WiMAX Need of the hour?: October 2008 Issue

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Need of the hour?

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w w w . e g o v o n l i n e . n e t | volume 4 | issue 10 | october 2008

COVER FEATURE

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Rollout Time Sandeer Budki, Sr. Correspondent, egov

INTERVIEW

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WiMAX: Answer for Last Mile Solution CS Rao, Chairman, WiMAX Forum

Transforming e-Governance for e-Society N R Ganti, Chairman and Managing Director, SQL Star International Ltd.

Citizen DashBoard

Sudhir Aggarwal, Senior Vice President and Head – Government initiatives, Sify Technologies Limited

PERSPECTIVE

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EVENT DIARY

INDUSTRY FEATURE

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Potential of WiMAX K Ravichandran, Director (Product Marketing), Telsima

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Broadband: Not the Need of a Specific Market

Interview: Tarvinder Singh, Director Marketing & Product Management, Home & Networks Business, Motorola

SPECIAL FOCUS

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The Sorrow of Bihar

egov Knowledge Exchange Series II Urban Local Governance

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eGov News

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mConnect News

Sandeer Budki, Sr. Correspondent, egov

STATE FOCUS: BIHAR

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TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE

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Advantage – Score Nirmal Kishor Prasad, Principal System Analyst, National Informatics Centre,

Bihar

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Passive Optical Network

Executive Movements

Product Launches

Product Showcase

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

COUNTRY FOCUS: MALAYSIA

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Registration Redefined Magiswary Dorasamy, Dr. Maniam Kaliannan and Dr. Murali Raman

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October 2008

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Events Watch

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Sign Off

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

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ov volume 4 | issue 10 | october 2008 PRESIDENT

EDITORIAL

Dr. M P Narayanan EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ravi Gupta

WiMAX: Enhancing Networks

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‘Connecting the unconnected’ has been the mantra for the promoters and the practitioners of the e-Governance game for a while now. The ‘look rural policy’ of the stakeholders has been given a green signal with the much awaited 3G and WiMAX policy of the Government of India. Does this mean - India will be swept by yet another ICT revolution? And this time at a much larger scale?

The answer will be sought only in the due course of time. It is claimed that WiMAX promises to solve most of the problems of connecting India. The wireless technology is not only fast but also cost-effective providing maximum outreach in terms of both numbers as well as quality of services. Endowed with such qualities, it is expected that the technology will account for 27 million subscribers in the country by 2012.

Wireless technology comes in handy when we talk about the Common Service Centres (CSCs) and kiosks - the gateway for information to our rural counterparts. Laden with WiMAX technology, these information windows can serve rural India with services such as online payment of bills to browsing the Internet for crop information. Wireless technology is not only the need of a specific market. It is in great demand amongst the tech savvy urban Indian who needs an anytime anywhere access.

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Taking a stock of the current happenings, one can not possibly sideline the devastating floods in India’s eastern state of Bihar with river Kosi ‘s mood swings leaving hundreds and thousands of people homeless and affected. Does it mean a total failure of the information and communication machinery?We have questioned ourselves, would ICT tools been able to make any difference in the lives of those living in the last mile or at least prepare the government system for such a catastrophe? egov magazine is bringing to you a special focus on Bihar floods and the need for developing ICT. This issue of egov magazine is woven around the theme of WiMAX, it’s roll out in India, potential that the technology possess and the connectivity revolution that it pledges to bring in. Innovative technologies in e-Governance developed both nationally and internationally are worth a special focus in each of our issues. We have believed in the notion of knowledge for change and innovation, hence, we have introduced a new section – ‘Sign Off’ in this issue.

email: info@egovonline.net egov is published in technical collboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies

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October 2008

Ravi Gupta Ravi.Gupta@csdms.in 7

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COVER FEATURE

ROLLOUT TIME WiMAX has the potential to provide India with widespread broadband access that can usher in economic growth, better education and health care, and improved entertainment services.

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ndia, which is expected to have the world’s largest WiMAX deployment by 2012, offers great opportunity and some unique challenges to the wireless digital communications technology. It may perhaps be the market that would define the success of this technology as a solution to connect rural and untapped territories.

With ICT-enabled kiosks or common service centers (CSC) dotting India’s rural map, WiMax could play a major role in delivering various applications to rural India as aresult briding the digital divide . These include online bill payment, delivery of agriculture, healthcare and entertainment services, solutions for e-commerce activities, including commodity price information, online trading and banking transactions.

Unlike the mobile front, the major initiative for WiMax is set to be from the state-owned telecom provider, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL).

The company has already announced plans to install WiMAX base stations in 1,000 blocks across India by the end of this financial year and to provide highspeed internet access to 25,000 villages through CSCs. According to a BSNL official “Villages will be equipped with infrastructure such as PCs, printers, software and staff for delivery of e-governance services pertaining to health, education and agricultural information,” BSNL has also partnered with Intel to promote WiMAX-based broadband access in rural India. Under the pact, Intel will review state-owned BSNL’s road map for the WiMAX rollout in the country and develop basic standards for the rollout and applications.

Private players have also not given a cold shoulder to WiMAX road either.

Motorola is strengthening its presence in the hinterlands through extensive broadband wireless access (BWA) 8}

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projects for state governments. Network major Alcatel-Lucent has set up a joint venture with C-DOT (the R&D arm of the telecom department) to focus on exclusive BWA/WiMAX solutions that are targeted towards rural connectivity.

The company has completed field trials using Aircel’s licensed WiMAX spectrum and the technology is ready for commercial deployment. “WiMAX has the potential to provide India with widespread broadband access that can usher in economic growth, better education and health care, and improved entertainment services,” Alcatel-Lucent chief marketing officer A Sethuraman said to a section of media.

There remain challenges to these ambitious roll-out plans, including India’s low PC penetration. Players are keeping their fingers crossed and also watching keenly how the WiMAX spectrum auction will pan out. While low broadband penetration is a clear opportunity for BWA/WiMAX, the market take-off will require sufficient spectrum, very low cost consumer premise equipment (CPE) and affordable end-to-end connectivity, including the computing platform. Apart from Alactel, Nokia Siemens Networks and BSNL, too, are developing CPE costing less than $100. The price is expected to further come down to about $70, once WiMAX rolls out in the country. Other major players in WiMAX arena for rural connectivity are Bharti Airtel, Reliance, SIFY and Tata Communications (VSNL), who have acquired licenses in 3.3 GHz range and are in various stages of trials.

VSNL has announced Phase 1 preWiMAX deployment of Aperto gear in 60 locations, extending to 200 locations within the year.

The WiMAX Forum Worldwide Subscriber and User Forecast is examining the progress of WiMAX service providers, equipment vendors, content developers and subscribers in regions around the world. The results are reflecting the accelerated growth of the WiMAX ecosystem, the acceptance of WiMAX technology and demand form mobile Internet services across the world. The forecast is based on results of an independently commissioned research study published this year.

“WiMAX devices and networks are available now for deployment ov

October 2008

worldwide delivering best in class broadband services at a cost to consumers significantly lower than any other technology. India is clearly making the commitment and taking the steps to ensure wireless broadband services are a reality that enables operators to meet the needs of India’s diverse and growing population,” said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum. “In addition, an operator’s investment to afford the build out of infrastructure and deployment of the service is at the lowest capex and the best ROI models plus the economies of scale created

by this demand will help drive down the cost of the wide range of diverse WiMAX devices. All of the leading telecom equipment manufacturers are having their WiMAX Base station and other infrastructure equipment WiMAX Forum Certified and are ready to show case their equipment in India.”

INDIAN SCENARIO

Last month, the WiMAX Forum commended the Department of Telecommunications of India for the allocation of and upcoming auction relating to the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz

Infonetics report Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola lead in mobile WiMAX, according to a new market report from Infonetics Research. The study found that the pair increased market share of equipment revenues from 50% to 66% over the past ninety days. For stationary and fixed WiMAX equipment, the report gave the top pick to Alvarion with 25% of the worldwide equipment revenue market.

While the combined worldwide equipment revenues were up only 3% from Q1’2008 to $402 million, Infonetics predicts that the balance of 2008 will see double-digit sequential growth.

By 2011, 110 million users of WiMAX technologies are forecasted.

Infonetics attributes the Alcatel-Lucent growth to a significant shipment of ASN Gateways in the quarter. The gateways manage mobility functions of 802.16e-2005 networks, enabling base stations to communicate with each other. Gateways can be vendor-agnostic, just like base stations and subscriber devices interoperate between multiple vendors. Alcatel-Lucent has had success with selling gateways to both its base station customers as well as competitors.

WiMAX Forum specifies the interfaces used by ASN Gateways.

A few more statistics from the report: • More than 200 networks are now being deployed and more than 100 other trials are in progress; the market will be increasingly driven by more Tier 1 operators entering the market • Developing countries are the engine for WiMAX market growth, with Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Central and Latin America, and parts of the Asia Pacific being hot-beds of activity • In particular, India, Russia and Brazil are fast-moving markets with numerous active WiMAX operators and large populations and market conditions to give potential for strong growth • The number of fixed and mobile WiMAX subscribers topped 2 million worldwide in 2007 and is expected to triple by the end of 2008 The Infonetics report tracks the equipment shipments from thirteen equipment manufacturers along with Wi-Fi mesh network equipment providers.

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COVER FEATURE

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Malaysia’s Stalled WiMax Rollout

frequency bands. The auction will enable two 20 MHz blocks in both the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz bands.

The WiMAX Forum is pleased that the Indian government plans to auction blocks in the 700 MHz and 3.3-3.6 GHz bands, as they become available.

The WiMAX Forum expects to certify the first 3.5 GHz WiMAX products by the end of 2008 and views 700 MHz as a strong contender for Mobile Internet services, especially in India’s lowdensity rural areas.

The availability of these key bands for WiMAX technology in India will provide its consumers with much needed broadband connectivity across the diverse economic and social needs of the entire population. WiMAX technology has the potential to bridge India’s digital divide, offering broadband services in dense urban and suburban areas, rural broadband connectivity to enable high speed wireless applications and services, and enterprise broadband access across the country.

The WiMAX Forum plans to add an Indian certification lab to its existing network by the end of 2008 to stay ahead of the demand for products in this region. The WiMAX Forum’s current network consists of six labs in China, Korea, Spain, U.S. and two in Taiwan. The industry body will also add a lab in Japan by the end of 2008 and a Brazilian lab in 2009.

GLOBAL SCENARIO

A new market research report, “Global WiMAX Market Analysis”, by the leading market research firm RNCOS, 10

says due to the completion of WiMAX standardization, a rapid growth is being witnessed in the WiMAX market globally over the past year. With this, the number of WiMAX subscribers worldwide is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 102.75% from 2007 to 2010.

According to the report, North America is likely to have more subscribers in comparison to other regions in the early phase of the forecasted period, while Asia-Pacific is expected to outnumber the WiMAX subscribers of North America by the end of the period.

The RNCOS research cites the combination of WiMAX cellular services and WiMAX fixed services as important factor for the expansion of WiMAX subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region. WiMAX mobile services will extend their reach from South Korea to other developed economies like Japan and Australia, while fixed services will continue to see deployment in key developing countries like China and India.

Moreover, the RNCOS report identifies the unavailability of wired infrastructure for accessing Internet as a major growth driver for WiMAX in the Asia-Pacific region. Also, government support and initiatives undertaken by the service providers to provide Internet services in remote areas are playing significant role in the growth of WiMAX penetration in this region. Thus, by 2012, Asia-Pacific is expected to have about 49% of the total subscriber base, making it the world’s largest WiMAX subscriber base, says the report.

According to local operators despite the hype, the wireless broadband technology will not go mainstream until 2009. This is when devices embedded with WiMax will be readily available.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) in March 2007 awarded WiMax licenses to four lower-tier telcos--including PacketONE--which have until the end of the year to roll out their services to designated areas.

PacketONE has started conducting WiMax technical trials and while the results have been a pleasant experience, but the things are not there yet.

Also, when WiMax chipsets become widely available and prices fall to about US$100, Wimax rollout will get a boost. The MCMC had said in March it expects license holders to roll out WiMax services to 25 percent of the population by end-2007, with a service provision of “at least 1Mbps at affordable rates”.

Eight months have passed, however, and all of the licensees have yet to roll out their services and are currently still conducting trials to evaluate the technology.

Krishna Baidya, industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan, said WiMax rollouts in Malaysia are only expected to commence toward the second half of next year.

According to Krishna, these initiatives are not expected to make any significant impact on the country’s wireless space, or pose an immediate threat to incumbent broadband providers.

Industry sources familiar with several WiMax trials taking place in the city have attributed the delay partly to technical issues related to the wireless technology. Some have laid claims that the extent of its provision for speed and coverage, may not be as promising as advertised by WiMax gear makers.

Also, it’s hard for WiMax signals to penetrate buildings due to its high operating frequency between 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz. This signal loss could result in problems for the operators [in terms of providing seamless coverage. www.egovonline.net

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COVER FEATURE

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Key Findings

DEVELOPING AND UNDERSERVED MARKETS

In several regions of the world, copper wire to the home or business just doesn’t exist. In these situations, a fixed wireless offering that is based upon an open standard may make more economic sense than deploying copper wire that can easily be ripped out and resold on the open market. Several of the companies that were founding members of the WiMAX Forum have been providing their proprietary wireless base stations and CPEs to these markets for a number of years. The total market has so far been relatively small, but the technologies have provided a much needed service offering in those countries.

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3.5 GHz licensed spectrums represent biggest opportunity followed by 2.5 GHz and other 5 GHz is largest unlicensed opportunity.

Large subscriber base, inadequate broadband infrastructure, along with the need for faster Internet access, will propel growth in WiMAX deployments in the AsiaPacific and MEA regions.

Countries such as China, India and Russia, with their underdeveloped infrastructure and large populations, represent strong potential for WiMAX growth.

DSL AND CABLE MODEM REPLACEMENT AND EXTENSION

WIRELESS BACKHAUL IN A CELLULAR NETWORK

Even in developed markets, such as the U.S. and Canada, there are regions of the country where the economics of running cable or putting in DSLAMs does not make sense. In these cases, a fixed broadband wireless access technology might be more appropriate.

There are already a number of WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) around the nation’s heartland, and even in very urban surroundings, using one of the aforementioned proprietary technologies. Not all of these WISPs have been successful, with the total infrastructure costs and subscriber numbers being very modest. Yet, the availability of WiMAX equipment in large volumes from a number of suppliers could help improve the economics and, in turn, increase the total addressable market.

In Europe, British Telecom (BT) is currently deploying a modest preWiMAX fixed wireless network at 5.8GHz in Northern Ireland to address this particular market segment. The operator, however, is not taking an aggressive stance toward deploying the technology until it has access to equipment that can be easily upgraded to support the portable/mobile solution.

Microwave radios have been used since virtually the beginning of the cellular industry to provide backhaul, or transport, of voice and data traffic from outlying cell sites to the operator’s core network. Typically, operators utilize copper, fiber links or microwave radios that operate at much higher frequencies than addressed by WiMAX, but that is not to suggest that operators in the future wouldn’t be open to the idea of using WiMAX. In large part, the operator’s decision will be based upon the availability of sufficient spectrum to meet their backhaul requirements, in particular with the increased requirements as the result of 3G data services. Some operators might even consider using WiMAX in unlicensed spectrum for their backhaul needs, but this scenario is unlikely in most instances since the potential for interference would exist and this interference could detrimentally impact the quality of the overall network.

PORTABLE OR MOBILE COVERAGE

Much of the focus and interest of the WiMAX community is the scenario in which the subscriber has a seemingly

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Europe is lagging behind slightly in WiMAX deployments due to its well-built cell infrastructure, intense competition, and strong presence of 3G services.

Finalisation of the WiMAX 802.16e standard will offset the growth in WiMAX fixed services and major demand will be seen in mobile WiMAX services in coming few years.

The price difference between WiMAX and DSL tends to be narrow, which tends to negate price as a factor for potential customers.

ubiquitous broadband wireless connection that can provide connectivity in a portable environment and even mobile environment. This service offering would require WiMAX enabled data cards for PCs and potentially lead to embedded solutions and new types of devices. This usage scenario is the most appealing, since it implies broadband access and other voice/data services anytime and anywhere. At the same time, a portable/mobile solution is also more challenging to implement and it will not be the first WiMAX solution that enters the market place.

The WiMAX Forum is projecting that by 2012 India will have 27.5 million WiMAX users, which would be 20% of global WiMAX subscribersOf the projected 27.5 million WiMAX users in 2012, the forum forecasts that 70% will use mobile and portable WiMAX devices to access broadband Internet services.

Pricing, customer service and whether WiMAX can scale and deliver the goods will ultimately determine subscription levels.WiMax — the faster, longer range version of WiFi (the technology to wirelessly access the Net) — might just turn out to be something that will allow India to to harness broadband for its objectives.

Sandeep Budki, sandeep@egovonline.net

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INTERVIEW

WiMAX : Answer for Last Mile Solution

“It is advisable that the government speeds up the auction process for the spectrum and completes the process by end of November 2008” says C S Rao, Chairman, WiMAX Forum India in a conversation with Nilakshi Barooah of egov magazine With the 3G policy and the release of 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz spectrum announced by the government recently, there will be high broadband penetration and expansion of WiMAX technologies. What is your take on the policy?

We are really glad that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) of India recently announced the 3G policy and the release of 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz spectrum for use with WiMAX as these are globally harmonised bands. We have interacted with the government and they have very well responded. It has been realised that broadband penetration is the need of the hour. We are happy that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the government has recognised that we have to fall in line with the 2.5 and 2.3 GHz as a band which is globally recognised.

It is advisable that the government speeds up the auction process for the spectrum and completes the process by end of November 2008. We have recommended the government ov

October 2008

to give 30 MHz per operator. If the spectrum allocation per operator is less than this, one can not expect broadband penetration to happen in a economic way helping the end user services to be affordable. It is fortunate that the government understands the need and importance of broadband, especially on a wireless network. This essentially means for the end users that the devices will get cheaper and call tariffs will be lower if Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) policy allows 30 MHz per operator in multiples of 10 MHz. However, 20MHz is a good start for now. It is also recommended that there should be at least three 3 to four 4 operators for bringing in healthy competition in the market.

The base reserve price for the auction of BWA spectrum should be low. We should keep in mind that the broadband subscribers will never be as huge as the GSM /CDMA/3G based voice subscribers base. Even the best of the countries in terms of broadband subscriptions such as Korea and USA has about 70 per cent and 45 per cent wireless broadband subscriptions compared to the wireless voice subscriber base.

For any broadband to success we need to have Personal Computer (PC) penetration. With this comes the question of PC affordability, PC literacy and Content availability.

There is a shift from voice to more multimedia centric information access, sharing and instant upload/down load of such multimedia information on wireless. Applications such as webcasting, online education, webinar are becoming very common across various sections of the population. These applications require high bandwith which the current hitherto known as broadband is unable to provide. End consumers wants ease of use and access from anywhere and any time through any kind of media such as – wireline, wireless, optical or ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN).

Thus, WiMAX is the most preferred BWA technology worldwide because of it’s speed, efficiency and competitive cost with open Internet Protocol (IP) architecture.

How would you compare 3G and WiMAX as two technologies in terms of broadband penetration? Which technology has a better future in terms of connectivity?

There are two different technology paths available for any Wireless broadband application – 3G and WiMAX. GSM is a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology and is hugely successful world wide for best and highly scalable, reliable wireless voice service. 3G is not a GSM technology but a Wide Band Code Division Multiple Access underpinned with the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and evolved for high speed data service support as GSM was felt to be 13

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very poor in data handling capability. On the other hand, It is estimated that 70 percent of the probable WiMAX WiMAX as a technology is Orthogonal Frequency Division users by 2012 across the globe will use mobile and Multiple Access (OFDMA) based, Internet Protocol (IP) portable WiMAX devices for accessing broadband based and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) based Internet services. In this scenario what is the future of smart antennae technology driven. WiMAX as a technology the fixed line devices? is three times faster and it is one-third the cost compared to Broadband can be used through various mediums through any other BWA technology. WiMAX is comparatively a new a LAN, metro ethernet, fixed wireless and mobile wireless. technology standardised in 2005 while 3G was standardised The answer to the question whether wireless devices will away back in 1998. 3G has limitations in terms of scalability be replacing fixed line devices is YES. Wireless access and in terms of number of data users which one can put in a WiMAX based access for Mobile broadband will de facto given base station at basic mode of access. Nobody peruser broadband speed of wants to be tethered down, 256 kbps and above. even in wireless and we have WiMAX is an open technology, therefore, we expect that this technology will be On the other hand, the seen in the case of CDMA embraced and utilised across characteristics of WiMAX Fixed Wireless Terminal the globe can drive the broadband (FWT) based wireless penetration in India to access device and it has not great extent, especially, been very popular. 3 to 4 with the frequency bands of 2.3 and 2.5 GHz. Intellectual million CDMA Fixed Wireless Terminal based subscribers Property Rights (IPR) which was a major issue for CDMA against roughly 65 mobile CDMA handset based subscribers and WCDMA (3G) is no more an issue here as WiMAX as it and about 235 million mobile handset based GSM is OPEN - IP architecture. We have seen that since GSM does subscribers. not have IPR issues involved with it, it is widely used and Wireline broadband eventually will be very limited and we have witnessed the success of the same across the world. it will come out of the segment of about approximately 40 WiMAX is also an open technology, therefore, we expect – 50 million wireline subscribers. How much percentage of that this technology will be embraced and utilised across the wireline subscribers will be broadband is an important the globe. question here. Today, India has about 300 million wireless subscribers, and one may ask - will 10 to 20 per cent of these India’s WiMAX market would touch INR 210 billion in wireless subscribers be broadband subscribes or how much the next couple of years with the 3 G and broadband percentage will account for the wireline subscribers based wireless access licence policy being announced. What are broadband users? Wireline based broadband subscribers will your comments on this? be essentially low. In wireless itself there will be fixed and WiMAX market opportunity is driven by four entities. mobile broadband.

Firstly, CAPEX for the equipment (equipment vendors) and secondly, subscriber devices,third BWA Service revenue Recently, there is a launch of WiMAX-enabled costand fouth is Content driven application access on mobile effective laptops in India. How will such devices enable Internet. For instance, if we consider that by 2012 we will rural connectivity? have 20 million broadband subscribers and majority of WiMAX Enabled Note Book (WENB)computers coming into these are going to be wireless WiMAX devices which will the market very soon in next 3 months is a reality which cost around $75 to $ 100, that offers one of the segments will cost about $550 to $600. This would comprise 35 per of the market opportunity. CAPEX per subscriber for Base cent of the PC market. Using WENB for rural connectivity, Transceiver Station (BTS), Access Service Network (ASN) the operators should have a social obligation. Most of the and Connectivity Service Network (CSN) as infrastructure operators don’t want to provide their services in the far network elements around $40 per subscriber is one of the flung areas of the country because it does not prove to be a four segments. The third market opportunity is WiMAX profitable business venture for them. Return on investments, service revenue which the operators offers to end users as pay back period, IRR are some of the challenging questions regular monthly subscription. The fourth market comprises and issues raised by the private operators when it comes to of content access on a click based revenue on mobile Internet connecting the last mile on wireless where the subscriber access. Content has the ability to surpass the service revenue density is likely to be very low.

The government has set up the Universal Services Obligation being generated through regular subscription on a per month basis. Content downloads such as movie songs, films, (USO) Fund under the Department of Telecommunications wallpapers and ring tones are a major revenue generator (DoT) for providing infrastructure build out assistance for today. These four entities contributes to the WiMAX market. enabling rural connectivity. As I have mentioned before, With WiMAX getting popular, there will be WiMAX enabled one needs to have low cost wireless broadband devices, notebooks which will comprise the fifth entity of the WiMAX affordability of wireless broadband service, PC literacy in the market. Therefore, WiMAX market in India will definitely be society and localisation of content in different languages for a highly rewarding one, especially with a potentially untapped driving rural broadband connectivity. In this regard, WiMAX will play a great role. broadband segment both in urban and rural areas.

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PERSPECTIVE

Potential of WiMAX Wireless technology such as - WiMAX, is beginning to offer reliable alternatives to ďŹ xed-line access, offering the potential for widespread, affordable connectivity to every region, village, and person in India.

K Ravichandran

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ndia is poised to become the technology powerhouse of the world. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is powering India. An increased application of ICT services is contributing towards the growth of telecom services. Increased connectivity and low transaction costs has resulted in a synergistic boom in the number of vendors who provide equipment, software, and content.

However, the digital divide is still a major issue, creating heavy pressure on the urban sector to provide employment and infrastructure to the rural migrants.

Mass exodus from rural to urban areas will not ebb till the digital divide is bridged. The government is betting on broadband connectivity as an essential tool in connecting rural sectors. It is expected that broadband will be heavily used in the information sector, entertainment and e-Governance to increase productivity in rural sectors.

However, the penetration of broadband connections is alarmingly low at around 4 million and disruptive wireless broadband technologies are poised to bring in sweeping positive changes. The broadband industry in India is still nascent, notwithstanding the widely accepted fact that it would create immense value in terms of improved products and services. Various issues related to technology, standards, regulations, business models, consumer value proposition, distribution etc. are still debatable. However, since 2006 December, when the Union Minister for Telecom declared 2007 as the year for broadband, serious efforts are being taken by the government to increase broadband penetration in India and meet the target of 20 million connections by 2010.

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Wireless technology such as WiMAX, is beginning to offer reliable alternatives to fixed-line access, offering the potential for widespread, affordable connectivity to every region, village, and person in India. WiMAX systems and services are being evaluated/deployed in urban markets to complement and compete against Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) in suburban business districts that lack high quality DSL access. Even when 3G deployment gets underway after the spectrum auction, voice will comprise a large chunk of the services in the initial years.

POTENTIAL OF WI-MAX IN INDIA

Low broadband penetration is a clear opportunity for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA)/WiMAX in India. The market take off requires sufficient

spectrum, very low cost Customer Premises Equipement (CPE) and affordable end-to-end connectivity, including the computing platform. The Indian market provides a broadband opportunity of approximately 50 million residential, 9000 large enterprise and 2 million Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) consumers. Their paying abilities are approximately US $ 15, US $ 20 and US $ 50 respectively. Hence we can expect that the India market has a potential to grow from US $ 2 billion today to over US $ 12 billion in the next five years.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are becoming important drivers for the broadband market. Innovative and new Internet-based applications are prompting consumers to go for broadband access. Typical applications www.egovonline.net

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such as online shopping and electronic commerce, (both for home and business segments), Internet telephony, video telephony, entertainment, gaming (including gambling over the Internet) and other Value Added Services (VAS) are creating a huge demand for broadband in India.

India is a prime strategic market for broadband technologies, especially wireless technologies like WiMAX that can enable a variety of technology applications aimed at the domestic market catering to the business, IT, governance and entertainment needs of the people. Broadband technologies will allow operators to offer Internet, telephone, cable television and entertainment on a converged network, which would also mean single billing for consumers. Service providers have realised that profits will truly come when companies come together to offer consumers a range of convergent solutions like Internet access, voice, entertainment, information and eCommerce. Currently, mobile telecom operators earn an average of about INR 500 from each customer. The revenue can climb by another INR 1,000 once broadband is introduced. An average Indian consumer spends INR 300 for cable services, INR 500 on voice calls, INR 600 on Internet and at least INR 100 on video and entertainment per month. Telecom companies offering broadband can pocket all this on a converged platform.

The cost-effective and scalable WiMAX technology is being taken up by the government to help it achieve its goal of taking the broadband connections to 20 million by 2010. Broadband access through a WiMAX enabled backbone is also being evaluated for increasing the effectiveness of e-Governance initiatives and massive projects are in the pipeline.

Capable of delivering broadband Internet and extending services like Internet telephony throughout India without major disruption to transportation and other services, WiMAX is fast, wireless, non-line of sight, long-range and offers scalable broadband last-mile solutions to meet India’s widespread Internet access needs. e-Governance has resulted in a tremendous change in the way a common man interacts with the ov

October 2008

government administration. Distance education, tele-medicine and a myriad of other applications have now grown and are looking at broadband as the highway that will facilitate content delivery. These will be the key market drivers for broadband. The key-end user groups will include mid-to-highlevel corporate users, government users, young urban professionals, and rural users through Common Service Centres (CSCs) and special projects like State-Wide Area Network (SWAN), Providing Urban Utilities to Rural Areas (PURA).

Advantage - WiMAX •

• • •

GROWTH DRIVERS

Currently, there are just over a million broadband subscribers in India. We expect it to grow to 20 million by 2010, of which 10 million will be wireless subscribers. If the capital expenditure per subscriber is estimated to be approximately USD 300, there is a wireless market of USD 3 billion waiting to be created and serviced. The ecosystem is ready to take it on.

The growth drivers for WiMAX in India are: Entertainment and distance education: These are already driving strong business cases for broadband.

Operators: Live Webcasts of events through data networks, interactive classroom sessions, online gaming, rich multimedia content and video.

Network Convergence: Voice, video and data are beginning to be pushed along the same pipe, bandwidth requirements are thus soaring. As connectivity costs are dropping, enterprises are considering a common network for voice, video and data. The real attraction here is the huge cost savings.

Large enterprises: Banking and finance sector are opting for more bandwidth to fulfill growing business requirements.

Heavy messaging and core applications use a lot of bandwidth.

SMEs: At present the SMEs are using ‘thin’ bandwidth because applications like VPN, ERP, CRM, and SCM don’t require high bandwidth. Ninety percent of VSATs use 64Kbps or less. These are all low-bandwidth applications that are manageable within 128Kbps However, bandwidth requirements till recent times have been low because companies have not yet combined video, audio and data

•

• • •

WiMAX promises to provide high-speed wireless connectivity more simply and costeffectively than current cellular technologies.

It provides a wide variety of data rates over large distances.

It supports mobility.

It offers the scalability to deliver affordable broadband access across India as its wireless infrastructure can provide portable and mobile device support for anytime anywhere service.

It enables economies of scale that brings down the cost of broadband access and ensures interoperability.

It increases ease of implementation.

It lowers equipment costs, hence allowing service providers to shop for the best price.

It delivers greater throughput and greater scalability to meet consumer’s needs.

on their networks. Now that corporates are converging their applications and are upgrading capacities on their networks, they will become the main demand drivers.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP): VoIP will be a big driver for bandwidth, especially in rural areas. Service providers are moving towards all IP networks. VoIP will add to the voice connectivity needs in a complementary manner. In the foreseeable future, mobility through cellular services will not be overtaken by VoIP but will only be complemented in areas which are still underserved.

WI-MAX VS OTHER WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES

Ubiquitous broadband services promises to enhance the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and offer enhancements in quality of life through applications - e-Education, e-Medicine, e-Governance, entertainment as well as employment. WiMAX technology, through its ability to provide a wide 17

PERSPECTIVE

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variety of data rates over large distances is uniquely suitable to provide the above broadband services. With the flexibility that WiMAX access affords, a service provider can offer high-speed connectivity or mobile broadband services with millions of users not only in metropolitan areas but also in rural and remote areas. We believe that WiMAX is best-suited to deliver the services and capabilities required in India. WiMAX technology flows in from the IP world and is far more optimised for data in comparison to 3G technologies such as EVDO and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). WiMAX differs from these technologies in that it is built upon open standards that offer up to 4x greater bandwidth, and is significantly less expensive. The 3G technology is more optimised towards voice and is gearing up to add data capabilities. In the long run, all the 3G technologies are evolving towards OFDMA, which is the underlying technology for multiple accesses through WiMAX as well as for the future 4G technology. Therefore, WiMAX is often referred to as a 4G technology.

WiMAX can be used for a number of applications, including ‘last mile’ broadband connections, hotspot and high-speed enterprise connectivity for businesses. The WiMAX Forum has focused its members’ efforts around implementing the IEEE 802.16 standards in order to drive interoperability,

reliability, and economies of scale. These in turn lowers the cost of technologies in the marketplace. WiMAX also has the greatest potential in bridging the ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural India in the most cost effective manner.

The standards offer a great deal of design flexibility including support for licensed and license-exempt frequency bands, configurable bandwidth, perconnection Quality of Service (QoS) and strong security primitives. 802.16 is optimised to deliver high, bursty data rates to the subscriber but the sophisticated Medium Access Control (MAC) architecture can simultaneously support real-time multimedia and isochronous applications such as VoIP as well. This essentially means that WiMAX is uniquely positioned to support applications requiring advanced QoS, reliability and higher speeds.

The WiMAX technology has been deployed in more than 80 countries. The fixed and mobile WiMAX equipment market nearly reached $800 million in 2007. Vendor consolidation took place in 2007 and the market saw entrance of specialist ASN gateway vendor, WiMAX phones and Ultra Mobile PCs were launched. There are Tier I operator rollouts in India which are significant for WiMAX Forum from the market presence point of view in not only India but across the globe since they are one of the first few massive WiMAX standard commercial roll

outs worldwide. With the allocation of Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum by Government of India in 2008, the government is preparing grounds for competitive services being made available to Indian consumers.

The year 2008 – 2009 is being viewed as the inflection point in time for ‘real’ WiMAX growth. Globally, the market seems healthy for WiMAX equipment and services. Service provider strategies and investment funds spent will begin to manifest more concretely through the buildup of a WiMAX subscriber base.

With a conducive BWA auction policy for 2.5 GHZ and 2.3 GHz bands in place now, it is now prudent to discuss how will today’s communications provider evolve to become an all-IP based convergent service provider to offer service bundles to their subscribers to include entertainment, infotainment, content, mobile transaction, advertisements and sponsorships on top of the data and voice. The multi-dimensional convergence in the marketplace requires new infrastructure and evolved industry mindset and the ecosystem is gearing up for the same.

K Ravichandran (Ravichandran.k@telsima.com) is Director (Product Marketing) in Telsima. He has over 20 years of experience in Telecom industry in different functional roles. Prior to this he was associated with VSNL.

Google to Digitise Newspaper Archives In another initiative in making information reach the masses, Google has plans for digitising the newspaper archives of the major newspapers worldwide.

The company started scanning microfilm from some of the newspapers’ historic archives. These archives will be initially available through Google News and gradually on the newspapers’ own websites.

Google has already scanned millions of articles. This new move is an expansion of the two-year-old Google News service which allows one to search the archives of some major newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time.

Google Books is aready running its book-scanning project. The company plans to obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives which may otherwise lead to copyrigths issues. However, the project might see some opposition from the newspapers, who might not be willing to allow google for digitise their archives because of issues involved in terms of revenue. Many publishers see their archives as a potential source of revenue.

This initiative is expected to digitise old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the reader base of news archives.

National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress is running a joint program - National Digital Newspaper Program for creating a digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the United States bewteen 1836 and 1922. These archives will be available freely on the Internet.

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INDUSTRY FEATURE

BROADBAND:

Not the Need of a Specific Market

“WiMAX rollouts will begin with an aim to deliver high quality Internet Protocol (IP) data services to fixed and nomadic users, and over time grow the networks to support increasing levels of mobility” says Tarvinder Singh, Director Marketing & Product Management, Home & Networks Business, Motorola, to Nilakshi Barooah of egov magazine 20 }

The WiMAX Forum has projected that by 2012 India will have 27.5 million WiMAX users, which would be 20% of global WiMAX subscribers.

What is your opinion on this and how are the telecom companies planning to tap this growth of WiMAX technology?

India today has about 4.6 million broadband connections in the country, which is a very small number by any standards. WiMAX as a technology allows you to have relatively faster penetration and is quick to deploy mainly because it is a wireless technology. Today, most of the broadband users are based on wireline networks in the form of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections. However, we as a country have limited capacity to deliver DSL connections because there are not enough coppers assets in the ground to upgrade to broadband. India has about 40 million wirelines and not more than 10 million can be upgraded for broadband delivery. Therefore, the rest of the growth is dependent upon wireless networks where WiMAX as a technology can play a significant role. The government has set a target of achieving 20 million broadband subscribers by 2010. One of the recent reports on WiMAX growth has projected a figure of approximately 28 million by 2012, but whether it is 20 million or 28 million, the fact of the matter is that the unserved demand is way above these projections. As the volume picks up, the services are going to be more and more affordable which www.egovonline.net

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will bring in more people under the broadband banner. A all current day broadband services in India. WiMAX rollouts country like India should not target any less than 15 – 20 will begin with an aim to deliver high quality Internet per cent broadband penetration in the coming few years. Protocol (IP) data services to fixed and nomadic users, and Although, we are a long way from that today, we finally see over time grow the networks to support increasing levels of initiatives that will enable the country to vigorously pursue mobility. While the 16e WiMAX technology is fully ready to support full mobile broadband services today, for the overall accelerated growth of broadband services.

Broadband is not the need of a specific market segment. It is proposition to become affordable enough for mass market not that broadband is needed only for rural connectivity and adoption will require price points to drop over time as well not required for urban India. It is a need that sweeps across as the eco-system of handheld devices to reach mass market market segments. There are users in rural markets who need inflection point levels. We see this progression over the broadband as much as users in urban markets, except the fact coming 2-3 years from an India market standpoint. Given that the needs that one addresses may be different for each the above views, these two technologies are going to be truly segment. These needs vary from impacting basic livelihoods complementing each other in India. by providing connectivity to rural markets for helping these users migrate from a world of relative unawareness to being Motorola has substantial number of contracts for WiMAX better connected with the power and access to information deployment systems with customers in 16 countries. on the one hand all the way up to a slew of personalised What are the factors that makes Motorola preferable for broadband solutions for anywhere anytime access on the go WiMAX Projects?

Motorola is engaged with 80 customers across the world to information, entertainment and commerce applications.

The projections of WiMAX Forum are realistic and it is today. Of these engagements, Motorola has 21 commercial doable. It depends upon how soon we get off the ground on contracts. Motorola’s success with WiMAX begins with a big scale as an Industry in India. The biggest hurdle till few its commitment to the technology itself. The company has days ago was the availability of spectrum. We are hopeful that been investing in this technology for a long time. We have with the policy being recently announced which will be soon amongst the highest number of contributions to the WiMAX followed by auctions, operators are likely to be in possession standards. Since the time the 16e WiMAX standards were of spectrum by the end of this year. Therefore, 2009 should being authored, Motorola played a key role in the creation of those standards and continues begin to see operators going to work as a key member of full throttle towards building the WiMAX Forum on the nationwide networks for With WiMAX, the goal is to deliver a true future evolution of the 16e delivering broadband to multi-media broadband experience, standards for WiMAX. We different sections of the superior to that delivered by all current have also made substantial end users. India has shown day broadband services in India contributions in productising tremendous success in terms of the cellular phone this technology and have penetration, where we add more than 8 million subscribers been amongst the first vendors in the market to have achieved per month. We now have an opportunity to create a similar WiMAX Forum wave 2 certification for our 2.5GHz product success story with broadband, for which, we believe, 16e thus ensuring we bring products that not only fully comply based mobile WiMAX rollouts will be the key. with the WiMAX standards but also allow for interoperability with certified third party end user devices. Motorola’s legacy Experts say that WiMAX combined with 3G technology as a corporation has been radio technologies and wireless. will take broadband to the next level of growth. What are We are seen as a very credible radio engineering company your comments on this statement. world over known for our competencies and innovations in In the Indian market context, we see 3G as an extension of this field. Given that credibility and our commitment and the existing 2G voice services. With 5+5 Mhz of spectrum (1 investments on ground with regard to WiMAX, customers WCDMA carrier) being made available to an operator, one feel very comfortable in placing their business with Motorola can certainly improve the current data services experience as a trusted partner who can best deliver on their network incrementally compared to that delivered on 2.5G systems and business expectations from investments in WiMAX. currently operating, but I believe it is not going to be adequate to deliver world class true wireless broadband Tell us about Motorola’s Mobile WiMAX solution and services. Operators will use 3G spectrum to create a head its unique features. How will the Mobile WiMAX bring room for their voice capacity growth by migrating current out communication revolution, especially in developing higher end users to this spectrum, because this is where they countries? are constrained right now with 2G. They will then, use the Mobile WiMAX is the commonly used term for the 802.16e capacity so created to continue adding voice subscribers version of the WiMAX standards. Mobile WiMAX technology without being capacity constrained, while at the same time can be effectively used to serve fixed, nomadic and full mobile improving in relative terms the service quality and data broadband requirements. An operator could begin with this experience that will get delivered to users connected to the version of technology to build a fixed broadband system to 3G network. With WiMAX, the goal is to deliver a true multi- start with and then, over a period of time, it can be evolved media broadband experience, superior to that delivered by into different levels of mobility support, thus ensuring total ov

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INDUSTRY FEATURE

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protection of network investments. Some operators can start where we need to start moving forward and Motorola believes small with fixed users such as homes and offices and then that the policy announcements made recently are a great step serve additional market segments such as customers with in that direction. nomadic lives who carry their laptops around the whole The answer to the question regarding whether there is some day, but want to have connectivity from wherever they are. scope for fine tuning in the policy, is that there always will Mobile WiMAX serves all kinds of users depending upon be a scope for the same. But as of today, the policy is in the their need in each of these situations. A user in urban market right direction and is well aligned with the larger objectives wants to have instant access to information sitting anywhere. for broadband access across India.

With 2G spectrum, people have to struggle to get connected The end consumer will benefit from this policy, because now to the world wide web or one has no other option but to it will become possible to make large network investments and get back to a place where provide broadband services some form of broadband to this largely underserved connectivity exists. WIMAX market opportunity and Mobile WiMAX technology can be provides an answer in such need. The minimum quantity effectively used to serve fixed, nomadic a situation making possible and full mobile broadband requirements. of spectrum per operator anywhere anytime access An operator could begin with this version of 20MHz TDD, and the through wireless broadband spectrum band, i.e 2.5 of technology to build a fixed broadband system connectivity. and 2.3GHz are two very to start with and then, over a period of time, it 802.16e WiMAX positive steps that would can be evolved into different levels of mobility technology can also be used enable investments to flow support, thus ensuring total protection of network investments for fixed broadband for into the arena of broadband rural areas. The question of wireless access. 3G is a connecting Information and logical extension from the Communication Technology (ICT) kiosks with broadband 2.5G networks especially for operators in parts of the is an example of a fixed broadband network being built country where their 2G and 2.5G networks are getting on mobile WiMAX standards which ensure maximum choked and not able to accommodate rapid growth that we investment protection, lower cost of ownership and superior are witnessing. Those networks certainly need immediate performance . capacity relief which will be provided through 3G in our opinion. This will still leave the opportunity to invest in Can you elaborate upon the possibility of your company’s WiMAX for serving the data and broadband opportunity tie ups with mobile service providers in India for the to new market segments. Thus, new revenue streams will WiMAX projects, especially in the rural areas? be created which will make the complementary use of 3G The establishment of kiosks and Common Service Centres and WiMAX. (CSCs) by the government in India are aimed at connecting the unconnected. Most of these kiosks and CSCs will be Pakistan has successfully deployed WiMAX in their located in areas which are very cumbersome to connect with country. Are there any lessons to be learnt from our wireline access. Wireless medium is therefore, the best option immediate neighbour? to reach to these kiosks. WiMAX can provide a means to Pakistan got off to a good start with Wateen Telecom provide connectivity to these kiosks. There can be multiple launching its services last year. Pakistan’s market conditions kinds of services which can be available under a kiosk, such are very similar to ours in many ways from a telecom as education, ticket booking, accessing information and perspective. They also do not have much wireline assets, so land records. WiMAX can play a central role in providing they rely upon wireless technologies to deliver services to the connectivity between these kiosks and the central the masses in a quick and cost effective manner. This is an data bases. identical situation when you compare it with India. Wateen’s Motorola has been talking to several service providers in 12 months of experience has shown that it is possible to run India on their WiMAX deployment plans. Since the wait a very successful business case with mobile WiMAX and use for spectrum seems to be soon coming to an end finally, we it as an effective means to deliver broadband connectivity expect these discussions to now proceed to the next level in to people who had no form of connectivity whatsoever. anticipation of large network buildouts very shortly.

The telecom company is now able to deliver voice and data services to as many as 40 million plus people by making their The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has services within the reach of this population. This is a huge recommended a review of the WiMAX policy recently transition in a short span of one year and they continue to announced by the government of India. How is the policy add newer cities to their footprint as they grow the user base going to affect the telecom industry in India? each month.

Motorola believes that both Telecom Regulatory Authority I am confident that once India gets down with the rolling of India and Department of Telecommunications, out of networks in a big way, we will positively force the Government of India have been discussing broadband rest of the world to stand up and take note of such growth, with all the stakeholders before coming up with their own as much as the same way, the country demonstrated with recommendations and the policy guidelines. We are at a stage cellular telephony.

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11 - 13 November 2008 Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

knowledge for change

Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications (MEWC) Government of Malaysia

REGISTER NO W!

Call for papers!

The organisers invite papers on the above mentioned conference themes.

Abstracts should be submitted, in no longer than 400 words at:

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SPECIAL FOCUS: BIHAR

The Sorrow of Bihar Bihar is one of the most flood-affected states of India. This has been a longstanding problem, but halfhearted flood control measures, and haphazard development plans have aggravated the problem.

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housands of people are missing in the catastrophe that had hit Bihar on August 18 after Koshi river changed its course and flooded hundreds of villages. Over one lakh people in 102 relief camps, about 2.5 lakh houses destroyed, crops in 1 lakh hectare wiped off, and while the government claims it has so far evacuated nearly three lakh people, the total number of population affected has swelled to 1.2 crore.

Monsoon floods are an annual event in eastern India, and are part of life for many people in the region. But on this occasion the river Kosi, which arises in Nepal, broke through an embankment and changed course, inundating six districts where people were unprepared for flooding. People have moved to 24 }

any available high ground, abandoning their homes, possessions and livestock.

Makeshift relief camps are operating.

Road and rail routes in the flooded area are completely blocked. Rescue operations have been hampered by a shortage of boats. People are drinking unsafe water, and cases of diarrhoea have been reported.

LOOKING BACK

Like many other rivers of North Bihar, Kosi gathers water from Himalayas in Nepal. However, it is a trans-boundary river and flows between Nepal and India.Kosi is also one of the largest tributaries of Ganga and after flowing through nearly 70,000 sq kilometres confluences into Ganga near Kursaila in Katihar district of Bihar.

In Nepal, this river lies to the west of Himalayan peak, the Kanchanjangha and has seven major tributaries namely Sun Kosi, Tama Kosi, Dhudh Kosi, Indravati, Likhu, Arun and Tamar. That is why it is known as ‘Sapta Kosi’ in Nepal.This river has earned notoriety since time immemorial due to its unruly, turbulent and unpredictable behaviour. On an average, it carries 7080 million tons of silt every year and it is perhaps due to this feature, it tends to change its course after a definite period of time. Kosi has an average discharge of 55,000 cusecs of water that increases by as much as twenty times during the monsoon or flood season, thereby assuming dangerous proportions.

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Bihar before and after Floods Monsoon rains regularly swell rivers in northern India, but in 2008, the Kosi, a tributary of the Ganges and a major river in its own right, did something different. It burst through its banks to flow into a channel it had abandoned more than 200 years ago.

The flooded channel swept over a region not accustomed to flooding and forced more than a million people from their homes.

The flood is clearly visible in these images, collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on August 24 and Figure - 1 August 8 .

On August 8, the braided channels of the Kosi River curved westward out of Nepal in a “c” shape before flowing into the Ganges (below the lower edge of the image, visible in the large image).

On August 24, the Kosi cut due south, bypassing the previous arc formed by the river’s modern channel. The

flooded channel was kilometers wide in places. Water still flowed through the modern channel on August 24, but the river seemed smaller than it had two weeks earlier.

Images such as these are useful in assessing the overall extent of a disaster.

In this type of image, water is usually

dark blue and black. Both sedimentladen water and water-saturated earth are a lighter shade of blue. The channels of the Kosi are silvery from reflected sunlight. Large towering rainclouds in the image are pale blue, while loweraltitude, warmer clouds are white. The plant-covered land is bright green.

Figure - 1: This satellite picture has been taken on 8 August, 2008 Figure - 2: This satellite picture has been taken on 24 August, 2008

Source: NASA

Figure - 2

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SPECIAL FOCUS: BIHAR

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being responsible for some of the most devastating floods caused in the state— from the one in 1954 to those in 1963, 1971, 1984, 1987, 1991, 1995 and the present flood in 2008.The initiative to tame sorrow of Bihar saw India sign the historic ‘Kosi Agreement’ with Nepal on April 25, 1954. While Gulzari Lal Nanda signed the agreement on behalf of the GOI, Nepal was represented

by Bir Shumeshwar. The agreement envisaged setting up of a barrage by GOI. The barrage was to be located about eight miles upstream of Hanuman Nagar town; the barrage was built at Bhimnagar and it took over seven years (1956-63) to complete the work.

The terms and conditions of the

26

agreement, however, stipulated that India would be responsible for the repair and maintenance of the barrage.

The Government of Nepal also handed over the project area land on lease for 193 years.Other than the barrage, a 39 Kilometre long embankment from barrage site to Chatra in Nepal was also built to ‘jacket’ and tame the turbulence of this river. The ‘jacketing’ directed the flow of the river to the barrage and swift and fast Kosi was brought to control to a great extent.

Spurs—a diagonal structure to check the speed of current and protect embankment—were also constructed along the eastward embankment to prevent the erosion or breach in embankment.

While the jacketing of this river upstream barrage did prove successful in guiding and controlling the direction of the flow over the last 45 years, it was also moving towards becoming disastrous because of heavy siltation.

As this river carries heavy silt with it, in due course of time the bed of the river rose above the field itself and this, in fact, has been the typical reason of flood every year in this area.

Unfortunately enough, while all previous floods in Kosi always happened due to breach in embankments downstream the barrage, the present flood has been caused due to breach in the embankment near Kusaha which is located upstream the barrage.

According to reports available with sections of media, the signs of breach in this eastward upstream embankment were perceptible in the very first week of August itself.

The current started eroding and damaging the embankment. The officials had said that

the law and order situation in Nepal has under gone a change and they were not getting required amount of cooperation from the Nepalese authorities.

They justified their alleged inaction by saying that when the team of engineers visited the site at Kusaha, they were not allowed to work and were forced to flee from the site.

Gradually, the spurs near Kusaha also got damaged and finally breached on August 18, 2008 . This site was about 12 kilometres away from the barrage, therefore within few hours waters flowed into the Indian territory.

Although engineers tried to lessen the damage and control the discharge of water through the breach by opening 54 out of 56 sluice gates of the barrage, the current had by that time adopted a different course, making the attempt to prevent the disaster futile.

RELIEF WORK

A day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi made an aerial survey of the flood-affected areas in Bihar, the Centre moved its machinery into top gear to provide all possible assistance to the State government grappling with a grim flood situation.

The Centre deployed four Army columns, five helicopters, 118 Boats and 624 National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel. The Union Home Ministry said four more Army columns were being deployed. As much as 1.25 lakh tonnes of food grains has been allocated to the State. The Home Ministry spokesman said 3,732 tents and one lakh water bottles were sent to Bihar since Thursday. More tents and boats were being organised by the government.

The Health Ministry is organising supply of two crore halogen tablets.

The National Crisis Management Committee, headed by the Cabinet Secretary, reviewed the flood situation in Bihar. Relief Commissioners of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Orissa have instructed the magistrates of the districts neighbouring Bihar to provide boats as per the requirement of the State government. As announced by the Prime Minister, Rs. 1000 crore from the National Calamity Contingency Fund was released by the Centre. www.egovonline.net

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ICT: Need of the Hour......

Community Radio: Community radio can be a blessing in disguise for the state like Bihar where the development has taken a back seat due to political apathy and hypocrisy.

The Community Radio Forum, India and its partner organizations has recently propose to set up temporary radio stations in the flood affected areas of Bihar to assist the local administration and provide the flood affected people with vital information through radio broadcasts on Critical Flood and Emergency Warnings - to alert people in advance of possible further threat(s) in order to help them take preventive measures and/or direct them to safer areas, Missing Person alerts - Hundreds of families have been separated in the flood emergency, with an unknown number of people missing, especially children. Emergency radio stations can play an important role in identifying and reuniting these families, Information on Relief Measures- including information on locations and time of relief material distribution, medical camps etc, Health alerts - for evacuees/flood victims, including epidemic warnings, medical safeguards and first aid, sanitation and hygiene information, location of medical camps etc. and Providing Accurate Information - Countering unconfirmed information and rumors that can trigger panic among an already disturbed population. It becomes vitally important to maintain the flow of authentic and reliable information.

Also, It can trigger much desired change in the society with its potential to empower people with local, adequate and relevant information necessary to make decisions in day to day life. Information is the key. If people have the right information, they can act prudently, thereby freeing themselves from the practices that bring misfortune to their lives.

Ham Radio: It can act as a blessing is disguise during hours of distress like the Bihar floods.The national association of ham radio operators, and police ham operators in other states, should be requested to station themselves in district headquarters and visit affected villages on day trips

The Ministry of Railways has issued sanction for transportation of relief material/fodder by rail from any station to notified flood-affected districts of Bihar for distribution in the affected areas. Officers of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Control Room of the Ministry are in constant touch with the State government and monitoring the situation round the clock. ActionAid on its part has distributed tarpaulins and water-sterilising tablets from their existing stocks,An ActionAid team has also, been touring villages to assess the damage and the need for relief and reconstruction. ov

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on motorboats to provide the most valuable commodity missing in remote areas – communication. They can assess where help is needed, and it can be reached there quickly in a sharpshooter approach.

Cell Phones: Though there was lot of congestionin mobile networks during the floods but it was only mode of communication fully functional during floods. Mobile phones have helped save hundreds of stranded people in flood-ravaged Bihar. People were able to contact the local administration using their mobile phones. Families received food packets as relief and were rescued from rooftops after they sent SMSs and called the administration in Supaul district. People exchanged messages to inform their kin about their safety and location.

According to Bihar disaster management minister Nitish Mishra, cellphones helped keep hope alive for people who are still stranded by the flood, one of the worst in the state in 50 years. He said that he received messages from at least 200 people requesting help.Local authorities received SMSs which explained their situation. Some said that they would die of starvation on rooftops without timely help, saying that time was running out for them.

Several women used mobile phones to contact their husbands who were in neighbouring states. When all other methods of communication, including landline phones, failed, mobile phones became the lifeline for hundreds affected by the floods. People were cautious enough to conserve the batteries of their mobiles as there was no way to charge them.

Landline Phones:Though Bihar has more than 9 lakhs landline connections but during the recent floods they were all rendered useless. No one can be blamed for it because the water had entered the telephone exchanges and also the cables were severely damaged.

Satellite Phones: In addition to the 4 Satellite phones already provided, 10 more satellite phones are being provided to state machinery for speeding up the relief work.

LOOKING AHEAD

The flood, which has impacted over 30 lakh people in 1,700 villages in the state, has forced the Nitish Kumar government to realise that the impact of the Kosi’s change of course would have been much less if officials of the traditional flood belt of the state were posted there.

Yes, experience counts a lot during disasters, but India can’t afford to adopt unscientific disaster management modules to minimise impacts of repeated natural calamities. For a couple of days, flood victims in Bihar had no clue what to do, and more importantly what not

to do. The Centre swung into action, but it was too late to stop the menace.

Only on the 11th day of the tragedy centre announced an immediate release of Rs 1,000 cr, by the time large-scale damages were already witnessed.

But a bigger tragedy for the country is its inability to put in place an effective nation-wide disaster management mechanism to contain impacts of natural calamities. If Indian-American Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal could ensure an immediate evacuation of people in response to hurricane Gustav, why can’t Lalus and Nitishes fail to deliver the same on a scientific manner?

27

SPECIAL FOCUS: BIHAR

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In Bihar, the state administration must share the blame for its failure to meet the unexpected challenges, but the problem is actually rooted in the lack of proper mechanism to deal with such a situation.

For Bihar’s disaster management flood came as a shock to the administration, but they finally tamed it. Technology has been a big help in tackling this flood. Bihar officials in the area were not that experienced to face such a flood fury. However, they got into action immediately. They managed to have the satellite images of the flood-hit areas which helped a lot in undertaking many logistics decisions.

Significantly, the ministry of home

affairs has a dedicated wing called national disaster management, but analysts say it’s grossly inadequate to face major disasters in a vast country like India. But the question here is how long India will wait to bring in scientific modes of disaster management.

Although the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government

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Bihar Floods vs Katrina Hurricane Bihar Floods

Katrina Hurricane

Date

August 18, 2008

August 29, 2005

Reason

Kosi River broke embankment

Tropical depression

People effected

Above 30 lakh

Above 20 lakh

Prior warning

Was there but not utilized

Was there but not utilized

Relief work

four Army columns, five helicopters, 118 Boats and 624 National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel

Approximately 58,000 National Guard personnel, helicopters, and all the law and oder personnel of the effected area were activated to deal with the storm’s aftermath

Deaths

217 (official figure)

1,800 (estimated)

initiated a mammoth project to link rivers in India, but at present it is almost non-functional. The idea behind the project was to emulate China and link the rivers in such a way that excess water of one river basin could be diverted to another basin, thereby minimising the chances of both severe flood and drought.

Also, corporate India has always played an important role in tackling natural calamities, but it was mostly confined to giving donations.

Floods, landslides, d r o u g h t s , earthquakes and other natural disasters are nothing new in India and yet still there doesn’t seem to be a default arrangement for dealing with these problems.

Given the frequency of these events - and most scientists seem to be predicting that extreme weather events are on the increase - it’s amazing that India doesn’t have effective federal-level disaster relief teams, with supplies and equipment, on permanent standby.

This might sound like a big ‘ask’ but in

reality it only requires the stockpiling of required supplies and the training of some military units to be ready to be redeployed in relief mode (as their secondary function) when disaster strikes.

However, its worth remembering that the mighty United States of America fared little better when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans three years ago.

There are obvious of parallels between the two disasters. Warnings about the poor maintenance and breach of the New Orleans levees were issued and ignored with catastrophic consequences, just as they have been over the Kosi barrage in Nepal which India was supposed to be maintaining.And when the scale of their folly became clear, the Louisiana and US federal governments played the blame-game just as the authorities in Patna and New Delhi have done.But this is where the similarities might end.

America learned from its mistakes, as could be seen by the evacuation of two million people from the Big Easy this week as Tropical Storm Gustav bore in from the Atlantic.

This is not to say India should have evacuated three million people from Bihar - that’s clearly impractical in the Indian context - but it is surely time the better plans were laid at Central level.

So will India learn lessons? Will the Bihar floods of 2008 be a ‘Katrina moment’ when the state woke up to its obligations and put in place the contingency plans required to deal with these kinds of disasters?Let us sincerely hope so, but on past form, you’d be a brave man to bet on it.

Sandeep Budki sandeep@egovonline.net

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ASIA 11-13 November 2008 Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Malaysia Through mSERVE Asia 2008, it is our endeavor to bring regulators, policy makers, service providers, content providers and infrastructure providers from different countries, under one roof, to discuss and churn out ideas to take telecom growth to next level. Also, visible digital divide between rural and urban population would be discussed in detail.

It will also provide an opportunity for mobile professionals and innovators from operators, value-added service providers, and equipment and device manufacturers, from across Asia and around the world, to network with a select circle of mobile professionals who can positively impact their business.

Call for papers!

Key Themes • Rural Connectivity &Last Mile Solution • Policy & Regulatory Issues • Localisation of Content – Value Added Services • Security • m-Marketing • m-Commerce / m-Remittances • Business Models & Unified Tariffs • Impact of 3G & Convergence • Wimax & Broadband • Low Cost Handsets / Ultra Low Costs Handsets

The organisers invite papers on the above mentioned conference themes. Abstracts should be submitted, in no longer than 400 words at papers@e-asia.org Last date for submissions is 30 September 2008.

For sponsorship and exhibition enquiries, contact: Anuj Agarwal (+91 9911302086), sales@e-asia.org For opportunities and information related to e-asia 2008 event contact us at info@e-asia.org

Host Organisation

Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications (MEWC) Government of Malaysia

Organisers

Country Partners

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Supporting Partners

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STATE FOCUS: BIHAR

Advantage-Score SCORE (System for Computerised Registration) Version 2 i.e. (Vinayak) is an ICT solution incorporating all instruments under Acts for property registration in Bihar.

Nirmal Kishor Prasad

L

and registration is mainly designed for the purpose of giving legitimacy to the land deed. At present there are 111 registration offices located at different places of Bihar functioning under the Registration Department. Out of these, 38 offices are at District Registration offices headed by District Sub-Registrars and 73 offices are Sub-registry offices headed by Sub-registrars. The vision is to have exemplary e-Governance in the registry offices, completely automated processes with less paper use, to provide the efficient Government to Citizens (G2C) services, and to have state-of-art record archival system at all registry offices of Bihar.

The objectives of the project are to do away with the manual land registration, design and development of work-flow based ICT solutions, rapid replication of the software solution to all 111 registry offices, quick delivery of original registered deeds to parties, extensive use of state-of-the-art technologies like web-camera, finger print scanners etc., and simplification, transparency, accountability to be achieved through Government Process Re-engineering (GPR).

SCORE-2

SCORE (System for Computerised Registration) Version 2 i.e. (Vinayak) – an ICT solution incorporating all instruments under Acts for property registration in Bihar has been designed, developed and implemented by the National Informatics Centre, Bihar State Centre, Patna. Hundred and eleven registry offices of the state have been SCORE-2 enabled in the record time of three months on an innovative as well as indigenously evolved cost-effective implementation model of Hardware 30 }

on Hire Basis (HOHB) yielding sharp increase in state revenue, an accrual of INR 0.25 million of fund in BISCORE society (a society formulated to run the business) within 15 months, creating ample job employment and healthy competition among the local entrepreneurs. SCORE-2 also demonstrates the innovative use of the state-of-art technologies like finger print biometrics devices, web camera, and scanners etc. It completely and effectively transformed the 200 old system of manual property registration to Small Office Home Office (SOHO) with less-paper office. The SCORE-2 system is also exemplary in healthy result oriented public/ private collaboration and the entire scheme is self-sustainable and verifiable.

Moreover, a unique concept, which is innovative and first of its kind, was adopted in Bihar with the implementation

of the bank challan (official receipt for payment or delivery) for the deposit of stamp duties/ registration fees/ additional stamp duties with the doing away of submitting stamp papers.

The cash transaction is completely stopped. The SCORE-2 system not only facilitates quick registration and delivery of deeds but with numerous reforms such as the government process re-engineering, record keeping transactions have become very simple, transparent and accountable. SCORE2’s online instantaneous help-desk for public for verification of required stamp duty, registration fees and requisite enclosures has brought public more closer to each and every registry offices of the state. The monotonous jobs like maintaining so many registers for these registered deeds have been taken care by the SCORE-2 back-office computerisation modules. The overall www.egovonline.net

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revenue has increased manifold, through the induction of SCORE2 for e-Registration of properties in Bihar.

Recently seeing the growing demand, the land and revenue department with the help of NIC has started Mobile Registration Offices at various identified locations of Patna. It worked for entire month of June 2007. This was again first of its kind in the country.

HOHB: IMPLEMENTATION MODEL

One of the key objectives of NIC was to formulate and put forth an innovative implementation model for those projects, which are citizen centric and large scale in nature. Effective management of 3MT (Men, Money, Materials, Technology) was also a prime objective for devising this new implementation model. Hardware on Hire Basis (HOHB) model of implementation was evolved and SCORE project scored another landmark in HOHB implementation model rejecting the Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) model, which was already deployed at the Registry Office, Patna Sadar by the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL).

Comparative figures of RoI (Return on Investment) assessment by taking into account an average load of 90 deeds per day and working days of 25 days per month along with an upper value of monthly rent on hire basis as INR. 30,000 and service tax at the rate of 12.5% implemented in two different models BOOT vis-à-vis HOHB, is discussed in the figure. Here, the assumption is deed comprising of 12 pages and service charge at the rate of INR. 30 per page as charged by ECIL. The comparative analysis reveal that only 8 per cent of total expenditure for one year through BOOT are being incurred in HOHB. Thus, a hefty amount of 92 per cent of the income is generated through HOHB. The objectives behind HOHB model is to give opportunity to local vendors for developing themselves as entrepreneurs.

It has created employment for 500 data entry operators, local trained youths, ov

October 2008

who have been entrusted with sales tax and other duties against hardware heavy purchase. A state level BISCORE (Bihar Society for Computerisation of Registry Offices) Society is being formulated to run the government business in the registry offices. The revenue is being saved in the BISCORE Society, which is presently worth INR 0.4 million.

The intention is to use the fund in developing the infrastructure of the registry offices, facilitating best possible public facilities to the citizens coming for registration of deeds. In a nutshell, the experimentation was done to have model offices in the premises of district administration.

proportion with the increase of deeds.

The other expenses like generator, diesel, and consumables i.e., paper, toner cartridges, external storage media like CDs, USB based external hard disks, operator remuneration are borne by the registry offices.

These expenses are met by the income generated by collection of funds as service charges from citizens at the rate of INR 20 per page of deed for all types of deeds except sale, gift, exchange, where services charge per page is at the rate of INR 25. The extra money that is charged is for sending a printout of the deed for auto-mutation of the property at the circle level. On an average, as per the statistics, per year 1 million deeds are registered across all 111 registry offices, leading to a revenue generation of INR. 14.85 million (approximately). Thus, the HOHB leads to a self-sustainable system with huge saving, revenue earning and is therefore, a win-win implementation model.

HOHB - AN OVERVIEW

HOHB - ADVANTAGES

For 111 Registry Offices (i.e., 38 district registry offices and 73 subregistry offices) 14 vendors have been identified, after a centralised tendering process. Property registration deals with confidential information of the citizens, and therefore, security features are embedded within the tendering system since any lapses on any part will not only lead to loss of public confidence on the system but also put the department at a heavy risk. The service spread for each vendor was further squeezed to maximum of 10 registry offices. The unit concept for set of hardware is proposed. One unit comprises of a server, four clients, two laser printers, scanner, finger print scanner, web camera, switch, anti-virus, operating system, oracle and one service engineer at the site. It is estimated that 50 to 60 deeds can be fairly registered with one unit. Likewise units will go in multiple

•

• • •

•

•

Entire requirement in terms of hardware and system software as a unit is obtained on a monthly rental basis.

The monthly rental cost is costeffective and affordable Maintenance of the machines is the sole responsibility of the vendors Vendors have a stock of spares for instantaneous service in order to avoid the heavy penalty for a day’s failure A service engineer at each office of the vendor is available for instantaneous rectification of any hardware related problems within the monthly rent The service engineers have also been trained to provide software solutions like SCORE2 installations, quick technical support on system software and application software.

31

STATE FOCUS: BIHAR

>

•

•

•

•

• • •

Registry offices need not bother about the hardware related issues Agreement with vendor is for one year and extension/ renewal is be subject to their performance Not less than 30 vendors are in the empanelled list to meet any exigency Renewal imposes certain further requirements on hardware and software on vendors as per the requirement and prevailing hardware technology There is healthy competition among the vendors for providing best services and getting more jobs Industry gets ample opportunity to provide the competitive price and qualitative services A helping attitude from vendors for project success and there is no expectation from vendors’ side except timely payment of their monthly rent and a recognition of their pivotal role in overall success

REGISTRATION BUSINESS PROCESSES

SCORE-2 has been a user-friendly software package designed on the Windows based clients/ server technology. The database being used is ORACLE8i and the front-end application is on D2K with security features like user-id, password along with roles and privileges.

The features of the SCORE-2 are: online capture of details of deed, autovaluation of the property(s) based on the Minimum Value (MVR) requisite criteria, auto-calculation of required stamp duty, additional stamp duty, registration and other fees, capturing of photograph and fingerprints of parties, generation and printing of all endorsements, receipt, memo of presentation and final registration endorsement in Hindi. Last but not the least, scanning of the deed is done to mark the completion of registration 32

•

process. Every deed bears a unique token number as a combination of running number and year. All registered deeds are allotted a running serial number and book wise deed number.

ADVANTAGES OF ICT SOLUTION

The SCORE-2 facilitates the Online Registration of deeds with following reforms in the business.

Simplification of the registration • process with the help of automated procedures resulting in delivery of original deeds in about 20 to 25 minutes • Transparency and accountability of registered deeds • Speedy, reliabile and one-stop nonstop disposal of deed registration • Auto-valuation of property based on MVR • Auto-calculation of stamp duty, additional stamp duty (if any), registration fee and other subsidiary fees (if any) • Photo and fingerprints capture of parties (executants and claimants), identifier • Generation and printing of memo of presentation, all endorsements, receipt and final registration endorsement and all statutory reports • Stamp duty, registration fee may be directly deposited in treasury banks • No need of stamp papers, resulting in elimination of black marketing of stamp papers as well as use of fake stamps

Preservation and archival of registered deeds on the electronic media like CD-ROMs The implementation of the SCORE-2 project reveals the fact that despite best available solutions we should not simply adopt a particular solution, rather we should do a SWOT analysis. Some times they very well fit the requirement and many a times they are not at all conducive to our own conditions and environments.

Deep involvement and analysis on various alternatives result in devising models.

The outcome of the above exercise i.e.

SCORE-2 on HOHB is that one can very well adopt the HOHB implementation model for rolling out large scale, public utility projects with the collection of token money from citizens for efficient services and disbursing a small part of the fund so collected on monthly rent payment to the involved entrepreneurs, The balance fund can very well be utilised for creating requisite facilities for public and other infrastructure for evolving a model office.

In the whole implementation of SCORE-2 and HOHB, the land and revenue department’s own investment has been nil. Thus, it is an eyeopener for the other state government departments providing citizen-centric services, wich can deploy their large scale ICT based solutions on the HOHB Model with multifaceted benefits. This is just a beginning, there is still miles to go...

Nirmal Kihsor Prasad (nk.prasad@nic.in) is presently Principal Systems Analyst (Scientist) in the National Informatics Centre, Bihar State Centre.

His Special interest is in DBMS technology, project management, and technical documentation.

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11 - 13 November 2008 Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia www.e-asia.org/telecentreforum

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The Asian Telecentre Forum, third in the series of telecentre forums organised by CSDMS in collaboration with telecentre.org, will focus on the knowledge sharing and telecentres 2.0 among the new and emerging telecentre networks in the region.

on mail us at For further informati org registration@e-asia.

The forum will also provide a platform for deliberating on the key issues facing the Asian telecentre movement and the way ahead. Experts will be engaged in close assessment of issues relating to project monitoring steered by external financial support, from international development agencies and governments in Asia.

Key Themes:

Call for papers!

1. Asian Telecentre Movement: Mapping the Emerging Markets 2. Telecentre Networks 2.0: A Cross-Cultural Learning 3. telecentre.org Academy: The Asian Regional Meeting 4. Content and Services: Innovations at the Last Mile 5. The Future of Telecentres: An Investors Perspective 6. Measuring the social impacts of telecentres 7. Social Entrepreneurship

The organisers invite papers on the above mentioned conference themes.

Abstracts should be submitted, in no longer than 400 words at: papers@e-asia.org Last date for submissions is 30 September 2008.

Host Organisation

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TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE

Passive Optical Network For the developing countries what matters most in implementing e-Government is low cost, high speed and efficient access network infrastructure. This article discusses about the low cost, high efficiency of Passive Optical Network (PON) which can help to implement e-Government in an effective way.

Mohammad Elias Eusuf

eGovernment is defined as the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to promote efficient and cost-effective government, facilitate more convenient services, allow greater public access to inform and make government more accountable to citizens [1]. Ideally, e-Government must increase opportunities for economic and social development and make government more transparent, responsive and democratic. This would require e-Government to offer services according to citizen’s choice, make government and its services more accessible, ensure and assist inclusion of weaker sections, provide information responsibly and use public resources with greater efficiency and effectiveness. It is found that in most countries, e-Government is limited to computerisation of government information and procedures, provision and delivery of online information occasionally. The focus is on information dissemination and the efforts are geared to the business sector to increase productivity rather than to the citizen for purposes of receiving feedback on government policies or addressing the needs of the excluded [1]. To implement e-Government in the true sense there is a need to do many things but this article discusses about the emerging, cost effective and efficient Passive Optical Network (PON) architecture which can help in implementing e-Government more effectively. The public organisations/agencies not only needs to be computerised, but their systems should have Local Area Network (LAN) environment and make web portals and public organisation come into the e-Government environment. It is also 34 }

important to access and share the information within the organisation and with other government bodies and finally deliver the services and information to the

data, image or video file for video conferencing, which are required in e-Government .

To ensure effective e-Government system, it is required to transport data, voice and video in a bundle through access network. But currently, most of the Asian countries public offices use dial up or Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL ) or Cable Modem (CM) technologies which are not optimal and cannot provide support for long distance. Here, PON technology can be useful for developing network infrastructure in implementing e-Government.

PON, THE NEXT GENERATION ACCESS NETWORK

Figure 1

citizens. Let’s take an example of ePolice system. Nowadays, terrorism is a major concern for most of the countries and sometimes it is necessary to send the information about terrorism activities or updates from central headquarter to all of the district/province police offices. Use of high speed PON technology makes it possible to send that information immediately. PON is a broadcast network in the downstream and it enables easy access to large

PON are point-tomultipoint optical networks with no active elements in the signal path from source to destination. A PON consist of an Optical Line Terminator (OLT) located at Central Office (CO) and a set of associated Optical Network Units (ONUs) located on the customer premise. General PON architecture is shown in the Figure-1. The data carrying capacity of PON is 1Gbps in both the directions and a single PON support upto 64 ONUs at a distance of 20km from OLT to ONU. There are different kind of PON architectures, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode www.egovonline.net

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Advantage@PON The advantages of using PONs as an access network for implementing e-Government are numerous.

• PONs allow to connect large areas such as main office and the local offices, operating at distances of over 20km.

• PON minimise fiber deployment in both main office and the local loop.

• PONs provides higher bandwidth due to deeper fiber penetration, offering gigabit-per second solutions.

• Operating in the downstream as a broadcast network, PONs allows video broadcasting either as IP video, or analog video.

• PON eliminates the need of installing active multiplexers at the splitting locations, thus relieving network operators from the gruesome task of maintaining curb-side units and providing power to them.

• Instead of active devices, PONs use small passive optical splitters, located in splice trays, and deployment as part of the optical fiber cable plant.

• Being optically transparent endto-end, PONs allows upgrade to higher bit rates.

PON (APON), Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON).

PON TECHNOLOGY FOR e-GOVERNMENT

Emerging PON architecture is the best choice to make optimal and efficient infrastructure for implementing eGovernment solutions. As shown in the Figure-2, let us consider that around a province/division under the same ministry have many offices, and LAN of each office will be connected with one ONU and each ONU will be connected with OLT placed in province/divisional headquarter which will make one province/divisional PON and all the PONs will be connected with the head office (which may be situated at a distance and connected through long reach optical fiber cable).

Also, if we consider that offices are ov

October 2008

situated in remote places where PON cannot be deployed, those remote office can be connected with nearest ONU with Base Station (BS) functionality through a wireless network. PON is the best candidate for implementing e-Government, as data traffic is increasing at an unprecedented rate. More and more users are getting online and are using more Figure 2 bandwidth-intensive applications. Market research has shown that, after upgrading to a broadband connection, users spend about 35 per cent more time online than before [5].Voice traffic is also growing, but at a much slower rate of 8 per cent annually. According to most analysts, data traffic has already surpassed the voice traffic. More and more subscribers telecommute, and desire the same network performance as they see on corporate LANs. More services and new applications are likely to be available as bandwidth per user increases.

Neither DSL, nor cable modems can keep up with such demand. Both technologies are built on top of existing communication infrastructure which are not optimised for data traffic. In cable modem networks there are only a few Radio Frequency (RF) channels for data, while the majority of bandwidth is tied up servicing legacy analog video.

DSL copper networks do not allow sufficient data rates at required distances due to signal distortion and crosstalk.

Most network operators have come to the realisation that a new, data-centric solution is necessary. Such a technology would be optimized for Internet Protocol (IP) data traffic. The remaining services, such as voice or video, will converge into a digital format and a true full-service network will emerge.

If we compare APON and EPON for e-Government, EPON is the best choice as almost 95 per cent of the network are Ethernet based and e-Government comes to the reality due to the expansion of Internet with is IP based solution and Ethernet looks like a logical choice for an IP data-optimised access network.

Newly – adopted quality of service (QoS) techniques have made Ethernet

networks capable of supporting voice, data and video. Ethernet is a inexpensive technology, which is ubiquitous and interoperable with a variety of legacy equipment.

In near future, we will see that the entire network will be optical based or optical wireless combined and most of the countries will be connected through inter continental optical cable such as submarine cable. In order to take the benefits of optical network, Asian and third world countries should deploy the network infrastructure based on PON for implementing e-Government.

REFERENCES

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2.

3.

4.

5.

Teruhiko Yoshimura (Ph. D),Researcher,UNCRD,“ICT Strategy and e-government in Japan: Incorporating Participatory Planning and Human Security in e-government Initiatives”.

ITU-T Recommendation G.981, “Broadband optical access systems based on passive optical networks (PONs),” 1998. http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ download/802.3-2002.pdf. http://www.ieee802.org/3/efm/index.html.

JP Morgan Securities,Inc.New York, “Broadband 2001.A Comprehensive Analysis of Demand ,Supply, Economics, and Industry Dynamics in the U.S. Broadband Market”, April 2001.

Mohammad Elias Eusuf (eeusuf@yahoo.com) is currently working in Bangladesh Computer Council under the ministry of Science & ICT in Bangladesh. His future research includes PON architecture as a candidate network for 4G mobile technologies.

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COUNTRY FOCUS: MALAYSIA

Registration Redefined It is the right time to create an online system for the National Registration Department (NRD) in Malaysia.

As Malaysia develops, the government must keep pace with the changes that are occurring.

Magiswary Dorasamy, Dr. Maniam Kaliannan and Dr. Murali Raman

The Internet is changing the way business is transacted the world over, and is now changing the way government interacts with citizens and businesses. While businesses were the first to adopt and use the information technologies, governments have followed quickly, especially in the adoption and use of the Internet. In Malaysia, the government’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project has been instrumental in providing necessary platform for change or transformation.

As one of the seven MSC flagships, eGovernment will contribute to the nation’s rapid development.

This article aims to study and highlight the problems with the current registration system and create a portal which will serve as one-stop center for all citizens to NRD’s key services such as certificates of birth, death, marriage, identification card, adoption, vehicle registration and citizenship. The current process of application for registration is manual, whereby citizens need to obtain the form to fill in the detail without much guidance and hassles.

The problems encountered in registration by citizens includes traveling long distances and standing in queues at an inconvenient hour; confronted by unfriendly officers; put into an endless telephone loop; standing in line for hours only to be told that your documentation is incomplete. All these happen to accomplish a menial task like renewing a car registration. People today value their time too much to be put up with the hassles of a slow and unreliable public service.

The proposed NRD’s one-stop portal will: • Make it easy for citizens to obtain service and interact with the government 36 }

in the state of Andhra Pradesh of India, the government portal called ‘e-Seva’ at www.esevaonline.com provides application for birth registration including application for issue of birth certificate. Not only that, together with the online birth registration, it provides all related information and links related to this event of life such as school, college, hostels, studies abroad and more.

BIRTH REGISTRATION SYSTEM

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Improve government efficiency and effectiveness • Improve government’s responsiveness to citizens This study focuses on the National Registration Department (NRD). NRD is a government department, which is responsible for facilitating all the registration related to birth, death, marriage, adoption, citizenship and identification card. Currently, the department provides an online service only to check status of identification card application through its website at http:// www.jpn.gov.my and services to extract birth, marriage and death registration certificates from myGovernment website at http://www.gov.my. The website provides all information regarding its services including the copies of the related forms.

THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

At present, many countries have implemented online birth registration and are running successfully. Singapore’s e-Citizen Center portal is one such example. Singaporeans can order a birth certificate and find out about immunising their child through this portal www.ecitizen.gov.sg. Meanwhile,

In the current scenario, whenever there is a birth, the parents will be given with the NRD form for birth registration by the hospital, at which the birth took place. The parent then fills up the form manually and personally visit NRD office for further processing, within fourteen days from the date of birth.

They then must take a queue number and wait for their turn to come. The form is submitted once their turn comes. Thereafter, they wait for the approval and printed original birth certificate. Figure 1 below depicts the above scenario.

Proposed System: An online birth registration system is the system proposed by the authors. Through this portal one can submit application of birth certificate online, track the status of registration and print the actual certificate at one’s convenience.

Additional supporting documents requirement, which are marriage certificate and parent’s identification card number are not required as in manual process. This information would be cross-checked by the system automatically with the NRD’s master database. Other important information is hospital birth identification number.

This number would be created by the hospitals when they submit the www.egovonline.net

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Figure 1: Registration of Births

birth details online and will be stored online using the hospital interface. This information consists of all data related to the newborn, such as weight, height, medical officer and more. Hospital registration will also create a sealed Person Identification Number (PIN) which will be printed and given to parents or informants in order to be able to log on to the NRD’s birth application interface. This PIN will be captured by the database. When the parents log on, the system will cross check the PIN with the database and allow usage. All this information will be stored in the database.

The master database will have all the information about citizen right from birth till death including marriage, adoption, and other information. With this information in the master database, their newborn child will be registered online on this portal.

The birth certificate records will be stored in parent’s MyKad (the government multi-purpose card) and the child’s MyKid. In order to upload this data, NRD must designate this information to Government Service Center (GSC) which is in charge and acts as a one-stop center for information in MyKad. If parents require the original birth certificate for instance, to register for school, or other applications, they can choose to print out the birth certificate after the application is approved over the portal, or go personally to Government Service Centre’s (GSC) office to collect the MyKid. MyKid will not replace the birth certificate; instead it would facilitate future transactions like school registration, hospitalisation and banking. Figure 2 illustrates the process flow of the proposed system.

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Figure 2: Proposed System Process Flow

NATIONAL REGISTRATION IDENTIFICATION CARD APPLICATION

At present, the citizens are applying for National Registration Identification Card (NRIC) by filling up NRD’s form JPN.KP01. They have to fill up this form and submit at the NRD’s counter. They are then requested to take a photograph and provide thumb print. After the card is ready they receive a notice from NRD to collect the card. Thereafter, NRD liaise with GSC to generate the MyKad. There are a lot of problems faced by the citizens in the current system.

This study intends to provide an interface between citizens and NRD’s officers to process the application.

The system will provide a form for citizens to apply over the web. They need to fill up all the information as required in the form and submit to the system. The system will cross check the data with the master database. If the person has earlier applied for birth certificate, which actually generates an identification number, this number will be referenced. If not, the system will create a new identification card number and a reference number. This reference number is to facilitate the user to check the application status.

If the status is approved, then the user must go to any of the NRD’s kiosk to provide the thumb print and scanned photo. Once all the information is uploaded to NRD’s database and once NRD pass the information to GSC to produce the MyKad, MyKad will be ready.

The current system requires citizens to provide thumb prints and their photograph in order to process IC application. Besides giving thumb prints manually using thumb pads, thumb prints can also be given using biometric

Figure 3: Online Identification Application Process Flow

thumb scanner and related software to store it.

There are many kinds of biometric scanners in the market which can support these options. Fingerprint and thumbprint scanners are popular for their ease of use. Several of these devices integrated into mice and stand-alone scanners. BioLink’s released U-Match 3.5 fingerprint scanner and U-Match MatchBook 5.0 takes the concept one step further. These scanners contains a built-in thumb-print scanner and provides log-on security with no extra hardware on the desk. The U-Match MatchBook provides added security by combining a fingerprint scanner and smart card reader. Both devices can be used by USB port. Biolink’s biometric scanners are widely used in government departments such as for passport departments in Senegal, Maldives, sales tax department in India, department of human services in San Francisco, and a few Banks in Kazakhstan. It is not practical for citizens to acquire it in order to perform the online registration considering the high price of acquiring it. Therefore, one of the ways to capture the fingerprint is by way of placing this type of biometric scanner at NRD’s kiosks at public places so that citizens can drop by at kiosks and provide thumb prints and photo while they do their shopping. The same is applicable for loading citizens’ photo into the NRD’s database. Figure 4 shows how the thumb print can be transmitted online over the kiosk to NRD. FEASIBILITY OF THE SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

Feasibility study is a preliminary study where the information needs of prospective users and the resource www.egovonline.net

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requirement, costs, benefits and feasibility of a proposed system are determined. According to James O’Brien, feasibility studies can be categorised into four, viz., organisational feasibility, economic feasibility, technical feasibility and cost/benefit feasibility. This article will discuss the organisational feasibility and technical feasibility.

Organisational Feasibility Organisational feasibility considers the impact on people who are stakeholders in the business process. The customers of NRD, who are the citizens, will have influence to the system. System developers such as analysts, designers, programmer, etc. play the main role in extracting the user requirement and codifying it into a workable system, that is error free and user friendly.

Organisational management and system users are the most important stakeholders. Since currently, NRD officers are using existing systems such as AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and DRF (Data Recovery Field), the culture of doing online is already there. Therefore, transferring the manual registration processes to an online system may not pose any objection or resistance.

Technical Feasibility: Technical feasibility is to assess which system can be successfully designed, developed and installed. Depending on the processes, different tools for different stages may be required. Among others are hardware, software, database system, security systems and disaster recovery systems. The most important criteria of these elements are reliability, capability

and availability. NRD has implemented some essential systems that may be integrated in the online NRD portal.

AFIS is a computerised fingerprint identification system. AFIS works based on 3 technologies; data storage, image processing and workflow management.

Usage of AFIS includes confirming the citizens’ identity by comparing between one and another, scanning new fingerprint to the system and cross checking with the records in the system, comparing among the fingerprint to avoid duplication. In short, this system makes it is feasible for NRD to implement the online registration system by using AFIS. Disaster Recovery Facility is another system that is implemented in NRD. It is a backup system. This is an important technical requirement as the malfunction of system can imply failure of use of other systems such as AFIS and GMPC (Government Multi Purpose Card). Disaster Recovery Centre (DRC) manages the application of the disaster recovery facility.

To summarise, the online registration system is technically feasible because users and organisations are familiar with the application and technology.

However, the new system must be checked for its compatibility with the existing system.

LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Security: Password authentification is not sufficient due to the fact that the system deals with highly confidential data. Further security measures

Figure 4 : Process of providing thumbprint at the NRD kiosk

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are needed in order to protect the information provided from hackers, virus and etc.

Thumb-print and Photograph: The system needs to incorporate technology to transfer thumb print and photograph, as part of the system. The suggestion to NRD to provide web-based kiosks may involve substantial infrastructure costs.

RECOMMENDATION FOR FUTURE ENHANCEMENT

One-stop center for all Government / Ministries Websites: This is further incorporated with inter-department or inter-agency data transfer. For example, a birth registration will be recorded also by the statistics department for statistical purposes, education department for forecasting school enrollment and probably notification to the parents about their placement at nearby schools, health department for notification of immunisation and latest updates on medications.

Provide a Database Query or Search Option: The proposed system only provides submission of registration. The future system may provide more options to citizens as well as to government officials to query and search on data stored in database, with implementation of strict and powerful security features.

Provide Options to Lodge Loss of Certificates or IC and Apply for its Copy: Currently, every loss of certificates is registered manually and the proposed system does not provide any option to lodge the loss or application for a copy of the certificates. The future system should include these options in order to provide a complete service. e-Payment: Create electronic payment system and incorporate it with the portal. Services such as marriage and adoption registration incur charges.

This charges must be made payable to NRD. The system with e-Payment facilities will definitely provide ease of use.

My Account: Provide an account for each citizen in relation to all their details with NRD. This section should only contain information specific to that particular individual and enable them to keep their personal details updated as well as to access records related to them. i. Birth Registration: (Option for 39

COUNTRY FOCUS: MALAYSIA

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foreigners) Options to be made available for foreigners who reside in Malaysia and gives birth locally, to register their birth through this NRD web portal. ii. IC Registration: (Additional information for Identification Card) All details about a citizen should be kept in the database. This includes police records. When the citizen is applying an IC, the records with police department will verify if that person has any criminal records or not.

Someday, people will log on to a website, establish their identity with a password and digital signature, and carry out their transaction with government without leaving their home. In time, the Internet will affect the public sector much more profoundly than it has the private sector, for the simple reason that people like to go out shopping whereas they dread the thought of making a trip to government office and do so only out of necessity.

Using the Internet would not only make people’s lives easier, it will change the way they think about government.

The NRD Portal, specifically, will provides an online one stop service center for its services. Citizens will no longer need to stand in queues for a service when they can carry out the transaction online and without any hassle. This generation will be the last to tolerate standing in line; the next will expect to be online.

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REFERENCES

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ComputerWorld (14 May, 2001), Making password passe, Executive Technology

by Howard Millman, Framingham. Also available at : www.biolinkusa.com Government of Andra Pradesh, India, Onestop non-stop service. Available at : www. esevaonline.com Hazman S., Ala-aldin A. (2000), A Study of the Use of Information Technology and its Impact on Service Quality in the Malaysian Public Sector, paper presented in EROPA Hong Kong Conference 2000.

Hazman S. (2004). e-Government in evolution: Evaluative survey of government websites , Draft Research Report submitted to Institute of Research Development and Commercialization, UiTM, Malaysia.

Holmes, D (2001), eGov : eBusiness Strategies for Government. London: Nicholas Brealey Publication.

Lieber, A. (2000), e-Government initiatives meeting. Available at: http://www.osti.gov Lorna Uden of Staffordshire University, (2002). Design Process for Web Applications, IEEE Multimedia, Oct – Dec 2002 Issue.pg. 47 – 55.

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New Zealand, (2001), e-Government: A Vision for New Zealanders. http://www.e-Government.govt.nz O’Brian, James (2005). Introduction to Information Systems. (12th Ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.

Shirley Ann Becker of Northern Arizona University, Anthony Berkemeyer of Texas Instruments. (2002), Rapid Application Design and Testing of Web Testing of Web Usability, , IEEE Multimedia, Oct – Dec 2002 Issue, Pg 38 – 46.

Singapore Ministry of Finance(2003), eCitizen. Your gateway to all government services. Available at www.ecitizen.gov.sg The Star (26 February, 2003), MyKid for all newborn babies soon, Kuala Lumpur.

Also available at : http://www.iris.com.my/ News/new_detail.asp?id=93 The NST (13 February, 2004), Many Mistakes made in MyKad, Kuala Lumpur.

Also available at: http://www.emedia. com.my/Current_News/NST/Friday/ Letters/20040213073808/Article/indexb_ html

Magiswary Dorasamy (magiswary@mail.utar.edu.my) is a Faculty of Accountancy and Management, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, (UTAR) in Malaysia. She teaches subjects such as Information Systems, Management Information Systems, e-Commerce and Management. Prior to this, she worked in IT companies for 8 years.

Dr. Maniam Kaliannan (maniam123@salam.uitm.edu.my) is Senior Lecturer at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia. He teaches subjects related to e-Government, Economics and Human Resource Management.

Dr. Murali Raman, (murali.raman@mmu.edu.my) Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Management Multimedia University, Malaysia. He teaches subjects related to eBusiness, e-Commerce, Human Resource Management, Management Information System and Cyberpreneurship.

West Bengal completes rural e-Governance project Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Department, Government of West Bengal, India has successfully completed a rural e-Governance programme 210 rural local bodies across 19 districts of the state.

Ranjit Kumar Maity, Joint Secretary of Panchayat Raj and Rural Development department, stated that the total project cost was INR 38 million of which 40 percent was spent on capacity building activities in the Gram Panchayats. The project involves a expansion of existing Personal

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Computer (PC) infrastructure to ensure that software such as the Gram Panchayat Management System (GPMS), Integrated Fund Monitoring and Accounting System (IFMAS) and Rural Household Survey (RHS) could be installed and accessed quickly and efficiently by all Panchayati Raj institutions. To bridge the digital divide, the programme was targeted at providing effective governance through computer penetration within the Panchayati Raj institutions.

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DIT PLANS TO LAUNCH CAMPAIGN FOR e-GOVERNANCE PROJECT The Department of Information Technology (DIT) is planning to launch a high-pitched awareness campaign for its INR 230 billion e-Governance project. The DIT has earmarked INR 0.15 billion for the campaign, which is likely to be launched around November 2008.

Under the e-governance project, the government is trying to bring many services to the doorsteps of the masses. Under the e-governance plan, around 1 lakh Common Service Centres (CSC) have been proposed, which will provide e-governance services in the country’s far flung areas. So far the government has implemented around 12,000 CSCs in eight states. Apart from educating the masses about technology, the campaign will generate demand for the services.

The national e-Governance plan would include services like road transport, land records, commercial taxes, employment exchanges, agriculture, civil supplies, treasuries, land registration, policy and education at the state level. At the central level it will cover areas such as insurance, central excise, National ID, pensions, e-passports, banking, passport, visa and income tax.

RWANDAN COMMERCIAL COURTS PLANS TO DIGITISE SOON

Soon, the courts of Rwanda will be facilitated with digital recording to reduce the cost of doing business in the country and act as a catalyst to increase both local and foreign investments.

The recording of court proceedings, the digitalization project will also help businessmen, researchers and other interested parties to access court documents at ease. The documents will also be available online for public access. The digital recording in commercial courts will also help in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness while resolving court disputes. Installations and implementation of the equipment is expected to be completed by next year.

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MADHYA PRADESH PLANS TO DEPLOY SWAN INFRASTRUCTURE The Government of Madhya Pradesh, India, is deploying State Wide Aarea Networks (SWAN) to support its e-Governance projects. Delhi based Tulip Telecom will deploy the SWAN infrastructure across the state. The network supports data, voice and video and will enable the state to implement various e-Governance activities, according to a statement. The network will be established on a built own operate and transfer model for five years. It will be a total Internet Protocol (IP) network based on open standards having scalability and capacity. Once the SWAN is deployed in the state, the government will have an integrated backbone for common citizen services, online monitoring of promotional scheme, integration of government data bases and unified communication.

SIX DEPARTMENTS IN KERALA SECRETARIAT TO GO PAPERLESS The State Government of Kerala has taken a policy decision to implement paperless office system in six departments in the Secretariat. Under the policy, six departments are finance, information technology, public works, food and civil supplies, higher education and nonresident Keralites.

To begin with, the process of handling petitions received in these department would be made paperless within a few months. Other files would also be made paperless in a phased manner. An IT cell would be constituted at the Secretariat by drawing officials qualified in IT from various departments in the Secretariat itself in order to monitor e-governance at the Secretariat. Paperless office has already been implemented at the Kerala State IT Mission, all centres of Akshaya, Kerala State IT Infrastructure Limited and Kerala State Urban Development programme. Once the petition process is made paperless, all the petitions received in the respective departments

would be scanned and forwarded to the concerned section. An official can access the file and make his remarks and pass it on to the next official in the hierarchy. The remarks made by an official could be tracked later.

The main advantage of the system is that anybody could track the status of his petition through the Internet.

Similarly, an officer could access the files send to him through the Internet from anywhere in the world.

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NEWS

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e-TICKETING KIOSKS LAUNCHED BY PIA

CDAC AND NIC SIGN MOU FOR e-GOVERNANCE PROJECT

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) launched its first e-Ticketing kiosk in Karachi recently. This move is to facilitate round the clock access to national airline tickets on domestic flights.

The launch marked the signing of an agreement between Managing Director of PIA Captain Aijaz Haroon and CEO McDonald Development Licensee for Pakistan Amin Lakhani in McDonald’s Seaview restaurant at Clifton.

PIA has tied up with McDonald in cities such Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad where PIA e-Ticketing machine facility will be available to the customers. Till date, 10 such machine are been installed. Passengers can make the payment for tickets with their credit cards for domestic flights and the facility will soon be available for international flights. These e-Ticketing kiosks at McDonald restaurants operate like an ATM therefore ensuring ease of use.

Amin Lakhani aid Macdonald PIA eTicketing machine facility in six kiosks at McDonald restaurant.

They plan to scale it up gradually and open more such kiosks in the country.

Now, India will have indigenous Operating System for the country’s various e-Governance projects. In this regard, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Department of Information Technology has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with National Informatics Centre.

Named as Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) the operating system is Linux-based developed by C-DAC and it supports 18 Indian vernacular languages.

BOSS will be deployed for some of the NIC developed and manitained e-Governance projects. These projects are in areas such as education, healthcare among others in municipality and taluka level of administrations.

NIC will identify suitable e-Governance applications for the deployment of the BOSS while C-DAC will provide support for telephonic, email and portal delivery mechanism for the e-governance program.

KMC HAS AN IT DEPARTMENT NOW! In order to streamline administration and expedite e-Governance, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has set up a separate Information Technology department. The existing data processing department has been merged into the new department.

There will be deputy managers, assistance managers, managers, engineers, data helpers and clerks. Out of 15 deputy managers, nine will be posted at the data centre as it will operate round the clock. Two systems managers will look after data centre and networking activities, software application and data securities activities. One manager will look after work in the added areas. IT professionals will assist the controlling officers and attempts will be made to turn KMC into a paperless office. With the introduction of the unit area assessment from next year, it is necessary to introduce e-Governance in borough offices to help property tax payers. The online system will connect all borough offices, maternity homes, stores and garages with the head quarters. It will make the administration both transparent and effective.

HARYANA TO DEVELOP STATE DATA CENTRE Haryana is ready to take the last step towards IT infrastructure development in the form of state data centre. The project, which is likely to catalyze an investment of about INR 500 million, is waiting an approval from the Central Government of India.

The state data centre will be developed and maintained by a private company in collaboration with Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation (Hartron). It will act as the main data centre where all the state departments will store their data in electronic form for their own use, as well for making it accessible to the general public. The data centre will have a 35 rack storage capacity which will be sufficient to store data for the next 10 years and the capacity may be scaled up in future as per the requirement. Haryana has done considerable work in setting up the State Wide Area Network (SWAN), Common Service Centres (CSCs), eDisha etc. These initiatives will help make rural areas IT enabled. SWAN in Haryana, known as “ADHAAR” has been established to provide a dependable and secure communication corridor between the state headquarter, district headquarters and block and tehsil headquarters.

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11 | 12 | 13 November 2008 Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (KLCC) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Focus Areas & Themes • • • • • • • •

National eHealth Policy & Strategy Framework Country Case-Studies on eHealth Projects & Implementations Capacity Building & Training for eHealth Environment Emerging & Cutting-Edge Technologies in eHealth ICT-based Automation of Healthcare Operations & Management Data Standards & Interoperability for Health Information Exchange Online Applications for Consumer & Enterprise Healthcare Management eHealth Implications on Medical Tourism & Offshore Healthcare Key Sessions & Panels

Commonwealth Ministerial Dialogue – Commonwealth Secretariat and Commonwealth Medical Association, with support of Ministry of Health, Malaysia will bring a top level delegation of Health Ministers from 8 Commonwealth countries in Asia, comprising - Bangladesh, Brunei, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

The Ministerial dialogue will focus on exploring national eHealth strategies by sharing the vision of the top leadership and creating an opportunity for learning from each other’s experiences.

Asian Healthcare CIO Conclave – While technology and IT promises to transform healthcare through improved service quality, better patient safety, higher cost efficiency and enhanced quality, the IT managers and CIOs of modern healthcare organisations face a myriad of challenges, be it in terms of implementing and operationalising ICTs, gaining organisation-wide acceptability for systems and processes or even achieving seamless work flow and interoperability.

In order to address all these issues and beyond, through creation of an open forum for constructive debate, brainstorming and experience sharing, the event will bring together some eminent CIOs and IT Heads from reputed healthcare organisations across the region and put together a panel (titled – ‘Asian Healthcare CIO Conclave’) that will seek to explore viable solutions to challenging questions facing the industry at the moment.

Contact Information Programme Enquiry: Dipanjan Banerjee (dipanjan@ehealthonline.org M : +91-9968251626) Sponsorship and Exhibition Enquiry: Arpan Dasgupta (arpan@ehealthonline.org, M- 91-9911960753)

Host Organisation

Organisers

Presenting Publication

Supporting Partners

http://www.e-asia.org/2008/ehealth/index.asp

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INTERVIEW

TRANSFORMING e-Governance for e-Society

“SQL Star is set to transform e-Governance for e-Society through guaranteeing quality services and improving access to those services” says NR Ganti, Chairman and Managing Director, SQL Star International Limited in an email interview with Prachi Shirur of egov magazine

What is the e-Governance vision of SQL Star?

The vision statement of SQL Star International clearly articulates the key of future e-Governance direction such as: • Be people-centric by focusing on adding value to the customers.

• Focus on the development of society by leveraging information.

• Promotion, creation and sharing of information and knowledge through various channels.

How important do you think is e-Governance for nations?

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SQL Star is set to transform e-Governance for e-Society through guaranteeing quality services and improving access to those services. e-Governance will usher one stop solution to citizen for multiple tasks, resulting in eradication of frustration to the common man as he had to deal with many functionaries, reduction of wastage of time of a citizen as multiple tasks are being performed at these centres, easy maintenance of Monitoring and Information System (MIS) leading to quick reconciliation of treasury collections.

It also provides G2C and B2C services and brings the department closer to all the sections of the society, especially www.egovonline.net

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the under privileged by providing a single, efficient information dissemination system to the citizen for availing Government services by minimising multiple interaction points for the citizen and hence reduces the wastage of valuable time.

What are SQL Star’s solutions to address the IT needs of the state governments, central government and local government bodies for facilitating effective G2C, G2G and G2E interactions?

SQL Star International Ltd. has opened e-Sampark and e-Jan Sampark Centres in the city of Chandigarh for the benefit of citizens in turn under the initiative of IT Department of Chandigarh Administration. We are providing the following services of the Department through Web Portal – 1. Domestic servant registration 2. Issue of birth certificate 3. Issue of death certificate 4. Pension distribution 5. Issue of bus passes 6. Issue of senior citizen’s card 7. Payment of electricity bill 8. Payment of taxes 9. Space booking 10. Tenant registration 11. Vehicles challan payment 12. Water bill payment 13. Telephone bill payment 14. Chandigarh housing board Private services are also being provided such as payment of telephone bills of private operators like Airtel and Spice.

We are providing Passport applications forms of Regional Passport office. We are able to sell about more than 1500 Passport application forms per month in Chandigarh and neighbouring states of Chandigarh and we are accepting about 300 to 350 duly filled in Passport application on behalf of Regional Passport Officer, per month. We are also accepting BSNL telephone bill (Landline and WLL) at our all 9 e-Sampark Centres. Thus, we are providing services to the Central Government through e-Sampark activities under the ambit of IT department and these facilities are very effective.

What advantages does SQL Star solutions has over its competitors?

Since last 3-4 years, we are operating two big projects namely; e-Sampark/e-Jan Sampark and e-Krishi. We are very close to the customers as well as the actual users of e-Governance facilities. Our operation has been 100 percent successful in both the projects and whoever is visiting our centres in Chandigarh and Bhopal are appreciating the performance of the SQL Star International Ltd. Thus, we have got an edge over our competitors who have just entered or planning to enter for these services (common services facilities).

The e-Sampark project and e-Krishi Vipanan projects that you have implemented with the state governments have won several awards. What are some of your other current e-Governance projects?

SQL Star International is implementing e-Governance projects in the State of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, ov

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Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. In some of the states, since specifications are in different stages, government is still to give final shape to the Report for Proposal (RFP).

It may be noted that these projects are huge in nature and it needs a lot of involvement of manpower for the execution of the project, depending upon the geographical structure of the state. Therefore, SQL Star International is limiting its activities where the requirement is small in nature and decision making power is at a much lower level. However, seeing the central government initiatives for establishing

SQL Star International is implementing e-Governance projects in the State of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. In some of the states, since specifications are in different stages, government is still to give final shape to the Report for Proposal (RFP) Common Services Centers (CSCs) all over India, we are trying to associate as a consortium partners with the major players where we can impart trained and experienced staff and take the responsibility without much financial expense to our company. The business potentials are very big.

What are your suggestions to the government in implementing the IT Projects ?

SQL Star can act as a consultant for starting CSC/Jan Sampark Kiosk activities in the different states.

Our suggestions to IT department of different states would be to associate with the local players so that the project can be made more viable in terms of employment and low cost working skill.

What are some of your plans to expand your market further?

Future plans of the SQL Star International Ltd are – i) In Chandigarh three more e-Sampark centres are proposed. These centres will be coming in phases and will cover approximately 50,000 additional customers per month. ii) Increase more and more services in the existing system. iii) As per IT Engineering instruction, we are also targeting 40-45 of Engineering Institutions to start Star Catalog Archive Server (CAS) implementation and high end training programmes on top most priority in the city of Chandigarh as well as in the rest of Punjab. iv) We are also going to start 28 more e-Jan Sampark centres in Chandigarh. This will increase the activities of grievance, Right to Information (RTI) and other forms print out to the citizen. v) We are in touch with the Haryana Electronics Development Corporation (HARTRON) which is the Nodal Agency of e-Governance for Haryana and Chandigarh. We are also approaching HARTRON for e-Programs activities and ERP packages.

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INTERVIEW

Citizen Dashboard “Citizen Dashboard is defined as a tool to enhance the transparency and accountability with respect to various schemes launched by the government” says Sudhir Aggarwal, Senior Vice President and Head - Government initiatives Sify Technologies Limited, in an email interview to Prachi Shirur of egov magazine

What is Sify’s road map for e-Governance in India? e-Governance is expected to deliver and facilitate natural benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) like efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, integrity, agility, flexibility, integration, concurrency, secured transactions, high availability, redundancy and scalability.

Sify is a leader in providing core infrastructure end-to-end services like Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) / Virtual Private Network (VPN), connectivity for built on vendor agnostic back-end, data centres, security and e-Learning services. Sify will continue to build on and maintain this leadership position and we will further enhance the services portfolio in Document Management Solution (DMS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and web development.

What is the Citizen Dashboard? How does it facilitate e-Governance?

There are different views and perspective to Citizen Dashboard.

Currently, Citizen Dashboard, is more of a Government to Citizen (G2C) website/portal with the objective for (1) government to disseminate whole lot of information and/or (2) Stakeholders to interact with the government.

Citizen Dashboard is defined as a tool to enhance the transparency and accountability with respect to various schemes launched by the government, measure the implementation progress of these schemes in terms of financial outlay and benefits to end-beneficiary, and impact analysis on the society.

It is about creating a basic framework for national level scheme conceptualisation, building/ development, implementation/ rollout, and monitoring mechanism. There 46 }

have been many initiatives/ projects kicked-off in the country.

Funds have been allocated and spent, but projects have never seen the light.

What are Sify’s initiatives in Citizen Dashboards? What are its competitive advantages over such initiatives by other companies in this field?

Sify has rich, comprehensive experience and expertise in creating, deploying, and managing commercial portal with various Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Citizen (B2C) services. Sify has a dedicated team in place to run Citizen Dashboard as a successful line of business. Sify has also deployed more than 3500 iWays across the Country. Sify can definitely extend its vast experience in conceptualising and developing such a framework in partnership with the Government of India.

What in your opinion should be the agencies which should implement Citizen Dashboard and what are the benefits of the same?

Many state and department portal have implemented various e-Governance initiatives. Nodal agencies such as Planning Commission should implement such initiatives. It might be interesting thought to conceive this as a Mission Mode Project (MMP) under Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India. Citizen Dashboard as a system can minimise the need for people to seek information under Right to Information Act (RTI). The Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) may wish to undertake such an initiative.

This will help ensuring timeliness, enhanced transparency and accountability, and overall efficient and effectiveness in implementation, proper utilisation of funds, and flexibility in managing the allocation/ re-allocation of funds.

One as a Citizen/ business/ stakeholder, should be able to look for at one’s entitlements and dues. One should be able to know, what all has been paid/ disbursed/ issued under one’s name. One should be able to demand one’s dues and raise issues/ concerns based on the facts.

What challenges do you foresee in the implementation of Citizen Dashboards in India?

The implementation of Citizen Dashboards in India can be faced with various challenges. There could be many perceived challenges to such an initiative, but not real challenges in the true sense. The availability of back-end systems by line department and integration with Citizen Dashboard could be perceived as a major challenge, but this should be one of the key requirements of the framework itself. In terms of acceptance, all stakeholders in my opinion would welcome Citizen Dashboard. In other words, it may be right to call it ‘Stakeholder Dashboard’ in a larger perspective. www.egovonline.net

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Anniversar y

Look forward to Anniversary Special issue - JANUARY 2009 Special features on : • Current status of e-governance in India • Central Government Projects • State Government Projects • Common Service Centres (CSCs) • e-Governance initiative in Banks • International Perspective

Exclusive Interviews with : • Policy Makers • CEO/CIO • Implementors • Solution Providers • Technology Experts • Project Heads • Domain Experts

Industry focus on : • Network and Security • Storage and Server • RFID • Broadband & Wireless (3G, WiMAX) • Document Management • Green initatives

For advertising enquiry contact: Gautam Navin (gautam@csdms.in), +91-981812525, Debabrata Ray (debabrata@csdms.in), +91-9899650692

NEWS UNCTAD’S REPORT FOCUSES ON MOBILE TELEPHONY AND TELECENTRES A United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD) report states that use of modern ICT gadgets like the mobile phones and net access are helping to narrow the digital bridge between the rich nations and emerging economies.

The Information Economy Report 2007 - 2008 finds that mobile telephones and telecentres support livelihoods in developing countries. The new UNCTAD report states that ‘a decline in the cost of ICT has extended its use by the poor, who capitalise especially on information obtained by telephone to support livelihoods in agriculture and various small businesses’. The study illustrates ICT contributions to poverty reduction by focusing on two examples; the use of mobile telephones for conducting micro-business in Africa; and the creation of telecentres for the benefit of poor communities.

In Africa, there were 50 million new mobile subscribers in 2006, and in 2007 the total number of mobile subscriptions reached

an estimated 200 million. This means an average of more than 20 active cell phones per 100 persons. Mobile telephony has practically replaced fixed lines in many countries. The reported noted that the flexibility and ease of mobile technology has led to its widespread use in business transactions, most particularly by very small firms or micro-businesses. To understand how telecentres support livelihoods among the poor, UNCTAD surveyed a number of telecentre networks in Bangladesh and India. The survey assessed which services telecentres are providing, who benefits from those services, and what are the key environmental and institutional factors that enable telecentres to help the poor raise living standards.

The results show that most telecentres are concentrating on providing access to ICT and on developing basic ICT skills. In line with the type of services offered, telecentres are primarily used for information and education purposes.

BSNL TO CONNECT 1.48 LAKH VILLAGES THROUGH INTERNET

Soon, Bharat Snachar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) will connect 1.48 lakh more villages with highspeed Internet connection in the coming six months. So far, around 30,000 villages are getting this facility.

The PSU would connect all districts and blocks of the country with high-speed Internet connectivity by March 2009 covering 5,000 cities.

At present, 95 per cent of the district headquarters and about 44 per cent of the blocks are covered under BSNL’s broadband connectivity.

Government will initially connect 5,000 blocks through 48

wireless broadband services soon after the allocation of the spectrum, which will connect all villages coming within a radius of 10 km of the block headquarter. The projects aims to help institutional users like schools, public health centers, village panchayats and the Community Service Centres (CSCs) meant for providing e-governance and data services to the rural areas. Also, to boost telephony in rural areas, BSNL recently introduced a tariff plan called Gramin 75, under which fixed monthly charges have been reduced from INR 110 to INR 75.

AIRTEL CALLING CARD SERVICES IN SINGAPORE In order to attract thousands of NRI’s living in Singapore, Bharti Airtel is planning to launch its calling card services in Singapore. Next, Bharti will launch these services in Canada.

Currently, the company provides this service in the United States and the United Kingdom, where its offerings are 15-30 percent cheaper than the prevailing call rates there. Calling cards services will enable Indians and NRI’s to make calls to their native country, they can purchase online and use across any landline and mobile phone. The services will be available to around 400,000 NRIs and students in Singapore as a pre-paid option. The service will allow subscribers in Singapore to make calls to India at 10.5 cents/minute on a toll-free access number. The subscribers can also call other countries, as per the list available on Airtel CallHome website. In the promotional period, Airtel is providing 70 percent extra talk time to its subscribers, bringing effective call rates down to 6.2 cents/minute.

EVERY SECOND INDIAN TO HAVE A MOBILE BY 2012 A renowned London-based research firm, Business Monitor International stated that 612 million mobile subscribers by 2012 will help India clock a mobile teledensity of roughly 51 percent by 2012.

India is already the world’s second largest mobile market, behind China’s 500 plus million mobile subscriber base. The new numbers overtake earlier estimates, including from UBS, Citigroup and Credit Suisse predicting a mobile population of between 400 to 450 million by March 2010. Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers have been more even conservative, betting on a base of just 400 million by 2010. However, India will reach this milestone in 2009 itself. India’s mobile revolution has been a huge social leveler, with the growing number of users tying a diverse nation in a manner rarely seen before. According to Richard Branson, founder, Virgin Group, which tied up with Tata Teleservices to launch branded services in India recently said, with more than 215 million Indians aged between 14 and 25 years over the next three years we expect to be adding 50 million new youth subscribers.

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EVENT DIARY

egov Knowledge Exchange Series II

Urban Local Governance

Participants in egov Knowledge Exchange Series II

egov has been the pioneer for bringing in meaningful discussion on e-Governance through its various platforms – conferences and print media. In yet another effort towards bringing stakeholders under a single platform, egov magazine in association with National Institute for Urban Affairs (NIUA) and United States Agency for International Development (USGAID) organised the Knowledge Exchange Series II on September, 5, 2008, in Ambassador Hotel, New Delhi. egov Knowledge Exchange Series II focused upon Local Governments in South Africa by bringing in a fruitful discussion on the context and reforms of local bodies in South Africa and sharing such knowledge with our Indian counterparts. The Series II started off with a welcome note by Ravi Gupta, Chief Editor, egov whereby he explained the need for such exchange of knowledge ov

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across countries through debates and public awareness in the context of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which can change our lives for the better. Welcoming all the distinguished speakers from Durban and the dignitaries he welcomed all for exchanging ideas on good governance.

In his introductory remarks Lee Baker, Chief of party Indo-USAID Fire (D) Project, United States Agency for International Development introduced the key points of discussion. He highlighted the importance and the challenges the Indian cities are facing and the government response mechanism through Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM) for tackling governance and infrastructural issues. He said that with the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s cities took a different turn. The growth of the economy resulted in the increase in

the population. He said that there are cities in India where the population has doubled in 15 years. Baker brought into light the fact that Indian cities accounts for 30 per cent of the total population but it contributes 60 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Indian economy. He further said that there are major issues surrounding infrastructure in these growing cities. He mentioned that the reforms which have taken place such as reform of property taxes introduction of e-Governance are of great importance in terms of local governance.

He called upon the speakers from Durban to speak about the issues such as the structure of government grants, inclusion of private sector in the service delivery mechanism, how do they approach the low income groups in the urban areas and which are the nodal agencies for dealing with local governance in Durban.

Dr. Michael Sutcliffe, City Manager, e-Thekwini Project, Durban, South Africa started his presentation with an overview of South Africa’s local governance scenario. He reflected that South Africa has a lecacy of colonialism with problems of racism and authority of control, advisory governance which were part of the British dominated state.

The new governance which was built up was representative and participatory democracy. The local governance in Durban provides basic amounts of water and electricity on a free basis.

Earlier only 25 percent of the people in Durban had access to portable water and now the number has risen to 95 per cent and the local government aims at increasing it to 100 per cent by the end of this year.

Local government is a seperate sphere of government that is independent.

He further said that in Durban the municipalities have the right to govern on its own initiative. The 49

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constitution promotes developmental local governance in the country for giving priority to the local needs of the community.

He also mentioned that his country has various structural associations at different levels such as the South African Local Government Association at a national level, Metropolitan Manager’s Forum, and also city to city relations with – Chennai in India, Chicago, Rhoterdamn at an international level.

Going into the intricacies of local governance in South Africa, Sutcliffe talked about the major challenges that South Africa is facing in the context of globalisation. The first is the porting sector which was built in many years ago and the main challenge now is to keep it in the pace of the economic growth.

The port in general and the logistics surrounding that are some of the major issues in Durban today. Manufacturing is the second denomination in the economy. The thrid key challenge is how to grow the tourism industry.

He said that the major elements contributing to such growth are through – infrastructural development and ICT. Durban also aims at hosting some of the prominent international games such as FIFA World Cup, Olympics in the future for which they are already in the process of building a stadium of global standards. The stadium as Suttcliffe mentioned has a flexible capacity of seating from 75, 000 people to 90,000 depending upon the requirements of the game. Apart from these, the Durban Municipal Council is also building up 16,000 houses each year for the native population. These housing is aimed at relocating the slum population of the city. GIS as a technology is also used for monitoring water supply and wastage on a daily basis. In his concluding remarks, Sutcliffe said that institutional governance, usage of ICT are critical in making local governance successful in Durban.

Sutcliffe’s presentation was followed

by Krish Ashwanth Kumar, Deputy City Manager, Treasury e-Thekwini Project, Durban, South Africa who focussed on the sustainability aspects of local governance. He touched upon the essence of governance in a transforming economy and society without losing the intention of creating 50

a sustainable local governance. He said that esuring sustainability and viability in local governance is ensured by the productive, well – governed and inclusive local bodies.

Speaking about the vision of local governance in Durban, he stressed upon the point that in Durban, it is believed to have a People First Policy for providing world class citizen services.

He said that the budget is prepared on a consultative basis for participative budgeting through various stakeholders and regional hearings. Apart from this the annual report is also presented to the communities.

Kumar further said that the key issues concering local governance in South Africa are – rationalisation of pension funds, common pay curve, asset management, economic, effective and efficient system, common coordination employment at local, provincial and national level of government. Kumar also spoke about the Revenue Management

The key principles of Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA), 2003, South Africa are : • Promotion of Financial Governance • Ensuring Strategic Budgeting • Modernising Financial Management • Promotion of Co-operative and Consultative government

where he said that the model is one of a self funded and the asset management which are important parts of the South African local governance.

In his presentation, Willy Govender, e-Thekwini Project, Durban, South Africa said that the e-Thekwini project has to cater to approximately 1,40000 non-residential and a large chunk is still residential. He stated that the Municipal Property Rates Act came into effect from 2005 onwards which primarily looked at a uniform system across the city based on the principles of simplicity and certainity while taking into account the historical aspects of the region. The valuation process under the Revenue Mangement system is purely a statistical one which includes things such as:

data analysis, model specification, data transformation, model testing and rating policy. It is said that the evaluation is published and the public at large gets a 30 day period to refute the evaluation process.

Govender further said that the e-Thekwini Project created on Ramco’s Virtual Platform for which they have the Intellectual Propoerty Rights (IPR).

The benefits of the system are marked as accuracy, faster payment process and a steady income. In his concluding remarks he said that usage of technology for the good management in financial, administartive and economic management.

Highlighting the Indian perspective in local governance, Chetan Vaidya, Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs, India briefly spoke about the Indian scenario of local governance. He stated that India has 4000 local bodies to take care of a growing population.

Reflecting upon the presentation made by his counterparts from Durban, Vaidya mentioned that some of the issues are common to both India and South Africa. Sustainability is one such issue and he said that the JNURM is focussed towards achieving the same.

Reforms such as e-Governance, GIS tax based system and pension schemes are some of the aspects that the misssion is focussing upon. Agreeing with the point that usage of technology is crucial for urban local governance, he said that we should not restrict ourself to Personal Computers only, but should also emphasise upon data, storage and application models of ICT. The presentations were followed by an interactive discussion on issues of asset management, sustainability and what has been the role of e-Governance in local bodies. Overall, the egov Knowledge Exchange Series II was a success with a full house audience participation that stayed till the end and participated effectively in the closing discussion as well. The event was concluded with a vote of thanks from Ravi Gupta who announced that there would be more such events coming in the near future and egov will continue in its endeavour of bringing together stakeholders from across the spectrum to discuss issues of e-Governance.

Nilakshi Barooah, nilakshi@egovonline.net

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XII National Conference on e-Governance, Goa NATIONAL AWARDS FOR e-GOVERNANCE 2008-09 Nominations are invited from Central Ministries/Departments, States/UTs, Districts, Local Bodies, PSUs, Civil Society Organisations and Industry for awards in the following categories :•

Excellence in Government Process Re-engineering

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Exemplary Horizontal Transfer of ICT-based Best Practice

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Outstanding Performance in Citizen-Centric Service Delivery

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Innovative Usage of Technology in e-Governance

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Exemplary Usage of ICT by PSUs

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Best Government Website

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Specific Sectoral Award : Focus Sector for the current year: Health

Last date for Submission of Nominations for National Awards : 15th October, 2008

Details of the Awards Scheme (including downloadable nomination forms) are available on DAR&PG website:http://darpg.nic.in . Kindly send the nominations in the prescribed format to e-mail ID: awards.arpg@nic.in and egovawards@gmail.com

For information on submission of nominations, please contact :

Media Partner

Director (e-Governance), Department of AR&PG Sardar Patel Bhawan, Parliament Street New Delhi-110001, Tele +91-11-23743030

Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions Government of India

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EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS

This section keeps you abreast with people on the move in the government and the private sector.

Raju Sharma, has been posted as Mission Director (Joint Director rank), in the Department of Science and Technology, Tech Info Forecasting and Assessment CI (TIFAC), under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. He is 1982 batch Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre.

Dr. Duvuri Subbarao takes charge as the new Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor. Dr. Subbarao replaces Dr. YV Reddy. He held the post of Finance Secretary in the Ministry of Finance.

Prior to this, he was Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance. He belongs to the 1972 batch, IAS officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre. Dr. Subbarao has wide experience on issues in public finance and has held important posts in this area.

Kiran Dhingra, Director General Shipping has been posted as Secretary, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) in Government of India, (GOI).

She is an IAS officer of the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre and belongs to the 1975 batch. She is replacing H.S.Anand (IAS of Haryana cadre from 1973 batch) who retired on August 31, 2008.

S. Jayaraman has been made the Member, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) in Delhi. Indian Minister of Power Sushilkumar Shinde administered the Oath of Office and Secrecy to S. Jayaraman. He woked for more than

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20 years in the mining and power sector and retired as Chairman and Managing Director of Neyveli Lignite Corporation in May 2008.

Sanjay Singh, presently Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, has been appointed as the next Ambassador of India to Iran.

M L Kumawat, Special Secretary, Home, will be the new Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF). He is 1972 batch India Police Services (IPS) officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre. Kumawat succeeds A K Mitra, who is retiring on September 30, 2008.

P K Misra, former Secretary of Union Agriculture Ministry, has taken charge as the Chairman of Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commissioner (GERC). Misra is a retired IAS officer from 1972 batch.

T Nanda Kumar is the new Secretary, Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture. He was earlier Secretary, Food and Public Distribution since July 2006. Nanda Kumar is an IAS officer of 1972 batch, Jharkhand cadre. He has wide experience in the areas ranging from agriculture and food to urban development, textiles, mines, commerce and industry.

D S Kolamkar, Economic Advisor, in the Department of Consumer Affairs has been appointed Member of the Forward Markets Commission. He will replace Kewal Ram. M L Sharma, Special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Director, has been posted as the new Central

Information Commissioner. He is an IPS officer from 1972 batch, Rajasthan cadre.

Suchitra Goswami has joined as Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.

She is 1989 batch Central Staffing Scheme (CSS) officer.

S K Poddar has been elected as the Chairman of Texmaco Ltd, a K K Birla group company. The position was left vacant after the sudden demise of K K Birla. Poddar was an Executive Vice-Chairman in the company prior to this election.

Rohit Mody joins Suzlon, makers of wind mills for power generation.

Rohit Mody, who has quit Larsen and Toubro, is an ex-1985 batch ManipurTripura cadre IAS officer.

S S Raman has been appointed as the new President of MAIT, the apex body representing India’s IT hardware, training and R&D services sectors. He was the President and CEO of TVS-E Servicetec Ltd. S S Raman is an industry veteran, with in-depth exposure to various aspects of the manufacturing industry, he is immensely respected in the industry circles for his incisive vision and astute knowledge.

Ravi Swaminathan is appointed as the Vice President, MAIT for the term 2008-09. He was the President – Personal Systems Group in Hewlett Packard India. Ravi Swaminathan is a stalwart from the PC industry and has contributed immensely to the development of IT market in the country.

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Become a Citizen Journalist.

Post your stories and experiences in dealing with the government machinery at www.egovonline.net

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PRODUCT LAUNCHES

Juniper Networks Introduces Dynamic Services Architecture

Zenith launches low-cost

PC Zenith Computers, the second largest Indian PC manufacturer has launched a new laptop and desktop under the brand name ‘EcoStyle’. The Zenith EcoStyle laptop priced at Rs 14,999, will be the lowest priced Windows OS enabled laptop in the market; while the desktop PC will be available at a highly competitive market price of Rs 11,999.

The EcoStyle PC and laptop will be available across India in time for the festive season. Zenith’s chain of 800 authorized dealers and 350 exclusive showrooms will stock these computers.

The laptop is Net enabled, and comes preloaded with the Microsoft productivity suite.The EcoStyle PC will give the customer an option of choosing Windows Vista Starter or Microsoft Windows XP Home. The desktop will also come preloaded with the Microsoft productivity suite. Bringing together ease of use and professional performance, the EcoStyle PC is ideal for small office or home offices owners.

In addition to the portability and the relevant content, both the computers have an added advantage of reduced power consumption due to a smaller screen size. One an average, they consume 30%

Juniper Networks, introduced industry’s first Juniper Networks Dynamic Services Architecture designed to help high-performance businesses tightly align rapidly changing business requirements with network technology investments to accelerate new service deployments. The Dynamic Services Architecture is the foundation on which the newly announced Juniper Networks SRX dynamic services gateways are built, offering an extensible “no compromise” solution to scaling integrated services and network capabilities on a single architecture.

This enables enterprises, service providers and public sector agencies to quickly and cost-effectively take advantage of new service opportunities, address changing business requirements, and deliver superior user experiences.

The Dynamic Services Architecture includes Juniper’s dedicated dual management engine and purpose-built, carrier-class terabit speed fabric that allows for massive scale of Ethernet ports and services processing independently. The new architecture delivers the ability to readily “turn-on” a wide range of services, including stateful firewall, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDos/DoS) protection, Network Address Translation (NAT), dynamic routing, and Quality of Service (QoS). This ability greatly accelerates application and service deployments.

The Dynamic Services Architecture serves as the framework for the evolution of networking, which will not only change the way businesses operate, but also improve how networks are architected.

High- end projectors by NEC NEC has recently launched a highend range of networkable projectors viz. NP3150 / NP2150 / NP1150. he projectors support “Windows Network Projector” function, which is one of the brand-new features introduced with Windows Vista. You can make presentations from your PC via the network without connecting RGB cable, if your PC is running Windows Vista. You don’t need to install any proprietary software application on your PC. Like using a networked printer, you can simply

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select which projector to use from the list presented on your PC screen.

Furthermore, it is possible to remotely operate a PC installed some distance away from the projector via the

network by using “Windows Remote Desktop” function.

In order to support a variety of Installations, five types of lenses are available in addition to the standard lens. The projector supports screens from 30 to 500 inches; select the optimum lens depending on the specific installation environment, such as conference rooms, halls, and exhibitions. For a 100-inch screen, projection is possible at a distance 1.66 m (Wide Angle Fixed Lens) or between 2.4 m to 14.7 m. Lenses are easily replaced by the customer and do not require special tools.

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PRODUCT SHOWCASE

Brother - HL-2140 Brother has a longstanding reputation in the world of printers and the new HL2140 is the latest one. A monochrome laser printer - aimed at both home and office users - it promises low cost reliability and improved looks along with a small footprint.

DESIGN AND FEATURES

The Brother Printer HL-2140 is a relatively compact printer, especially for a laser printer and also does not occupy a lot of space. Its dimension are; 14.5”(w) x 14.2”(d) x 6.7”(h). The body is two toned and quite rugged.

Installing the toner cartridge is easy like in all other Brother laser models, just open the hatch and slide it in.

It has one input tray each for envelopes and letter-sized papers and can be adjusted for different paper sizes. Its input capacity is 250 sheets and output is 100 sheets, which is really good for office environments. Paper is to be placed with the side to be printed facing down and the print out gets deposited in the output tray with the printed side face down.

Three status LEDs provide information about paper jams, no paper, toner status, drum errors or if the machine needs a service call. There’s a separate button for canceling prints, error recovery, form feed and reprints apart from a power button at the back. The back opens up to allow easy access to the rollers, so paper jams would be easy to clear up. Practically anyone can pop open the back and clear jams in seconds. The HL-2140 has 181 MHz processor and 8MB of memory, which is quite sufficient for a monochrome printer. This is paired with a high-speed USB interface to connect to computers.

The printer comes with a single CD for the driver software providing drivers for Windows and Mac OS X 10.2.4 and above. The drivers are released under the GPL license so there is an upside.

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manual duplex, watermark, scaling, job spooling, sleep time, macro, headerfooter print, density adjustment and error message printout. There is also a toner saving option to conserve toner.

It takes under 10 seconds to initialise once the printer was turned on.

Being a monochrome printer, its appeal for the casual home user might be limited. However, it is aimed at the home-office user as well. It is a low-end printer priced at INR 5900 and it is reasonably stylish and remarkably fast, maintaining 23 PPM consistently. It takes 460 watts while in operation and 80 watts in standby. It goes into sleep mode in between prints during which it consumes 5 watts. There are two toner cartridges available for this - the Standard Yield TN-2130 and the High Yield TN2150, which have duty cycles of 1,500 and 2,600 respectively. The drum and toner units are sold separately despite the printer being a low-end model. This is beneficial because one can replace them separately and can save on maintenance costs. The drum unit is priced at INR 3,925, the standard toner at INR 1,550 and the high yield one costs INR 2,235.

Thus, the cost per page of this printer is lower than INR 1.20 and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is far better than any other competitive model available in the market.

Product at a Glance Product: Price: Dimension: Paper Input Capacity: Paper Output Capacity: Memory: Processor: Power Consumption:

Best for:

Brother Printer HL-2140 INR 5900 14.5”(w) x 14.2”(d) x 6.7”(h) 250 sheets 100 sheets 8MB 181 MHz 460 Watts (in Operation), 80 Watts (Standby), 5 Watts (Sleep mode) Casual Home users / HomeOffice users

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EVENTS WATCH

OCTOBER 6-12, 2008 The Sixth Annual Plone ConferenceOpen Source Content Management Washington, D.C. USA http://plone.org/events/conferences/2008washington-dc/

OCTOBER 8-10, 2008

22-24 OCTOBER 2008

3rd Annual Advancing Intranet Management in the Public Sector Sydney, Australia

e-Challenges e-2008 Conference Stockholm, Sweden http://www.echallenges.org/e2008/

http://www.arkgroupaustralia.com.au/eventsc032AdvancingIMinPublicSector.htm

24 - 26 NOVEMBER 2008 TranSec India Expo Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai, India http://www.transec.com

23 - 24 OCTOBER 2008 OCTOBER 15, 2008 Secure Infrastructure Workshop Paris, France http://www.epractice.eu/workshop/FASTeTEN

4th International Conference on eGovernment 2008 RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia http://www.econference.com.au/4thInternational-Conference-on-e-Government2008.html

NOVEMBER 26, 2008 The 12th International Exhibition in Vietnam on Telecommunications and Information Technology / Vietnam Electronics 2008 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam http://www.2456.com/VNC

OCTOBER 18, 2008

5 - 7 NOV 2008

GCC eBanking Forum Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Promoting the Value of Internal Communication in the Public Sector Sydney, Australia

http://www.datamatixgroup.com

http://c.cminteractive.com/?wpFRNBHlN=6196769

The 6th International Conference on eGovernance (ICEG 2008) Delhi

20-22, OCTOBER 2008 Open Source World Conference Malaga, Spain http://www.opensourceworldconference.com/

18 - 20, DECEMBER, 2008

11-13 NOVEMBER 2008

http://www.iceg.net/2008/

Wireless and Digital Cities 2008 Barcelona, Spain http://www.epractice.eu/document/4835

17-19 APRIL 2009 OCTOBER 22, 2008 4th International Conference on eGovernment Melbourne, Australia http://www.academic-conferences.org/iceg/ iceg2008/iceg08-home.html

NOVEMBER 13, 2008 Network Enabled Capability Exhibition 2008 Noida, India http://nec-exhibition.com

3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009) Doha, Qatar http://www.ictd2009.org

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October 2007

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SIGN OFF

e-Waste -India bearing the brunt Ali, the local scrap dealer ( raddiwala ) had come home. He was on his routine weekly visit to collect the old newspapers, plastic items meant for recycle and any other waste items that he felt could fetch him money if given to the recycling units.

It was noticed that he had 2 HP Laser Jet toners and a old broken computer with him. when he was asked him if they fetch him any money. He told that it was his lucky day that he got hold of them that day and that they would fetch him anywhere between Rs. 150-200 ( Approx. USD 3.33 to 4.44 ). Is e-waste* so precious?

A quick search on the Net revealed startling facts. Toxics Link, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation, says India generates $1.5bn worth of e-waste annually, with 1,050 tons of electronic scrap dumped by manufacturers and assemblers. Developed nations too find it cheaper to use developing nations as dumping grounds. e-waste could comprise of Home Appliances, IT equipment, entertainment equipment, telecommunications equipment, data, audio and video media, CDs, DVDs, tapes, printer consumables, ink cartridges, toner, cartridges, laser printer drums, laser printer developer units, printed circuit boards, batteries, Mobile phones A glance at the media reports reveals shocking and spine chilling reports of India turning into a e-wasteland.

• Thirty million computers are thrown out every year in the US alone, and many are dumped in India • About 80 percent of the e-Waste generated in the US is exported to India, China and Pakistan • Home to more than 1,200 foreign and domestic

• • •

technology firms, Bangalore figures at the top in the danger list of cities faced with e-waste hazard.

As many as 1,000 tons of plastics, 300 tons of lead, 0.23 tons of mercury, 43 tons of nickel and 350 tons of copper are annually generated in Bangalore Domestic e-waste including computers, refrigerators, televisions and mobiles contain more than 1,000 different toxic materials Other e-Waste scrap-yards exist in Meerut, Ferozabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai.

FLIP SIDE by Santulan Chaubey

“Perhaps, she misunderstood the meaning of transparency in Government.”

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