Managing of GIS projects in infrastructure development, Curr Sci. vol. 96, No. 2 , pp 211-218.

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? u o y e r a e r Whe

N ews & V I ews

“

The website, available at www.google.co.in/ loksabha2009 in both English and Hindi, should be the primary destination for all those interested in learning about India’s democracy in the context of this year’s elections

National Solar Venture of 250-MW Planned by BEL, BHEL Public sector majors Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) and Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) have signed an Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for setting up of a 250-MW joint manufacturing facility for solar photo voltaic cells, modules and silicon wafers. BEL and BHEL have an existing capacity of around 6 MW and 8 MW respectively. The two PSUs are on the look out for a suitable vendors or partners for technology and supply of raw materials. The joint venture would cater to domestic solar product requirements and exports.

10% Growth in Wireless User Base India has become the world’s fastest growing wireless market, during this quarter, the subscriber base for wireless services has increased to 346.89 million from 315.31 million in the previous quarter, a growth of 10% over the previous quarter. The total subscriber base of the wireline and wireless services reached 384.79 million in the said period, a growth of 8.80% over the previous quarter. Whereas the rural subscriber base rose by 2.38% to 93.15 million. The number of PCOs has also decreased by 4.32% to 5.98 million.

Rishi Jaitly Senior Policy Analyst, Google Inc.

Only 3 in 3 lakh SMSed Civic Tax Payments The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) much-talked about ‘payment of tax through SMS’ seems to have fallen flat. Despite 80 per cent of Mumbai citizens, being mobile phones users, of the three lakh tax payers in the city, the service was availed by only three, making a total payment of Rs 7,700. Followed by the failure of the programme of payments through Internet, which also did not find much favour with citizens, this is the second such failure for the BMC.

12,000 Rural kiosks by 3i Infotech 3i Infotech is planning to expand its network of IT kiosks in rural areas from the current level of 4,000 to over 12,000 by the end of this year.

Known as i-serve, these centres will be set up at an approximate cost of INR 0.01 crore spread across nine states while being networked and automated. 3i Infotech is looking at providing e-governance and business to consumer services in rural market through IT kiosks.

Nokia’s Plans For Rural Market Nokia is now reaching out to its rural customers through its ‘showrooms on wheels’ and ‘Rural care on the go, marketing and servicing vehicles, respectively. With the urban market for handsets fast getting saturated, Nokia plans to tap the growing rural market in collaboration with various micro finance institutions. India has about 249 million subscribers and 93 million rural subscribers.

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Dinesh Nandwana Chairman, Vakrangee Softwares Ltd.

“

Our company has scalability and we have 14 years of experience in executing mission-mode and time bound project involving multi locations

What was the thought process behind the loksabha 2009 initiative?

Google’s global mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

One of the most important lessons we at Google have learned in our short history is that information can be fundamentally empowering; there is perhaps no moment when information is more important than when a society comes together to undertake democratic elections.

With this in mind, we at Google India sought to understand what

India is reporting the fastest global growth in the e-Governance, catalyzed by the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act and a holistic e-Governance action plan by Government of India. How does your company plan to leverage this business opportunity?

The Government of India has targeted 30 mission mode e-Governance project.

Almost all the state governments are also taking up egovernance in various areas such as land records. We have already worked under the dynamic leadership of TCS-CMC combine on MCA-21 project of Ministry of Company Affairs. We have performed our part of managing documents (hard copies),scanning and digitizing them .

Looking to our capacity to execute time bound project TCS is in advance stage for associating us in Passport Seva Kendra project another ambitious e-Governance project of Ministry of External Affairs.

We have also done the e-Governance project of Land Record of Ghaziabad Development Authority.

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N ews & V I ews role we can play in India’s 15th general elections, which, in our view, would be India’s first “Internet Election.” Given that Google is a neutral platform for information, we surveyed the landscape of NGOs and government organizations and decided that our role should be to shine a light on the most critical elections-related information available in India today. Of course, we knew that our technologies would also give us the unique ability to highlight this information in a visible and compelling way. Ultimately, though, this initiative has primarily been motivated by our view that the Internet can play a profoundly important role in elections, governance, and democracy in India. In a country where elections are a central part of national culture, there is perhaps no other medium that ensures voters can directly interact with leaders and information. Our goal was to usher in a new era of citizen empowerment in India as well as inaugurate the arrival of India’s “Digital Democracy” in India’s first “Internet Election.”In the end, together with a range of NGO and government partners, we launched a website that dynamically showcases the most important information available today

pertaining to this year’s Lok Sabha Elections.

The website, available at www.google.co.in/ loksabha2009 in both English and Hindi, should be the primary destination for all those interested in learning about Indian democracy in the context of this year’s elections.

We are also digitizing Board of Revenue Records of districts of Uttar Pradesh .This project is awarded to us by UPDESCO (a UP state Government undertaking ) We are also targeting the opportunities available outside India in e-Governanace field and recently the Company has signed an agreement with one of the Document Corporation, Philippines and IL&FS Technology Limited, Philippines for Land Titling Computerization Project (LTCP) of Land Registration Authority, an agency of government of Philippines.

by our latest state of the Art technology machine i.e. Kodak Versamark 2000 to meet their short deadline

What are the services that you are providing to the BFSI segment?

We are providing document management solution and print solution to two major Telecom Operator and also providing document and print solution to leading insurance companies.

On the technological front how are you participating in the current general elections.?

We are providing data management & print solutions to Chief Election Commission, India

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May 2009

How many hits per day are you getting on the website?

This initiative is unprecedented and groundbreaking not only in India but also in the global context. As such, we have not set any numerical goals. We have built this elections centre such that it appeals to Indian citizens of all ages and from all walks of life. We are delighted at the response we have observed to date from users in India and around the world.

What are the new features that are going to be added to the website?

Over time, we hope for this site to be an even more dynamic centre for transparency, democracy, and governance in India.

We welcome feedback and ideas from individual users and organizations from across the country.

Your company is providing Services on document & printing management area by providing end to end solution. what is the USP of your company?

Ours Company has scalability and we have 14 years of experience in executing missionmode and time bound project involving multi locations. Apart form this capabilities we also supplement the financial resources of our principal by deploying capital equipments and managerial resources.

Tell us something about rural health insurance project under the RSBY scheme .

We have been working with Financial Information’s and Network organization for last 1 & half year as a preferred associate .We worked with them in Rajasthan, Haryana Punjab and we have recently completed 8 districts of Uttar Pradesh. WE provided them end to end solution from invitation to the beneficiary till the preparation and delivery of card to the beneficiary.

National Register Complaints to NDMC through SMS The New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) is planning to very soon to launch a special software called “Interactive Voice Response Software-cum-Grievance Handling and Monitoring system,” which will enable local residents to send out their complaints through SMS. The services of the system would be available only after the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

BEST Buses to have GPS Facility Soon Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport undertaking (BEST) buses will soon be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS). This will enable the commuters to know about the timing of the bus, and the next destinations.

The fares of the buses will stay the same. Such services are available on trains, and now it will available on buses as well. Moreover, it is said that the announcements will be made in the local languages, so that the common man can understand it.

Hyderabad Police Launches Website for Traffic Jam Alerts The city police of Hyderabad has launched a new dedicated website on which traffic jam alerts will be updated regularly. The website called www.htp.gov.in through which people can lodge complaints pertaining to traffic using the `Traffic Help Desk’ link and also check the status of the complaint. The website also offers services like checking the e-challan status and data pertaining to accidents.

Short-Term Course on ICT in DU Colleges Under the Delhi University - National Thermal Power Corporation (DU-NTPC) resource centre several colleges under Delhi University (DU) will now teach short-term course in ICT. The DU-NTPC centre offers short-term certificate courses in sign language interpretation, communicative English, ICT and disability and human rights. The decision was taken at a meeting of the University’s Equal Opportunity Cell. Several colleges of the University will choose two non-teaching staff to undergo a 15day course module to learn the ICT software.

Biometric PAN Cards are Here Biometric permanent account number (PAN) cards that capture their fingerprints and facial features are going to become a regular feature for taxpayers soon. The development has elicited huge response from the country’s top information technology companies have shown great interest in the development.

Along with the card, there are plans to spruce up the PAN issuance infrastructure.

Bidders have been asked to ensure that they set up points of service for 10 hours a day, six days a week.

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N ews & V I ews interNational Vietnam to Improve IT sector Prime Minister of Vietnam has approved a twoyear plan (2009-10) to enhance information technology application at all government agencies. The plan also aims to create an online working environment among state agencies nationwide and get officials accustomed to working on the networking environment and computer-assisted systems instead of paper documents. It envisages preparing the ground for e-governance by completing a special date transmission network for Party and State agencies, building and upgrading the local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) for government agencies.

Thailand Ministry Plans to Launch Five-year e-Government Roadmap The Information and Communications Technology Ministry of Thailand plans to launch an e-Governance Road Map that will be used as a framework for e-Government developments over the five years from 2010 to 2014. The draft version of the roadmap would be submitted to the Cabinet Ministry for approval before sending to all government agencies. The roadmap consists of four stages .

Wireless going Green in China Australia based Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO), ICT Centre Wireless Technologies Laboratory is trying to make next generation of wireless communications in China that would be more environmentally friendly. The centre will facilitate joint research projects between the two countries, the exchange of scientists and students, and the uptake of Australian wireless communications technologies by the world market.

Urban EcoMap offers Climate Change Info Cisco, and the County of San Francisco, have collaborated to start a pilot project called Urban EcoMap, that will educate people about climate change and to spur a shift to climatefriendly social behavior in cities. Urban EcoMap is an innovation and a key element of the Connected Urban Development framework for Connected and Sustainable Cities.

The Dubai Police wins Tejari eLEADER Award The Dubai Police has been awarded with eLEADER status in the ‘Power Buyer’ category for having achieved an exceptionally high online purchases rate using Tejari online marketplace. The Dubai Police achieved estimated value of auctions of more then $26m within three months from November 2008 till February 2009 and continued online purchases in March and April 2009 with additional 33 new tenders conducted via Tejari online marketplace.

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N S N Murthy Director, Sales MphasiS

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In India, we are going to align ourselves with the projects under National eGovernance Plan and in parallel will work with state governments on specific solution areas.

How do you see MphasiS addressing Government requirements end-to-end?

Governments across the globe are consolidating the number of vendor’s taking care of its requirement. The single reason is moving from just project-based application automation to a complete “Transformation” of the Department. This is a much mature and holistic approach to achieve the end-objective(s) of the Government. Our “Transformation Services” covers Application Services, IT Services and Business Process Services. This enables us to partner with our clients in not only addressing their current needs but also making them agile to respond to future requirements.

What are the areas of e-Governance you are looking to tap in the years to come?

MphasiS, has been working on several government area’s along with its parent organization EDS an HP Company worldwide. As a group we have been providing solutions & services for Defence, Finance & Tax, Agriculture, Municipalities, Customs, Homeland Department, Tourism, Social Welfare, Healthcare, Education and several others. In India, we are going to align ourselves with the projects under National eGovernance Plan and in parallel will work with state governments on specific solution areas.

You are known for your Portal expertise in several industry segments, would that be a focus offering in Government too?

Yes definitely, we have strong credentials globally in the area of Portals. We have already started working with several Government Clients and PSUs on this service offering and we have received a very good response too. We have also developed our own Portal Framework called MFrame. It is our solution offering to help clients readily build cross-channel Portals using a vendor neutral framework that facilitates the integration of best of breed products to quickly deploy eGovernment capabilities.

What is your opinion about the developments in e-Governance arena in India as compared to Global Scenario?

India is extremely well placed today to leap frog several other nations in the eGovernance Implementation. Recession, increasing citizen expectations, availability of cutting edge technology and most importantly a positive mindset from both bureaucrats and political parties is going to speed up the transformation of government services.

It is exciting as well as challenging time for every IT Solutions & Service Provider in India; exciting because there are plenty of opportunities to work on and challenging because government clients are extremely intelligent now. They no longer are looking for plain computerization of department but results-oriented transformation, which will enable them to increase their own internal efficiencies and service their end-customers better.

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Ask SAP

Integrated Government Financial Management As Vice President of the Public Services group for SAP’s Asia Pacific Division, Adaire Fox-Martin oversees the strategic direction and activities in the area of public services in the health, education and defence sectors across the region and executive relationships with customers and partners. Ms. Fox-Martin is a key member of the SAP leadership team and plays a lead role in delivering SAP’s offering to public secto­r customers. A respected thought leader, Ms. Fox-Martin continues to be invited at seminars and conferences by the media and analysts to address public services issues ranging from e-Government transformation and reengineering of Government processes to public service policies. She is regularly featured and quoted in numerous publications throughout Asia and Australia. Ms. Fox-Martin has over 20 years of experience in the field of information technology and management.

Effective e-Governance can take information technology (IT) to the common man, while helping Governments to regulate their services in line with the changing needs of both citizens and stakeholders, as well as develop the economy. Recognizing the growing importance of eGovernance and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in public administration, we bring you a much needed, regular, interactive platform, where your questions on a pre-defined theme can be answered by Adaire Fox-Martin, Vice President, Public Services, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan.

In this issue, we focus on questions around “Integrated Government Financial Management System (IGFMS)” in the backdrop of the critical role that Government has to perform with respect to balancing their budgets and expenditures under the continued pressure of targets for growth, development and social welfare, particularly under the recessionary trends that the globe is faced with. Governments will ignore prudent and effective financial management at their own peril. And to support it, is the vital need for integrated ICT for financial management.

We have heard of integrated financial management systems for companies and corporations. How is it relevant for Government?

It is not very apparent but governments at all levels (Central, State, Local) perform very detailed exercises on economic planning, budgeting, expenditure management, revenue management, paybill processing, grant management, and loans and investments.

Hitherto, either these have been manual exercises or at best supported by islands and silos of IT systems. Instances of these can be found across various Treasuries, Pay & Account Offices, DDOs and Departmental systems. Integrated Financial Management Systems specifically meant for Government could be leveraged in a big way to provide efficiency and effectiveness in this process.

Could you provide an example and explain how this works?

Let us look at the Financial Management for State Government. The finance department performs the planning and budgeting process with all the other departments in an iterative process. Budgets are frozen and then released from time to time. The Treasuries need to perform funds check and pass bills drawn by DDOs and then draw checks and send back to DDOs or pay vendors. Subsequently, there needs to be a reconciliation process. The AG then takes the vouchers and prepares the financial statements of the State. This process is fairly standardized but still continues to be handled in a fragmented way from ICT perspective. IGFMS unifies the entire process and allows collaboration to all stakeholders in this process through a common system and seamless integration.

Where have IGFM Systems been implemented? What is the scope for this in India?

IGFMS has been implemented across the globe, both in developed and developing countries. Canada, US, Germany, Austria, France, UK, Australia, Singapore and several other countries run IGFMS

both at the Federal and Provincial level. Countries like Israel (Merkava Project), Malaysia, South Africa and others have also implemented IGFMS. There are several implementations of IGFMS at the city level also and some prime examples include City of Cape Town, Paris, Toronto, Auckland, Birmingham and Ottawa. In India, various Governments, particularly at the State and City levels have evinced a lot of interest in such systems and it is imperative that they evaluate such systems keenly so that they can reap the benefits of such off-the-shelf, best-practices, madefor-government systems at the earliest.

Are these systems cost-effective compared to the current alternatives that the government agencies have?

In the long run, the off-the-shelf IGFMS are far more cost-effective compared to custom built software. In fact, they have been shown to have far better ROI over a period of 5-7 years of implementation.

The agencies get enormous flexibility to accommodate any changes (without writing and re-writing codes) over a period of time and they are totally protected from obsolescence in technology over a long period of time. Time to implement and use is much faster and it incorporates the best-practices developed over a long period of time based on collective knowledge of agencies globally.

Where can I get more information about IGFMS and how can I engage with the solution provider for evaluating such systems?

Information about implementation of IGFMS is largely available on websites and can also be seen at websites of solution providers, SAP being one of the prominent ones. The discussions and engagement can be had with the solution provider directly or with any of the major system integrator and implementation partner of such providers. Of course, you can always send your queries and interest to the email provided herein.

Next Month’s Topic: “Enterprise Systems for Urban Governance and Infrastructure”. Please write to us your queries on this topic or mail back to us at info@egovonline.net

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