UID : September 2011

conference

awards

exhibition

15 - 17 december, 2011 Mahatma Mandir, Gandhi Nagar, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

www.eINDIA.net.in

Steering e-inclusive economy Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS) and Elets Technomedia - the publisher of the eGov, eHealth & digitalLEARNING magazines - invite you to join eINDIA 2011 - the seventh edition of India’s largest ICT event. The innumerable initiatives in terms of public policies, programmes and projects rolled out for the inclusion of the vast disadvantaged population of the country are all exploiting the power of ‘e’. The advent of ‘e’ is being considered as the panacea of efficiency & delivery of public services. eIndia 2011 would therefore hover

eINDIA has been an excellent platform for bringing together stakeholders to exchange ideas and to get to know the possibilities of new innovations that have come into the field of technology. Smt D Purandeswari Minister of State, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India

around the theme of steering an e-inclusive economy which is being held in the growth capital of the country. eINDIA 2011 would be a platform for sharing knowledge, assessing the already existing initiatives, and planning the creation of technology enabled society. eIndia 2011 expo would showcase various innovative ICT products & services in the domain of Governance, Healthcare & Education. It would help explore the diverse opportunities of integrating ICT in different spheres of life.

It has been quite a spectacular journey and has always been an outstanding show growing from year to year. Shri R Chandrashekhar Secretary, Department of Information Technology & Telecom, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India

I have seen eINDIA from its inception and thereafter growing like an institution in itself. I congratulate the eINDIA team for its tremendous effort in putting together this outstanding conference. R S Sharma Director General, UIDAI

Delegate Profile I congratulate the CSDMS and Elets team for organising an event that would go a long way in helping the country achieve the Millennium Development Goal objectives of education and health

Conferences like eINDIA have the potential to create awareness about the stupendous possibilities that e-governance harbours within itself in the context of governmental activities.

Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University

Subhash C Khuntia Principal Secretary, Government Public Works Department, Karnataka

Secretary-level Officials such as head of various departments, Chief Secretaries, Principal Secretaries, Additional Secretaries, Joint Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries and Directors from Central and State government departments Key officials from IT, Health, Education, Urban Development, PWD, Agriculture, Rural Development, Home, Planning, Power, Finance, Transportation and Taxation departments and institutes from states and central ministries

Why

Key stakeholders and elected representatives

Meet & Network with

Key decision makers from educational institutions - VCs, Registrars, Principals, Directors and Heads of organisations

participate?

key decision makers & experts, bureaucrats & policy makers, leaders & stakeholders, service providers & IT vendors, telecom vendors & consulting firms, ICT entreprenuers & NGOs on innovative e-Gov implementations, government agencies & developmental organisations in the domain of ICT for Governance, Healthcare & Education

Engage with colleagues and experts handling similar ICT projects, dealing with transformation and GPR challenges, working on automation of back office processes and integration.

Benefit from extensive & in-depth conference sessions on more than 50 thematic areas in the field of e-Governance, e-Learning, eHealth, eAgriculture and Telecentre.

Key officials from Districts and municipalities Representatives from the judiciary and legal experts Key people from various chambers of commerce and associations Industry representatives and experts

Witness

Representatives from NGO and other civil societies

innovative solutions from within the Indian ICT industry and beyond in the eINDIA exhibition which will showcase cutting edge developments in ICT.

Consultants and research agencies

Sponsorship & Exhibition Enquiries eGov Track: Digital Learning Track: Fahim Haq, fahim@elets.in, + 91- 8860651632 | Jyoti Lekhi, jyoti@elets.in, +91-8860651634 | eHealth Track: Rakesh Ranjan, rakesh@elets.in, +91-8860651635 For General Enquiries: info@elets.in, +91-120-2502181-85 organisers

co-organisers

presenting publications

www.eINDIA.net.in

Key Speakers at our past events D Purandeswari Minister of State Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) Government of India

Jyotiraditya Scindia Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Government of India

Agatha Sangma Minister of State for Rural Development Government of India

Dr K Rosaiah Governer Tamil Nadu

R Chandrashekhar Secretary Department of IT Ministry of Communications & IT Government of India

Dr N Jadhav Member, Planning Commission Government of India

Smt Vibha Puri Das Secretary Department of Higher Education Ministry of Human Resource Development Government of India

Shankar Aggarwal Additional Secretary Department of IT, Ministry of Communication & IT Government of India

RS Sharma Director General Unique Identification Authority of India, Government of India

Sudhir Krishna Additional Secretary Ministry of Panchayati Raj Government of India

N Ravi Shanker Additional Secretary Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and IT Government of India

Ravi S Saxena Additional Chief Secretary Department of Science and Technology, Government of Gujarat

J Satyanarayana Principal Secretary, Health, Medical and Family Welfare Government of Andhra Pradesh

Dr Arvind Mayaram Additional Secretary and Financial Advisor, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India

Navdeep Suri Joint Secretary and Head, Public Diplomacy Division, Ministry of External Affairs

Sanjeev Gupta Joint Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India

Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai Vice Chancellor Indira Gandhi National Open University

Subhash C Khuntia Principal Secretary, Public Works Department, Government of Karnataka

Prof S S Mantha Chairman (Acting), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE)

Dr Rajeev Sharma Director General Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad

Sharda Prasad Joint Secretary & Director General Employment & Training, Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India

Abhishek Singh Director-eGovernance Department of IT, MCIT

Kapil Mohan Director Ministry of Power Government of India

Dr Sameer Sharma Commissioner Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation

T Krishna Prasad IGP & Director Police, Communications Government of Andhra Pradesh

U K Ananthapadmanabhan President, Kovai Medical Centre & Hospital

A Babu CEO, Arogyasree Health Care Trust Government of Andhra Pradesh

Dr Ashok Kumar DDG and Director Central Bureau of Health Intelligence Government of India

Dr Latha Pillai Pro Vice Chancellor Indira Gandhi National Open University

Dr SS Jena Chairman National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS)

Sherif El Tokali Assistant Resident Representative Poverty Reduction, MDGs and Private Sector Team Leader, UNDP

Kapil Sibal Minister of Human Resource Development and Communications & IT, Government of India

Dr R Sreedhar Director Commonwealth of Learning

... AND MORE

Communicating Governance

e celebrated the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web with great fanfare on August 6th. What started as a single page (http://info.cern. ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html) has now grown into a web of over 19.68 billion pages. The World Wide Web has become an inextricable part of the lives of billions of people. Such has been the fate of e-Governance in India. What started as the computerization of Government Departments has now grown into initiatives that encapsulate the finer points of Governance, such as citizen centricity, service orientation and transparency. The eWorld Forum 2011 organized between August 1-3 at New Delhi saw the confluence of initiators & stakeholders of various e-governance projects. In over 20 thought provoking sessions ranging from Telecenters to ICT in Agriculture to Public Safety, Security & Disaster Management; UID; ICT Infrastructure, Data Centers and Applications; Urban Governance; Information Management & Security; ICT in Financial Inclusion and Citizen Centric Service Delivery, the conference unraveled the finer shades of various issues pertaining to eGovernance. The outpouring of public support to the Janlokpal agitation and participation of the middle class and youth – two groups often criticized for their apathy to public affairs – reflects discontent against the status quo. In the clamour for promoting ICT in governance, we often tend to overemphasize the importance of IT at the cost of ‘C’ – Communication. The adept management of modern technology by the Janlokpal team and virtual absence of a communication strategy on part of the government were extremely important factors in determining the contours of the ensuing national dialogue. In the age of Web 2.0, a very miniscule proportion of government bodies are utilising the potential of social media. There is an immense amount of work that can be done for promoting governments’ engagement with citizens. In this light, it is heartening to note that the Department of IT has released a draft outlining the Framework and Guidelines for Use of Social Media by Government Organisations. This will go a long way in establishing a uniform template for government communications. As Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria has said, “Communication is the real work of leadership”.

ravi guptA Ravi.Gupta@elets.in

From the history Email at subscription@elets.in to get previous issues

June 2011

July 2011

August 2011

September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Contents september 2011 issue 09 n volume 07

President Dr M P Narayanan Editor-in-Chief: Dr Ravi Gupta GM Finance Ajit Kumar DGM Strategy: Raghav Mittal Programme Specialist: Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar partnerships & Alliances Sheena Joseph, Shuchi Smita, Jaunita Kakoty, Ankita Verma EDITORIAL Divya Chawla, Rachita Jha, Dhirendra Pratap Singh, Sonam Gulati, Pragya Gupta, Shally Makin (editorial@elets.in) Sales & marketing Jyoti Lekhi, FahimulHaque, Rakesh Ranjan, Shankar Adaviyar (sales@elets.in) subscription & circulation Gunjan Singh, Mobile: +91-8860635832 subscription@elets.in Graphic Design Team Bishwajeet Kumar Singh, Om Prakash Thakur Shyam Kishore Web Development Team Zia Salahuddin, Anil Kumar

expert speak 08 Opportunities v/s Challenges Walter Fust

Spurring Technology-Driven Innovation Akhtar Badshah

ID is the Only Focus of UIDAI R S Sharma

17 Digital Literacy for Women Maria Theresa Camba

CSCs: Bridging the Gap Abhishek Singh

Know the Earth, Show the Way Maj Gen R C Padhi

IT infrastructure Mukesh Sharma, Zuber Ahmed Events Vicky Kalra human resource Sushma Juyal

14 Aadhaar is Stan-

dards Based Srikanth Nadhamuni

Monitoring-Any Time, Anywhere Gagan Verma

22 Enhancing

legal R P Verma accounts Anubhav Rana, Subhash Chandra Dimri Editorial & Marketing Correspondence egov – G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA–201 301, India Phone: +91-120-2502181-85 Fax: +91-120-2500060 Email: info@egovonline.net egov is published by Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd in technical collaboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS). Owner, Publisher, Printer: Ravi Gupta, Printed at Vinayak Print Media Pvt. Ltd, D-320, Sector-10, Noida, U.P. and published from 710 Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30, Sector - 50 Noida, UP Editor: Ravi Gupta © All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic and mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage or retrieval system, without publisher’s permission.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

Full Automation of Social Services Ashank Desai

Automated IT Management Jai Kevin Kumar

17 Content is the King Rita Soni

the Efficiency of Policing Purushottam Sharma

Real-Time Connectivity Puneet Gupta

IT for Business Automation Dhiren Pardhanani

24 e-Governance

Managing Information Arvind Mehrotra

An Ecosystem of eGovernance in Gujarat Ravi Saxena

42 Fruits of IT

34 Banking on

42 Unlocking

43 Building

27 NDMC: Towards

36 Fresh

44 ICT in Coal

28 ICT for

37 Social Media in

Challenges Golok Kumar Simli

Virtualisation of Data Centers Neeta Verma

Land Reform System in Karnataka Jaijit Bhattacharya

26 Analytics for Effective Governance Ravi Makhija

Smarter Grid Amit Prasad

Development Abdul Rahman Panjshiri

28 eGover-

nance for Urban Infrastructure Manu Srivastava

Rising State of Threat Amit Nath

eGovernment in Bahrain Feras Ahmed

Inclusion L P Rai

Reaching the Un-banked AVV Prasad

Paradigms of Governance Arvind Mayaram

Revolution N Ravi Shankar

Value with Open Source Anuj Kumar

Nation Through e-Governance Sambit Sinha

Sector in India Ashok Kumar Singh

Public Diplomacy Navdeep Suri

Digital Bangadesh: Progress and Plans Anir Chowdhury

50 How Well

Improving Public Service Delivery Naimur Rahman

do we Know Our Farmers? M Moni

Assessing National e-Readiness Seema Hafeez

September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

eworld forum

Vision for the India of Tomorrow The first eWorld forum envisaged as a major global platform for dialogues, debates and deliberations upon policies, tools and methods for effective e-Governance

(From Left) Dr MP Narayanan, President, CSDMS; Walter Fust Member of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission; Victor Bodiu, Secretary General of the Government of Moldova; Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai, VC, IGNOU; Shankar Agarwal, Additional Secretary, DIT

n the current era of globalisation, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is performing the role of universal equaliser, enabler and integrator. Today, ICT can help achieve the dream of a more just, inclusive and equitable world in a most peaceful way. We can see many examples of ICT-enabled empowerment and social inclusion achieved in the developing world over last decade. Our country still has poverty, inequality, corruption, and social exclusion everywhere. The most important and revolutionary aspect of ICT is its potential to shift the balance of power in the society, governance and economy towards the common people, the disadvantaged groups, the poor, the women and youth. With this vision and mission, Elets Technomedia and Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies organised the first ‘eWorld Forum 2011’, from 1st to 3rd August in Delhi.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

The event was organised in association with Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Acclaimed as one of the largest ICT event in India, it drew participants and visitors from across the country and worldwide. A plethora of activities ranging from keynote speeches, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops and technology showcase made for a great rendezvous at the event. eWorld Forum hosted policy makers, academicians, researchers, technology vendors as participants and delegates from across India as well as overseas. The three-day long conference threw light on the areas of IT and technology in eGovernance, while providing a successful platform for sharing knowledge and discussing emerging issues in depth. The conference organised sessions on crucial eGovernance issues such as opportunities and challenges on global cooperation; telecentres: effective approaches

and best practices; ICT in agriculture; best practices in eGovernance; public safety, security and disaster management; ICT mass literacy; UID; urban governance and infrastructure; ICT in financial inclusion and many more. eWorld 2011 also recognised some of the best projects, initiatives and practitioners of ICT-driven development across government, education, healthcare, agriculture and rural sectors, through the eWorld 2011 Awards. With the purpose of bringing better transparency and fairness in the award process, the awards were given under two categories, namely, the ‘jury choice’ and the ‘public choice’ (through online voting). The overwhelming response for the online public poll - a whopping 93, 927 votes was delightful. ICT being the powerful tool that can help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this forum has provided an essence to effectively integrate or mainstream ICTs at a global level into development strategies and programmes.

eworld forum

glimpses...

eWorld Forum 2011 Inauguration

Shri Jyotiraditya Scindia addressing the eworld Forum 2011

Shankar Agarwal, R Chandrashekhar, MP Narayanan

R Chandrshekhar visiting the Exhibiton

Launch of eINDIA 2011 at eWorld Forum

Shri Shankar Agarwal addressing delegates

Eminent global dignitaries

eHealth World Forum 2011

Launch of eASiA 2011 at eWorld Forum

Launch of eGov August Issue

Raghav Mittal, Rajiv Tikoo, Bidisha Pillai, MK Yadav, Akhtar Badshah, Naimur Rehman

Jyotiraditya Scindia glancing eGov

September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

inaugural session

Opportunities v/s Challenges e-Government can be a gamechanger, but challenges remain By Walter Fust, Member, ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission; Member, UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA)

n times where one has amazing tools for data collection, processing, storage and communication, there is no excuse for not using technology in government and servicing the public. Opportunities for deploying ICT in government are immense in all countries, but they are subject to capacity, political will and leadership, financial resources and computer literacy among government officials and citizens. In addition, quicker the technological tools â&#x20AC;&#x201C; hardware and software develop, the more it becomes obvious that choices are necessary and the risks of missing the train lurking nearby. There are seldom opportunities without risks, but there is an opportunity to introduce a culture of IT risk governance dealing with what you do and whether you do the right thing well or not.

Making Administration e-Enabled The challenge in Public Administration is to reorganise work procedures, workflows, administrative flows, overcoming generational

There is no third investment partner that can do egovernment for somebody else. There is however knowledge and support that can be provided without borders

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

The challenge for adequate technical solutions might be considerable, but the challenge for leadership is of paramount importance

edge of services to be rendered should often be the point to start in tackling those applications and to make them user-friendly.

Issues of Access

gaps in computer literacy and in easing the readiness for change, reducing the fear of becoming more easily controllable and subject of political intervention or media-related investigations. The challenge for adequate technical solutions might be considerable, but the challenge for leadership is of paramount importance. If there is no clear political will and continuous leadership from and to the top, the administration often gets stuck in an internal struggle leading to stalemates and political staging. A sound policy of incentives is recommended to overcome barriers. Those offices making good progress should be rewarded and not subject to budgetary reduction because of being more effective than others. Gains in effectiveness should be made available for doing even better. Parliaments and citizens should be kept well-informed about intentions and what the short- and longer-term benefits will be. Citizens should be able to experience the benefits of egovernment and that is why the cutting-

It is obvious that the telecom infrastructure must be there and adequate bandwidth available and accessible at reasonable costs. The availability of broadband is key not only for urban centres but also for rural areas. If broadband is not brought to the last mile of users within a reasonable time, many govt intentions in rendering public services might be partly or greatly a failure. As we have seen, access to mobiles is growing at a much faster clip than access to computers. Consequently, m-government would be a significant part of e-government. For egovernance, access to broadband is the key and matters related to broadband rollout and access should not be left to the telecom industry alone. An additional challenge might come from and through the social media. Increasing number of citizens will use that space and will challenge governments and administration. When governments speak as one-to-many, they will have to get accustomed to the echo that is from many and even more. Government decisions will be influenced if not sometimes derailed by this impact and the key is to learn how to engage with stakeholders in a effective manner using this platform. Weighing opportunities against challenges, I still think opportunities over short or long term will prevail over challenges. Time and citizen access to IT will simply turn challenges into opportunities over time. There is no fit for all solution. There is no third investment partner that can do egovernment for somebody else. There is however knowledge and support that can be provided without borders.

inaugural session

Spurring TechnologyDriven Innovation Software companies are constantly striving to encourage innovations in the development sector By Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director - Global Community Affairs,

nformation technology today plays an extremely strong and important role in all aspects of development. The challenge is how to get technology resources in the hands of the underserved to spur development and part of the discussion then becomes whether Intellectual Property (IP) has any value or not and whether intellectual property helps generate revenue, helps generate development, helps generate economic activity and how do you manage the two issues â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one of costs and the other one is economy because people that create anything have a right to benefit from that creation. At Microsoft, revenue is generated either through a product or through IP. To us it is clear that every individual that wants to participate and have access to technology, particularly technology that we have created, needs to be provided certain resources in order to be able to do so. The challenge is to get technology in the hands of the underserved in a meaningful manner. We run a number of programmes that involve facilitating access to technology. We run training programmes in over 100 countries through more than 70,000 technology learning centres that we have helped set up in partnership with more than 1000 non profit organisations. A related challenge is to build the capacity of non profits so that they use technology in a beneficial manner and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services. Finally, the challenge of spurring innovation at the bottom of the pyramid around technology to facilitate development also needs to be addressed.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

Effective collaboration among individuals who use technology, organisations that develop technology and solutions based on these technologies and the governments that deploy these solutions is essential if egover-

We run training programmes in over 100 countries through more than 70,000 technology learning centres

nance is to become an effective mechanism. In addition, individuals that need to use technology should be able to use it, organisa-

tions should have the resources and capacities develop technologies and solutions and the solutions themselves have to be effective, affordable and relevant for those who are

The challenge is how to get technology resources in the hands of the underserved to spur development

going to use them. For this, training and capacity building is a must and we at Microsoft are running a number of initiatives across the world in this regard. In India, our partnership with the NASSCOM Foundation has reached over 10 million people and worldwide, over the last eight years we have reached over 190 million people. We are also involved in a big way in capacity building of non profits so that they can use technology effectively and also innovate using technology and reach the most marginalised aspects of our society. The gaming device Kinect that we launched recently, has been hacked by people in the development community. At first, people within the company reacted with horror that our IP was being compromised. However, saner heads prevailed and pointed to the kind of innovation that was taking place â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Kinect was being used in ways we could never have imagined. The deviceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infrared camera that acts as a motion sensor for gaming, was used by students in Germany for providing auditory inputs to blind people to help them navigate corridors; another set of hackers mounted the device on top of a robot to look for people in collapsed buildings; some have even tried to use it for medical imaging! Inspired by this, we decided to make our source code available to the development community for noncommercial usage. Companies will have to start looking at what can they do to spur development and innovation and what should be controlled from the perspective of IP that becomes commercial in nature.

Unique Identification Number

ID is the Only Focus of UIDAI India is making the direct triumphatic jump from a DOCUMENT to a CLOUD based ID authentication system. Once populated the Aadhar database would be the largest of its kind

UID Enrollment Kit

By R S Sharma, Director General, UIDAI

The UID Enrollment Kit comprises of a Laptop with enrollment client, a monitor for live data verification by the resident, a camera for photo-capture, an iris scanner, a fingerprint slap scanner and an enrollment kit box.

Enrollment Update

hat is UID?

Launched on 29th September, 2010 around 30 million aadhars would have been generated by the time this issue would reach in your hands. The real time tracker of the exact number of Aadhars generated is hosted on UIDAI’s official portal. Around 4,00,000 enrollments are received on a daily basis which is expected to touch 1 million per day starting October. Over 8000 units have been deployed with over 20,000 trained operators.

UIDAI has been given the mandate to provide Unique ID Number to all Residents through a one time enrollment process which establishes uniqueness and to provide an online, costeffective, ubiquitous authentication service across the country which is transactional in nature, establishes identity and which can be done at the time of availing a benefit. UID is just an instrument and guarantees only a unique identity. It doesn’t guarantee any kind of rights or entitlements.

Information Captured The Unique ID number maps to 4 demographics and 3 biometrics of every resident. The demographics comprise of the standard Know Your Resident dataset – Name, Address, Gender, Date of Birth while the Biometric dataset comprise of the photograph, finger prints of all the 10 fingers and the IRIS scan of both the eyes. Each IRIS has a unique pattern which is encoded in a 1024 digit number. Over 30 minutiae are extracted from each fingerprint.

The UID Ecosystem A comprehensive ecosystem has been developed to handle a project of such a magnitude and complexity. Several partners have been identified for carrying out enrollments in a distributed manner. Standard processes have been

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

been centralised as it entails a huge computational processing of 1:N de-duplication. The entire technological stack has been based on standards and has been largely built on open source platforms. The authentication systems are scalable in nature. Multiple ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification Sub-systems) have been installed which are allocated on the basis of performance. The quality of data captured is ensured through certification of devices and operators.

Service Delivery Potential of Aadhar

Key Features • • • • • • • • •

Only Numbers – No Cards Random Numbers – No Intelligence Standard Attributes – No Profiling All Residents – Including Children Flexibility to Partners No Guarantees to Rights, Citizenship, Entitlements Uniqueness – Ensured through biometric attributes De-novo creation of database Ubiquitous Authentication – anytime any where Ensuring Security and Privacy of Information

laid down for device empanelment, manpower training, client software usage and verification. The processing and allocation of the UID has

The uniqueness and existence ensures that no fake or duplicate can occur. The uniqueness ensures the breaking of database silos. It also acts as a sufficient KYC for multiple services like Bank accounts, Financial Inclusion schemes, Mobile connections etc. Aadhar becomes the identity platform for various domains as all transactions start with a proof of identity. Aadhar online authentication provides a common platform which can be used across all applications. The non-transferability of various entitlements can be ensured by authentication at the point of service delivery. The proof of presence can be duly provided by aadhar for various domains.

Challenges The scale of the project, the technological complexities, privacy and security issues compounded with adoption, enrollment and associated political challenges would define the sustainability of the project in the longer run.

Unique Identification Number

Aadhaar is Standards Based Enrollment & Authentication Framework for Service Delivery By Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head Technology, UIDAI

adhaar has been designed to work on a set of standards. For enrollments there exist Demographic Data Standards and Biometric Standards for capturing Fingerprint, Iris and Photos. Standards for enrollment devices ensure quality of data captured. Enrollments are driven by a set of processes whereby the Registrars have been provided with an Onboarding Kit. The operators are duly trained and there exist an ingrained process for continuous improvement.

Aadhaar Architecture

ensure interoperability. Open-source technologies have been used wherever prudent. The entire system has been built using a multi-platform support including Linux and Microsoft Windows. The Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA) allows smarter failure handling. The entire computing platform has been designed in a distributed manner. The system is highly

Aadhaar Authentication

The architecture is based on open standards to

Aadhaar Enrollment Rate Modeling The entire project progress has been linked to the rate of enrollment of Aadhaar which has been duly modeled as a normal graph. The enrollment rate model gives a projection of the project progress which can be matched up with the real time ticker on the Aadhaar website. On population, the Aadhaar database would be the largest database of its kind. The second such database would be at most one-tenth of what Aadhaar would become. The biggest computational challenge would lie in the 1: N de-duplication which theoretically would mean that for an ID to be unique it has to be matched against 1 billion such entries into the Central ID Repository (CIDR) of Aadhaar.

Aadhaar Authentication

Aadhaar APIs The system provides a whole set of APIs for developers so that they can build applications using the Aadhaar authentication system. The Biometric Capture Device API, the ABIS API, the Biometric SDK, Authentication API and Authentication Device Specifications are some of them.

asynchronous and uses a high speed messaging layer. The entire data is shared across RDBMS and DFS over the distributed platform.

In order to authenticate a person, the system needs the 12 digit Aadhaar number along with any or all of the fingerprints & iris scan; demographic details and PIN/OTP. The system in turn returns a binary response in yes or no. This ensures the privacy of an individual and lessens the computational burden on the system. The authentication API uses XML over HTTP(s). Enough transaction security and audit have been put in place. Since the authentication is a read only operation, the entire database can be distributed. The Automated Biometric Identification Sub-systems are thereby being installed for quick authentication. Once operational, the system would be receiving some 100 million hits on a typical working day.

Visibility and Transparency

YES YES NAME, GENDER DOB, Address

Any or All y Authentication Mechanism

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

In order to ensure due visibility and transparency of the project, a public portal has been set up which showcases the real time rate of enrollment of Aadhaar. Individuals can also track the progress of their Aadhaar allotment. A partner portal has been set up whereby the progress of the various registrars and enrollment agency can be tracked. Performance of various operators is evaluated and rated through this portal. A portal for developers has also been set up which provides the various development resources for application developers on top of Aadhaar.

Unique Identification Number

Full Automation of Social Services To be achieved through concurrent approach of ‘UID integrated’ and ‘UID independent’. UID integration to be perceived as a ‘plug in’ to the benefit distribution framework By Ashank Desai, Founder,

primarily referred to an individual, however the beneficiaries under various social schemes can be households, groups, institutions. How would the demographic changes to the UID data be managed? Who would take the ownership of synchronizing the changes with the various benefit domains data? In case of realizing a threat to the UID data – who triggers the damage control? There are several such questions pertaining to the technological and operational framework of UID.

Magnitude of De-Duplication

ID is fraught with a large number of challenges pertaining to the management of social benefits something for which the UID has been created in the first place. The slow paced progress of automation in social welfare domains such as PDS, Social Justice, Women and Child, Tribal – mismatches with the pace of UID enrollment. Some schemes confer benefits since birth, for e.g. a child up to six years is allowed 1 unit of kerosene under a ration card scheme. UID is captured at the age of 14.

Key challenge facing UID Key challenge facing UID Core benefits of UID

Envisaged benefits of UID

KYR + Biometrics

1:N De‐Duplication N = 1.2 Billion

Establish Identity

Establish Uniqueness

Tracking Benefits, Single source of beneficiary view Manage Benefits provided to Beneficiaries

Quality of Data

Consistency of bio-metrics across life stages How UID would maintain the biometric con-

sistency across the various life stages and service requirements – scholarship for student, loan for entrepreneur and pension for the old ? UID is

The De-duplication of the magnitude required by the UIDAI has never been implemented in the world. In the global context, a de-duplication accuracy of 99% has been achieved so far, using good quality fingerprints against a database of up to fifty million. Retaining efficacy while scaling the database size from fifty million to a billion has not been adequately analyzed. Fingerprint quality, the most important variable for determining de-duplication accuracy, has not been studied in depth in the Indian context. A Nation-wide HETEROGENOUS Identity Management system catering to a population of more than 1 Billion & other entities numbering approximately 5 million and involving multiple agencies, stakeholders/entities catering to more than 35 Languages and 150 Dialects would be a real challenge. The level of fieldwork spread over the entire country having a area of 3,166,414 Sq. Kms divided into 593 districts, 5470 sub-districts comprising of 5161 towns and 638,588 Villages.

Multi-Pronged Implementation This high level of complexity can be mitigated through a bottom-up approach whereby the Social Welfare domains bring all the beneficiaries within their ambit irrespective of the UID. The Social Welfare departments render some 150+ schemes through various corporations and other departments. For e.g. a student gets post-matric scholarship and also scholarship under Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana. There is therefore a need to create a single view of the beneficiary. Through this multi-pronged Implementation Methodology, 100% automation of social schemes needs to be achieved through a concurrent approach of ‘UID integrated’ and ‘UID independent’. For e.g the Ration card management system can be rolled out with and without UID. The UID integration can be perceived as a ‘plug in’ to the benefit distribution framework. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Unique Identification Number

Automated IT Management

Optimal Response Time The 2-3 second response time of the system whereby over 1 billion records are to be compared for every enrolment for the speedy creation and retrieval of entries call for dynamic resource management, dynamic workload analysis and the due maintenance of SLAs to registrars. The on demand elastic & dynamic provisioning of dataset and existence of distributed data centers require a judicious optimization between regional capacity vs. National demand; the upgradation and consistency across datacenters.

The key to the success of Aadhar By Jai Kevin Kumar, Global Solution Advisor,

Security & Standards

he Aadhar Eco-System comprises of various sorts of applications like enrollment application, authentication application, fraud detection application, administrative application, analytics and reporting application.

The due application of security & standards in the domain of biometrics call for a dynamic audit and compliance as well.

Traditional IT Management The typical traditional IT management often held together by paper-based forms, spreadsheets, email etc. is highly manual in nature which makes it difficult to scale, respond quickly and meet the commitments on a consistent basis.

Handling Voluminous Data The sheer volume of data to be handled and processed in an optimal response time on demand in a secure fashion poses unprecedented challenges to the entire technology stack. The 10 finger prints of an individual would occupy somewhere around 5MB space

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

Automated IT Management

SERVICE REQUEST MANAGEMENT

DATA MANAGEMENT SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT

CAPACITY MANAGEMENT EVENT AND IMPACT MANAGEMENT

CONTROLS AND COMPLIANCE

Automated IT Management RELEASE MANAGEMENT

ASSET MANAGEMENT

CONFIGURATION AUTOMATION

CLOUD LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

ENTERPRISE SCHEDULING

PERFORMANCE & AVAILABILITY MANAGEMENT

which would sum upto 6 Peta Bytes for the entire population of 1.2 billion. With 4 million enrolments per day coming in, a de-duplication check for all these records is a mammoth

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT

task which calls for capacity management, infrastructure & application availability, dynamic infrastructure management and application level provisioning.

There is therefore a need for an automated IT management system to support a system of such a giant magnitude and complexity. An automated IT management system provides platform for effective business planning and operations. It provides a common and consistent way for sharing information across IT functions. It simplifies, standardizes and automates IT processes with oob workflows. Such a system enables IT to scale better and consistently meet expectations. An automated IT management system can support aadhar enrollment errors deduction and remediation. It can automate and autoscale based on capacity trends during enrollment or authentication. It ca continuously autodiscover of infrastructure and associate it to aadhar applications. The orchestration of data and workflows across Aadhar Data Centers can be duly accomplished by such a system. Such a system ca monitor end-to-end transactions across enrollments, authentication, fraud detection and other applications. It can eventually plan future growth and define supply and demand strategies.

telecentres

Content is the King By Rita Soni, CEO, Nasscomm Foundation

he role of telecentres is not new in our country now. Certain key features to keep in mind though can be looked into. Firstly, involvement of intermediaries and opinion leaders of that community as part of the telecentre movement is critical to the success of the whole process. Only known people, whom the community has an amount of faith can develop a positive attitude towards the services that are being offered and people will not hesitate in using them. Secondly, maintaining relevant content and information for the specific communities that are being addressed is crucial. For achieving positive results and reaching out to the community content needs to be developed accordingly. In one of NASSCOMM centres in Orissa, we have

an initiative going on about mushroom cultivation training being done through computers. It has received a very positive response. The community should be able to relate with the content and thus be a part of the whole process of empowerment. Next comes the most important feature, which is the person running the centre- entrepreneur and a lot depends on that stakeholder. The local person who is running the telecentre, the entrepreneur, must ensure that the centre runs as a useful community resource. For the successful functioning of the telecentre, the person running the centre should play the role of an infomediary- to provide information of immediate relevance to the community; being a social advocate- to proactively hunt for local social issues try to identify possible solutions and mobilize the community. The centres can and already are playing a key role in imparting education and skills.

Computer education is being provided in the centres; a key problem being faced with the adult literacy programme which is not attracting students, the reason for this is that there is a similar course being offered in the area which is recognized by the government and thus getting the students jobs. There are also other hurdles like the price not being all that affordable and location problem. This is where a proper informed VLE is needed. The telecentre movement thus needs synergized efforts of all stakeholders and an informed, proactive entrepreneur to reap the fruits.

Digital Literacy for Women

elecentre.org foundation is the premier non-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of telecentres and their usage for enhanced development of the whole society. The latest initiative, launched in April 2011 in Chile, in association with the International Telecommunication Union is the Telecenter Digital Literacy Campaign. The campaign aims to strengthen and empower the marginalised women population by imparting digital literacy to make them more prepared to earn their living by training around one million unskilled women to use computers and modern information and communication technology (ICT) applications to improve their livelihoods.

By Maria Theresa M Camba, Director - Operations, Telecentre.org foundation

The new Women’s Digital Literacy Campaign will leverage the combined reach of telecentre.org Foundation’s global network of 100,000 telecentres worldwide and ITU’s 192 Member States and 700 Sector Members to deliver training in ICT use following a ‘train the trainer’ model.

Of the 1.7 billion people living in poverty, 70 percent are women. Of 867 million illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women. Thus the campaign is focussing on women who have little or no know-how of even day-to-day living and are isolated from the technology revolution that has swept the world. They don’t even know what a computer is, what is world wide web or what is internet. They don’t know that this kind of literacy can change their lives in ways unimaginable to them, that this will open up a new future for them about which they haven’t even dreamt. The telecenter movement is over two decades old but now their importance and role in enhancing stakeholder competency is being realized at a greater level. In this particular initiative the telecentres can and will serve as classrooms for women to learn critical skills and improve their living conditions and overall socio-economic existence. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

telecentres

CSCs: Bridging the Gap Through Common Service Centres (CSCs) a whole range of services are already being offered and once the infrastructure is there in the remote areas, content and applications can be built on it in time By Abhishek Singh, Director-eGovernance, DIT, MCIT

he major problem in a vast nation like ours has been to reach the unreached. Thus, the basic objective behind the development of the CSC scheme has been to establish centers through which services can be delivered at remote places. How do we ensure that the electronic services are reaching till the last mile? CSCs are an outlet to make these services available to all. CSCs are nothing but kiosks which have ICT connectivity, infrastructure and trained manpower.

CSC Rollout Progress (2007 – 2011)

There are certain unique features of CSCs, one of them being the fact that they follow a strict public-private partnership model wherein Government doesn’t invest in hardware or software procurement or even manpower but invests on a service procurement model in which private sector earns by offering sustainable services. Government provides viability gaps for these partners also. The CSC Scheme is the largest PPP project and telecenter project on a national level. Another feature that is unique to CSCs is that the stakeholders run across the spectrum from service providers, government to Village Level Entrepreneurs and finally common citizens.

Numbers Count Around 95,000 centres have been already set up as against the originally planned 100,000. Although, reaching the target has neither been timely nor smooth but still the fact that there still is a satisfactory figure consoles the purpose. The rollout has been a gradual process. But is we look at the graph from 2007-11 it has been a steady, consistent growth. Talking about the various services that are being offered through CSCs he said that whole range of services are already being offered and once the infrastructure is there in the remote areas, content and applications can be built on it in time. Financial Inclusion is a critical service we are trying to provide through our CSCs by offering banking services and bill payment facilities. Telemedicine, women literacy, digital literacy, B2C services like mobile phone recharges, railway ticket booking, internet banking, downloading and submitting various government forms, photocopying, internet browsing, electricity bill payment are some of the services being delivered through CSCs.

e-District: A novel initiative The e-District project which is all about delivering the voluminous G2C services through CSCs. In two districts of Kerala, more than one lakh transactions have already been done in 6 months under the e-District project. One of the key issues, which is lack of G2C services will be taken care of by the e-District project.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

Public Safety and Security

Know the Earth, Show the Way National Map Policy and liberalised geospatial policies provide opportunity to support development without compromising security By Maj Gen R C Padhi, MOGSGS, Military Survey, Indian Army

CT has brought the capabilities in depiction, integration, visualisation and analysis of geo spatial data. Improved bandwidth, high speed data processors and data storage capacity have enabled fusion of military and intelligence inputs so that a common operational picture is made available to all security managers, commanders and officers at different levels. The implications of global realignments of power and a troubled neighborhood are key foreign policy challenges facing India. National Map Policy and liberalised geospatial policies provide opportunity to support development without compromising security. High resolution mapping and GIS requirements being huge outsourcing of defence needs to geospatial industry recommended. Geo spatial industry required to invest in aerial survey, image processing, LiDAR mapping, and development of GIS applications. There is

Enterprise GIS & SDI

GIS

Remote Sensing Data Policy

intense focus on capacity building by academia and universities. Policy requires further liberalisation to make it more industry friendly and support on PPP mode on geospatial services. Change in mindset of security agencies is necessary to look map as a development tool instead of security threat.

Army

Air force

Attribute data

Digitized i i i d Maps

Navy

Imageries Policy

Soldiers Battlefield simulation

It is with this concern that the National Map Policy has been designed on a global reference framework. It was mandated to take leadership role in liberalising access of spatial data to user groups without jeopardising national security through this map policy. Two series of maps namely Defence Series Maps (DSM) and Open Series maps (OSM) have been approved in this policy. Defence Series Maps are the topographical maps on various scales with heights, contours and full content without dilution of accuracy. User agencies can use OSMs on hard copy and web with or without GIS data base. All transactions will be registered in the Map Transaction Registry (MTR) with the details of the receiving agency or end users. Accuracy of OSMs and DSMs are derived from National Topographical Data Base (NTDB).

National Map Policy Maps need to be properly geo-referenced, because worldwide there are so many reference frameworks that most people get confused. So there is a need of a common reference framework.

The Government of India has adopted the Remote Sensing Data Policy (RSDP) – containing modalities for managing and/or permitting the acquisition/dissemination of remote sensing data in support of developmental activities. Department of Space (DoS) of the Government of India will be the nodal agency for all actions under this policy, unless otherwise stated. All data resolutions up to 1.0m shall be distributed on a non-discriminatory basis and as requested by DoS. The policy tries to balance the demand for higher resolution data with the country’s security considerations. The requirement for images with a resolution of less than a metre was picking up because of its usefulness for urban planning and infrastructure mapping. Data of one meter resolution and better will also be screened as above & distributed to government users without any further clearance. Private agencies recommended by at least one government agency for use of one meter and better resolution data for developmental activities can obtain without any further clearance. Specific sale and non-disclosure agreements to be concluded between NRSA and users for data of 1m resolution and better. OSMs are compatible with GPS and satellite imageries. Maps, imageries in public domain contain info required by antinational groups and adversaries. Security forces must be able to exploit the technology ensuring the security and integrity of the data. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Public Safety and Security

Monitoring-Any Time, Anywhere Visual communication aids in better collaboration among all departments and helps in faster decision making By Gagan Verma, National Head, Government business,

ince the last decade, nature of disaster has completely changed in terms of response time and mechanism used in tackling. If we consider the recently happened disaster in Japan, the visual communication played a major role during that point of time. With the help of visual communication, different departments can collaborate with each other and entire operation can be restored in an effective manner. Governments must be prepared to respond to any situation on natural disasters, health hazards, security threats, chemical spill, bio terrorism and crime expansion.

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Government Landscape Today, any government faces budget restrictions, citizen-centric approach, public safety, green initiatives and public-private-partnerships. The visual communication plays the better collaboration among all the departments and helps in making decision in a faster way. For example, in the north east states of our country, there is different terrain. In these states, any security operation is very different with normal video conferencing. So, the role of all the applications would be totally different in these states. In the recent years, most of the thrust has been given to judicial services. More video conferencing applications have been deployed in jails and courts. The challenges are- enhance access and quality of various government services, train the next generation of public servants and responders, break down barriers for multi-agency collaboration, improve productivity and efficiency and reduce cost, time and carbon emissions.

Collaborative Government Unified Collaboration enables people from different locations or department work as a team, respond, solve, and serve more effectively. It also reduces human latency and optimises workflows. Video and voice-based Polycom collaboration solutions can be tightly integrated with UC industry-leading solutions that agencies may already use. From administration and training to public safety, Polycom technology is used every day by departments and agencies in governments to meet with teammates, partners, and citizens to exchange information and make better-informed decisions faster. Highly immersive experience provides a like-like experience with a true personal touch to engage citizens, business, partners and other stakeholders.

The Polycom Advantage

In-Vehicle real time audio, video and content

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Managing and providing quality judicial and public safety services to citizens are just a few of the key responsibilities of governments. At Polycom, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve worked with many government agencies to solve a variety of critical and day-to-day issues in countries around the globe. It transforms government operations with unified collaboration, delivers greater service, performance and Communication and leverages visual communications beyond the conference room.

To learn more, visit hidglobal.com/fargo-dtc-eGov or Contact: hidindia@hidglobal.com | +91 9899116054

Public Safety and Security

Enhancing the Efficiency of Policing CCTNS aims at creating a comprehensive system for enhancing the efficiency of policing at all levels and especially at the Police Station level through adoption of principles of e-Governance By Purushottam Sharma, IG of Police, Madhya Pradesh

It aims at creating a comprehensive and integrated system for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of policing at all levels and especially at the Police Station level through adoption of principles of e-Governance, and creation of a nationwide networked infrastruc-

IND

BPL

ture for evolution of IT-enabled state-of-the-art tracking system around “investigation of crime and detection of criminals” in the real time. It is a critical requirement in the context of the present day internal security scenario. The CCTNS project includes vertical connectivity of police units (linking police units at various levels within the States – police stations,

Matcher Server

Comm. Server

JBP

GWL

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DWS

Police at Central Data Center Responsibility for information security Password Policy Server Security Policy Router Policy Switch Security Policy Antivirus Policy Patch Management Policy Firewall Policy E-mail Usage Policy

GIS/GPS based AVLS Project

Architecture of AFIS

Control Server

• • • • • • • • • •

district police offices, state headquarters and other police formations) as well as horizontal connectivity. Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) is fully automatic computerised system for Fingerprint Identification which reduces expert intervention. It is very useful system for quick & accurate search in ten digits as well as in chance print.

olicing in our country has become increasingly complex over the years. Social tensions, religious disputes, growing economic disparities and regional, linguistic and ethnic differences, terrorism and Naxalism have long been major challenges to effective policing in India today. Crime is present in various forms in India. Organised crime includes drug trafficking, gunrunning, money laundering, and extortion, murder for hire, fraud, human trafficking and poaching. Many criminal operations engage in black marketing, political violence, religiously motivated violence, terrorism, and abduction.

CCTNS

Security Policies Adopted by MP

KWA

HBD

SHR

BHD

BTL

MP Police has implemented an Automated Vehicle Tracking System for Bhopal and Indore for providing an integrated disciplined system for traffic control and maintaining law and order in the district, where in 100 vehicles of the MP Police would be tracked and monitored each city. It enhances public safety by making more timely, accurate and complete Information. It utilises information technology to improve public safety service to the community. This project reduces waiting time for citizens on roads while during surprise checks to verify the possible involvement of person and property.

Firewall Policy at Data Center Firewalls are used to prevent unauthorised Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. Firewalls can be hardware, software or a combination of both. In either case, it must have at least two network interfaces, one for the network. It is intended to protect and one for the network it is exposed to. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the fire all walls, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria.

data centers and applications

Real-Time Connectivity By Puneet Gupta, President-Sales & Marketing,

ideo Conferencing (VC) is still limited to a small section of people and that is also now that it has started to catch up. In the 80s or early 90s, even getting a mobile phone was difficult and now you have all kinds of devices with many different features embedded in them. Video will move on the same track as voice. What limit the use of VC are its price and the technology itself. The constantly falling bandwidth prices will further VC adoption. There are many advantages to VC and they are steadily being noted by the markets. The first and foremost is that it reduces travel time and cost spent on face-to-face meetings. Moreover, it is not always possible to reach all

the remote areas personally considering the demographic challenges of our country. And lastly, for the environment-friendly, using such a technology reduces the carbon footprint. There are some points to keep in mind when choosing the right VC technology; it should have good resolution, frames per second, scalability, ability to share applications, open standards and flexibility. From the government point of view, there is need to communicate effectively in real time and that is the biggest opportunity that VC also offers. In India there is a dearth of good teachers, doctors, skilled manpower and professionals in remote areas. People are not getting enough opportunities as they are not very accessible. This is where the real need of such a technology comes in. Also, in conflict-struck areas also there is reluctance to

venture and thus real-time monitoring solves the problem. The opportunities are endless and potential areas where VC can be used are limitless. VC solutions can be used for trial of prisoners whose transportation to court is risky, for education purposes to reach out to remote villages, telemedicine as we know is already very popular, it can be used for surveillance in police and defence forces, inter-departmental meetings in government departments for quick decisions, and more.

IT for Business Automation

ata centers are the backbone of IT infrastructure resulting heavy stress on them to face challenges and fulfill expectations of the consumers. Two factors which must be looked in when discussing data centres are the scale of IT infrastructure and the extent of value added services to enable consumer needs. It is pertinent to ensure that all our IT investment are aligned with business priority. We must also analyse that new services to be deployed whether it is flat or incrementally growing up year-on-year. There are however certain crucial challenges with the use of IT infrastructure like how to make the existing workforce more productive and efficient and how to utilise

By Dhiren Pardhanani, Director Product Development,

existing resources to deploy new services? How to tune IT infrastructure with IT policies? How to meet commitment through automated process v/s manual process? How to make Data Center more effective in term of design, planning, monitoring, maintaining & supporting?

Utility of IT portal is justified when it provides quality services in less down time. Take the example of filing income tax return online. Today just few lakhs of people are using but it will grow in coming years. Common Data base Model shoots up the delivery of the services, productivity of the people hence provides consistency between data and processes. It assists to meet commitment consistently. Business service management basically provides the effective platform for business planning and operations simplify and standardise the entire delivery processes, ensuring consistence delivery of the services. Time consumed in the process depends on the depth of automation which may be from one minute to a few months. Data center is monitoring itself for compliance violation. Hence effective configuration of Data center is the key for successful business service management system. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

data centers and applications

e-Governance Challenges

By Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant & Head-Technology, MEA, GoI

mplimentation of ICT within the Department is a major challenge as experienced in 6 years of working. Seminars and events provide a platform to point out the drawbacks at the application part hence direct us to find out the effective solution. Even we have good service providers, beautiful, hassle free and tier-3 data centers, industry partner which provides cloud computing to use various services but we do not have a single service to initiate within the department which we can start with the assistance of national data centers or state data centers. It starts with business renewal process, all rules and regulations to work with, entire re-engineering process, change management within the department, all the staff and employees and sometimes you should fight with the management to do

something rolling out within the department. So the main question is, from where we can start e-governance. Plan and then decide to start the e- governance application in a right and successful way probably in a pilot phase quoting an example of Passport Seva Project, which was started 3 years ago and out of 77, 20 Passport Seva Kendra have been rolled out all over the country. For starting this project, there was no problem for setting out the Passport Seva Kendra because there are enough industry partners, support partner who assists completely but when it comes to the application part which have been running successfully for last 20 years for example there is an existing application to issue the passport. In spite of having an application someone try to improve the processes, rules and bye-laws which can invariably improve the delivery of the services

then challenges comes. Once we build our own application and then integrate it with other applications for example UID project which is helpful for biometric matching and identity. While designing the core part of any application you or departments have to decide. Nobody assists you, whether any industry partner, consulting agency or service providers, they are only for supporting function. Core group and champions within the department, who can show the way forward to the industry.

Virtualisation of Data Centres

ata centers are the core of any e-governance sector for example e-mail, social networking, website surfing etc. Data centers are meant for the availability of existing resources and additional resources which require extra power, cooling and IT infrastructure. It provides the agility to extend the services. Operating cost of data centers are becoming very high because of increasing cost of land, park, cooling and asset management. There is exponential growth in data centers because we are connecting to the digital world. Earlier few people were using website,writing blogs but now it can be accessed by everyone so huge amount of data is getting into the system. For regulating the things we need to keep this data for certain periods for example medical records for 7 years and certain of emails for 5 years.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

By Neeta Verma, HOD, Data Centre and Web Services Division, NIC

Earlier storage cables and UDP cables in data centers were laid out parallel but now those cables are replaced by single cable carrying both things. Through data operation management one can manage the services from remote location thus technology offers cloud computing and virtualization. There

are four factors except security which must be considered to enact this technology which are efficiency, flexibility, availability, ability to innovate users. Automation requires a huge amount of investment and effective management but not ensuring the success so use of virtual data center is very helpful to initiate this technology by leasing for a certain period whether for 3 months or an year. You launch mode of application, services and analyse how it is working. If it works well you have flexibility to ask for more resources but if it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you pay for the services hires and come out of it. So whole thing becomes flexible. We have five national data centers of NIC and many data centers of large organistions. So, we must avoid building another data center. Consolidation of data centers is needed worldwide not only in private sector but also in government sector. Some countries like US and UK have started this work and other nations will join them very soon.

Urban Governance and Infrastructure

Land Reform System in Karnataka The principle of Keynesian economics and free market that information can be freely available is not valid in case of land and property in India By Jaijit Bhattacharya, Director, Government Affairs,

he issues of urban governance were highlighted with the case study of Karnataka where multiple urban systems have already been implemented. Technology is opening up new models of governance including new business models for government, operational model, technological model and financial models which are leading to participatory governance. One such area where these models are used is in land records. Increase in efficiency of land and property records will have considerable impact on GDP of the country. Primary source of income in rural areas continues to be agriculture. Some issues of land and property transactions are that it is broker driven, there are significant brokerages and manipulations because there is no transparency of information. There is non transparent market, distress sale and purchase which also lead to manipulation of prices. There is very limited liquidity and it is difficult to encash particular wealth. Finally we have deed based system rather than title based system which means that property can be sold multiple times based on deeds. In Karnataka, land records are mentioned in a dead language which have to be kept because new deeds have no value. Globally, people are moving towards title based system which is if the land is in a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name he owns it irrespective of what the previous deeds are. Between the time of registration and actual mutation, the land could be sold to many people as the registration system does not go and check whether property is sold or not.

Registration and mutation are independent. There is Sarfaresi Act which keeps track of all assets for which loan has been taken. It ensures that new urban property follows the system because much of the old properties are embroiled in the issue of whether the deed is clean or not, whether there are competing claims on land, and so on. In Karnataka, land property records and management system works by three sections. One is land records which is responsible for managing ownership and rights, ownership records of non- agricultural land and property. Second is registration section which is registering all transactions taking place in land and property in public record. Third is service section which is managing spatial and non spatial data about land. There are two kinds of properties- agricultural and non agricultural urban property. In

urban section there is a request for pre mutation sketch done by urban property ownership record system. Then it goes to registration system Cauvery which is where you pay taxes and then it goes to Bhoomi system where mutation happens. Essentially, the four major steps are: agreement to sell is reached without the sale deed; the seller and buyer get together through a broker; pre mutation sketch is made; it is then brought to registration or mutation system. Same is the process of sale deed and detailed process of how mutation is done. All this is converted to online system. There is a lot of pressure on the legal infrastructure because of large number of civil suites that are based on land records. As per one estimate, 70 percent of cases in Indian courts are related to land and property issues. The Bhoomi project and reforms improved the quality of land records. But it is still built on a foundation which is very archaic, laid down by the British focussing more on revenue collection and in providing governance. Therefore, land and property transactions continue to be a significant source of litigation in courts. It also has significant socio- economic impacts. The sub-optimally governed land and property system leads to considerable hardships for rural and urban citizens. Moreover, it leads to family disputes and impacts the well being of the citizens. Support system is critical to facilitate land acquisition system for developmental projects at appropriate rates and compensations. At the end of the day, the benefits are that one gets service/tax oriented administration. If government starts looking for providing services and getting revenue enhancements because of the service provided, that would increase the revenue collected by the government. As the transaction hassles goes down, the number of transaction goes up and in turn tax and revenue collection goes up significantly. At high level we need to train people, legislative and administrative changes, and training of owners, how to manage digital signatures and digital ownership of land. The major legislative changes that are required are three rights that government should grant- apriory right to owners to sell their property without any objections; buyers to qualify on terms such as eligibility to buy agricultural property apriory right to buy land; automatic mutation of property after a certain period. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Urban Governance and Infrastructure

Analytics for Effective Governance SaS Technology has been designed purely for business analytics use with seamless integration with clientsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; business IT applications By Ravi Makhija, Chief Operating Officer,

D Various Levels of Analytics for Effective eGovernance

ata has been transformed to information and to intelligence and different applications related to it for effective governance. Over the last eighty years we have organised from knowledge in the mind to knowledge in the books to internet. The question arises how to turn data into some kind of information and eventually into intelligence. There can be various questions and differences related to data like what kind of data, why and when did it happen, how much of it has happened, where will it happen, what is it that is going to happen, and what if the trend continues to happen. This primarily is the difference between business intelligence and analytics. Local governments and organisations try to understand what is historic and is happen-

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

ing and so on. But not many of them are trying to get into the next level which is the predicting part.

In case of land reforms, property and registrations are the key elements to identify land and property names and addresses. This will help in data adjudication layer. Next is analytics layer followed by reporting. Business solutions specifically to government, like what we have is and what can urban governance do with lot of intelligence applications, are related to essentially improving citizen centricity. Next is increasing revenue and reducing operating cost, optimizing operations, smart grids and how we can ensure that we have enough power supply. We need to have the ablity to maintain continuous supply and ensure that there is no fluctuation in supply. Then there is cyber policing and tax fraud management. In health sector smart applications have been implemented. Aarogyashree in Andhra Pradesh has been implemented and SaS is trying to understand how exactly the programme has been implemented in terms of reach and performance. Third step is trying to predict what is required in terms of infrastructure and manpower to address the growing concerns of health related issues in Andhra Pradesh. When the hospitals were filing the claims for reimbursements of cashless schemes it was found that certain hospitals were filing claims which they were not eligible for. So they cut off those hospitals from the list of approved hospitals. Taxation is one of the key areas for adoption of analytics. There are close to 85 installations of taxation across the globe. The concerns are related to low filing, zero filing and nonpayment, and claiming VAT when one is actually not eligible to claim it. So pilot programme was implemented in two states. One simplistic rule that pilot followed is to correlate tax returns with consumption of electricity. In terms of public safety, analytics can help in putting in place information-led policing, intelligence led investigation and social network analysis. If implemented well, this can help identify possible causes of threat in advance. A person while using social media leaves social footprint which can be analysed to try and predict the behavior leading to threat. In India we are on the verge of creating fusion centre which is going to help in deriving more intelligence out of 21 databases where people leave some kind of data in normal day to day activity. In this way, day to day work can be done much better with analytics.

Urban Governance and Infrastructure

NDMC: Towards Smarter Grid NDMC is initiating Smart Grid to employ innovative products and services together with intelligent monitoring and communication to provide consumers with greater information By Amit Prasad, Director of Smart Grid, New Delhi Municipal Council

DMC is one of the three local bodies in Delhi. It was made purposely to cater to the needs of Lutyenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Delhi for specific requirements in VIP area. One of the functions of NDMC is electricity distribution. With the increasing demand of electricity there is a need to find the ways to reduce outages and consumption. Quality of electricity is also becoming an issue as we are buying more and more equipments sensitive to electric fluctuations like microwaves and TV. But the information technology is not embedded in the network that brings electricity to us. The parameters of the network is not being monitored. Smart grid is a very new concept and it is only in the initial phases. So todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grid is fragmented, compartmentalized and have one way communication. It does not utilize renewable

resources and it is still not known how much electricity will come from these resources. But future smart grid would be highly interconnected and integrated with two way

communications. For example, if smart grid meter is installed one would know how much electricity is consumed and if a person is consuming extra the electricity can be disconnected anytime. Also, if it is known that there will be heavy load shedding at a certain point of time then instead of having a blackout, using smart meters and switches heavy loads could be cut off. For infrastructure smart grid has tied up with Infosys. It has analysed weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats of the new technology as it is very difficult in the government to adopt and implement it. IT people in government will vouch and fight for it. They will meet resistance from all sectors. Today there is a need to put devices and sensors at all places where faults lie like analyzing temperature of transformers and other equipments. This is to ensure more reliable power to the consumers. These are some areas where NDMC has chalked out. This is the roadmap for next ten years. The risks factors are also typically the same as in any other IT project. Other initiative of NDMC is mapping everything on GIS for property. All the services will converge on every property be it water connection, electricity, garbage service point etc. and will be merged in a single home page to all the consumers. It is very important to computerize property tax system and make it available online to public. There were ten lakh property tax owners and for filing tax returns once in a year every citizen was coming to office at least five times. Still filing returns was difficult as forms were complicated and there were lot of parameters which needed to be filed. When things were complicated people used to go to the middlemen and ended up paying more. By making it computerized people now can file their returns from home and in addition they are also saving fuel and in turn our environment. In the newspaper it was mentioned that 5000 MW plant was coming up but the question is where it is coming from. We are burning carbon fuel and our reserves are non renewable. Gandhiji said there is enough for our needs and not for our greed. So we should live into our interests and not eat our bank balance. In this way NDMC resolves to intensify its efforts in providing better civic services to citizens. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Urban Governance and Infrastructure

ICT for Development By Abdul Rahman Panjshiri, Director, International Relations, Ministry of Information and Culture, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

ustainable development is a high priority for every nation and Afghanistan is no exception. In spite of political and social turbulence, the last decade saw development in every sector and the media played an important role in achieving this national objective. Afghanistan is a new full member of international community, taking steps to use ICT to promote freedom of speech, good governance and public transparency. The historical Bonn agreement laid the foundation of a democratic Afghanistan, committed to public participation in the decision-making processes. We have had some creditable achievements in using ICT particularly in the finance

and budget planning, rural development project evaluation and monitoring under the â&#x20AC;&#x153;National Solidarity Programâ&#x20AC;?. Increased accessibility of internet expands use of alternative platforms to address social problems. Afghanistan faces many challenges and threats on the path of development. The most pressing among these is the threat of resurgence of extremism. Terrorists use the rural areas to attack the cities and disrupt social harmony. Nearly 75 percent of Afghanistan population is living in rural areas and only by building infrastructure and services, providing education and public participation can we defeat extremisim. Presently, we are moving towards a period of transition of power to Afghans by 2014. Afghanistan and the international community came a long way and we cannot afford to lose the last battle against extremism.

It is the responsibility of the state of Afghanistan and the international community to spread the power of media and ICT for sustainable development. Together with dialogue and more cooperation amongst international community, state and individual, we will strike the ideological core of the extremism and terrorism and this would be as a cornerstone for new free Afghanistan. This is an opportunity for all of us to come close together for our mutual survival and revival.

eGovernance for Urban Infrastructure

he basic infrastructure life cycle comprises of the stages of budgeting where funds are allocated for the planned work, tracking execution, and getting feedback. Elements of good governance are transparency and accountability, participatory governance and data driven decision making. Technology is the enabler in ensuring that these key ingredients are part of good governance and quality urban infrastructure. Participatory budgeting is identified along with the work where it is to be allocated. It is defined as democratic deliberation and decision making process where people decide how to allocate municipal budget. In this presentation the focus was mainly on how budget is allocated to the municipalities. They have ward committees, as mandated by constitution, which identify

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

By Manu Srivastava, eGovernments Foundation

spending priority and develop specific proposals and with the help of experts they figure out the estimates and the priority. Then community votes on what kind of work needs to be picked up and municipalities implement those works. As a citizen you would know what kind of work is going on in your specific ward. In this people participate to know what kind of work is

taken up by the municipality and can vote for a particular project. Based on this, municipalities can know what citizens want. It is not something municipality decides upfront as this is based on the needs of citizen and what they want. At execution level there is e-tendering and e-procurement platform where a lot of work is being done in this area. The contractor is selected based on performance and feedback of the citizens. This is made possible through the data where contractors have worked in the past have been rated. This information could be given back to the citizens as to how much work has been completed and how much task has been performed. In this way while selecting a contractor, a person has the record of all the things that have been done by him in the past and work by work categorisation can also be looked at as to how a particular contractor is performing in a particular area. There is also grievance redressal system and citizens can also give their feedback.

session: DIT- IGNOU

Empowering Masses through ICT Goal of community knowledge enterprises is to take information at the right time to the right place and to the right person in right context

From L - R: Archana Gulati, Prof V N R Pillai, Dr B K Murthy, Prof K R Srivathsan

he session was chaired by Prof VN Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). He started by mentioning that Ministry of IT, Government of India, has constituted a working group- ‘Mass IT Literacy for all’ which is chaired by IGNOU. They had meetings with the IT ministry personnel, IT secretaries of the states as well as the private players in education sector to propagate this activity. In India there have been some successful literacy missions the purpose of which is to define literacy in a contextualized way. DOEACC which is conducting a large number of programmes under the Ministry of IT is a major partner in this activity. Unconventional collaborations are necessary to make the society literate. It is also necessary to spread the message to educational institutions. Jan Shikshan Sansthan under MHRD is also one of the partners in this initiative.

With broadband revolution, mobile revolution and intervention of the computers with different setups it is becoming very diverse and we need to be more focused. For this working group the computer division at IGNOU is providing the necessary support. Kerala was the first state to become 100 percent literate. In total literacy movement one district with maximum number of illiterates was Malappuram. In Kerala with the support of Ministry of IT, Government of India, they started IT literacy movement Akshaya. The district of Malappuram, with maximum numbers of conventional illiterates, became the first IT literate district in India. The main reason was life expectancy in Kerala was very high, so there were large numbers of old people whose children were working in Gulf countries. For communication purpose they learnt how to make use of computers. Therefore we have to look at the diversities of the levels of educational systems of the country, and technological capabilities, in terms of infrastructures.

event

The next speaker Archana Gulati, Joint Administrator, Universal Service Obligation Fund, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Government of India, started her presentation with a small clip on ‘Sanchar Shakti’ which is ICT skills for women by members of Self Help Groups in rural India. Sanchar Shakti focuses on four key areas: providing value added services, establishing solar based mobiles and CDMA, SWT charging centres, and rural repair and service in handsets and modems. The long term vision is to use the mobile projects to scale up the Sanchar Shakti into a pan India initiative. Ms Gulati said that it is also pertinent to give information to women based on their daily life to give them self confidence and empowerment. This scheme was launched on 7 March 2011 by President Smt Pratibha Patil. Challenges were also faced mainly because of the fact that rural women were largely illiterate. For example, the content delivered though mobile needs to be highly gender sensitive. Also a lot of training is required to teach rural women how to use mobile phones. They also have a limited capacity to grasp the knowledge. So they should be made to choose what kind of content they want to learn. The USOF has signed eight different MoUs with service providers across the countryagriculture, horticulture, livestock rearing, bee keeping etc. Ms Gulati gave examples of two different villages- one in UP where rural women had never held a mobile phone in their hands, and the other in Pune where women were slightly more educated and were quite enthusiastic about the use of mobile technologies. Outcomes expected from this study are: enrichment of the lives of the villagers, to show the stakeholders that such kind of projects can succeed and can be commercially viable. If the service providers develop the software catering to the needs of rural women it is feasible and it can work. There are also some projects in the pipeline like women running solar charges in mobiles, women running repair work centres for modems and mobiles. The content is highly customized to the needs of the women including market skills, training, information on government schemes, education, literacy etc. B K Murthy, Director and Head, National Knowledge Network Division, Department of Information Technology, Government of India September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

event

session: DIT- IGNOU

started by saying that ICT Literacy has become a part of life. 8 out of 10 people in India in the age group of 30 years are software engineers. Behind every successful IT project around the world there is an Indian. So for Indians IT literacy is not a big issue. Education gives empowerment while IT gives efficiency. In a country with one billion people if everybody is empowered, then a powerful nation can be built. Today in most of the courses across the globes IT literacy courses are specially designed for social science research people. All humanities students are now learning IT literacy. These days the total population on social networking sites is almost comparable to China and India if the total number of people is taken as a country. The Division did a case study ten years ago in a village near Faridabad on how ICT can help a common man. Based on this experience they have designed a community software package by which a person need not understand emailing and related stuff but could see the picture on the screen, click it and record his/her voice. But the problem that villagers faced was when the system was taken to the villagers, they could not even click the mouse. Mr Murthy cited another example from IIT Kharagpur. They went to one of the laboratories where a professor was using ICT for cerebral palsy. He had designed some icons based on which he taught different patients about the use of computers. He also talked about the use of ICT in a blind school that used a text-to-speech software. In three years about 10 students had passed O level and were employed in other blind schools and government schools. So overall there is a need to improve IT literacy as today IT has become a part of life. According to Prof Srivathsan, Pro-Vice Chancellor IGNOU, fundamentally, the whole society is changing as we are entering into a knowledge era and in this environment it is imperative as to what kind of IT literacy we build. The entire community should exhibit the characteristics of knowledge organisation and become knowledge activators. So question is what kind of values are we creating for the masses through IT enabled services. The masses have to be categorized to ensure that information reaches everyone from rural to urban people. Indians will become part of knowledge society and economy whether it

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

besides internet one must create web based activity, propose two levels of IT literacymass functional literacy and potential IT livelihood skills

will be in the field of education, healthcare, livelihood opportunities, access to egovernance services, social networking, arts and craft, agriculture. There are four basis to understand the dynamics of information society- smart enabled citizen access to common services; to assure effective delivery of services to the poor, needy and below poverty line citizens; citizens should become producers as well as consumers of content; opportunities for local growth though mass literacy. According to him the best definition of ICT was given by Henry Kissinger in 2004 who said that the role of technology is to bridge the gulf between availability of information and the ability to use it. There are technologies and backends to support this kind of system. The kind of taxonomy we get as skills for common persons may vary depending on various categories, for example, Bluetooth, WiFi, internet access, navigation, email should be in local languages. Then there are issues of security and certain ethics need to be followed. For example, security issues in payment of credit cards; content creation in audio, video and documents in local language; mobile ethics etc. Smart enabled IT citizenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practicality can be seen through use of ICT. In Malappuram district the government pays for one person from every household to become IT literate the cost of which is paid to common service centres. Later on, they are used to post agricultural information and market produce. Now all districts of Kerala have adopted the Akshaya concept. Below Poverty Line people should be exposed to the use of CSCs, kiosks, egovernance citizen access, introduce livelihood oriented IT skills. Large number of people will need skills on how to use and manage

social networking, citizen centric egovernance, NGOs, industries, and CSC associated services access. Participating in web group activities can be converted into a web group model. Example of community services include agriculture wherein one can connect all those services that are sufficient to provide services, create database, and connect all those organisations which have experts who are relevant to provide services. ICT is for breaking barriers. So there is a need to build connectivity in terms of community enterprises. The Prof gave several examples of extended Janani Suraksha Yojana for mother and child welfare, health assurance services for old and poor, localizing and accessing primary education, introducing education passbook for every youth, agriculture virtual farm cooperatives for specific crop, e-krishi type market access services which can be readily be taught. There should be professional support for community staff. For this DOAECC should team up with other DIT wings and other concerned media. The goal of community knowledge enterprises is to take information at the right time to the right place and to the right person in right context. So localising basic mass literacy means that besides using internet one must create web based activity, propose two levels of IT literacymass functional literacy and potential IT livelihood skills in information management for the local profession. Prof Srivathsan concluded with Vivekanandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s directive that if the poor cannot come to education, education must reach them at the plough, in the factory, everywhere. IT mass literacy should bootstrap the country and prepare every citizen for the emerging times for knowledge and economy, make India a true exemplar and practitioner of knowledge society and economy.

information management and security

Rising State of Threat

sophisticated that you might not even detect a security breach. On an average, a new malware is released every 1.5 seconds. As our lives move online, the frequency and sophistication of attacks is going up and we are exposed to vulnerabilities as never before.

The complexity and frequency of security threats is rapidly increasing. A systematic approach to security is the need of the hour

The Korean Experience

By Amit Nath, Country Manager, India & SAARC,

f late, there have been some large-scale security incidents across the world. Large corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Sony and Intel have been the targets of cyber attacks and Randy Vickers, responsible for ensuring cyber security of US Govt property had to resign recently owing to large number of security breaches of US govt sites. Indian sites are also being routinely targeted on a large scale. Whereas earlier we had global scale attacks such as the Melissa virus and the I Love You virus, the situation today is very different. Attacks today are so

On 4th July 2009, South Korea came under a massive cyber attack by Chinese hackers who tried to shut down the entire South Korean information infrastructure. The attackers succeeded in infiltrating a number of servers due to which the Korean eBay Auction site remained shut for 72 hours, several govt sites were shut down or compromised and a large volume of data was destroyed. Following this a Cabinet Ministerial Level task force was set up to develop a security policy. The taskforce came up with the proposal for an anti-botnet initiative that was later legislated into an Act of the Korean Parliament. The Ministry of Education and Public Administration asked Trend Micro to develop a comprehensive security system and today it is possible to centrally monitor the activity on every government computer in Korea and to automatically flag suspicious behaviour.

Ensuring Cyber Security There are four things we need for adequate security. A central Command and Control Centre that can monitor govt computers across the country and flag any suspicious activity is the essential first step. This will put in place an early warning and mitigation system against cyber threats. Second, there should be a comprehensive Cyber Security Policy. The industry must be a very active participant in terms of how the govt frames its security policy. Security companies can open up their labs and conduct training for govt officials. If an officer does not understand security, how can he protect you? The third thing is the legal and regulatory mechanism. The conviction rates for cyber crimes in India are abysmal and we need to address this. Finally, we need to engrain the security culture among our future generations by making cyber security a part of our educational system. Application security, server security and a Security Incident and Mitigation Plan are the very essential things that we need to start working on immediately. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

information management and security

Key Challenges

Managing Information A structured approach towards addressing information management challenges is immediately needed

T RET TURNS

Events Logs

Millions Raw event data Distributed Heterogeneous

Event Management Event Management 9 Explicit event collection & Log Analysis

Events Events Threats Threat Analysis

Thousands Relevant Events

I id t Incidents

Old Criteria • Optional • Health of Business • Reactive • Meet Regulation • On‐Premises

Paradigm Shift

New EFFORT / TIME

Paradigm Shift in Security & Risk Management

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

aspects appropriately so that the security of our information assets is not compromised.

Key Challenges There are four sets of challenges that we need to address in order to put in place an effective information management system. Managing datasets is the first challenge. We need to manage different datasets that need to be integrated. The present egovernance model talks of more and more public facing systems that can increase transparency and reduce costs besides creating trust among the people. In order to ensure reliable service delivery, there is a critical need to manage data, guard against unauthorised intrusions and create audit trails that can help in forensic analysis of any untoward event. The next challenge is a macro-level view of risk management in governance. While the RBI has mandated corporates to adopt risk management and corporate governance norms under Clause 49, the risk management

Mana

• Com chan • Defi Secu rem

Macr

• Pres evall • Ther acce • Own

Multi Enviro

Incidents Threats

Hundreds Prioritized lists Actionable items

Key Challenges

New Criteria Mandatory • Mandatory • Competitive Advantage • Proactive • Risk Driven • On‐Demand

Log Archival

Security Data

Reporting & Forensics Incident Response

DISCONTINUITY CURVE

ss Based

9 Intelligent Down S Stream Suppression

Structured Process

he principle of PDCA (Plan, Do, Check and Act) is an important paradigm In information management and security. Although a lot of work has gone in planning and evolving policy structures for egovernance, implementation can only be as successful as the strength of the monitoring mechanism. We thus need to strengthen our monitoring abilities to manage information and ensure security of data in a more robust and effective manner. Challenge for Indian security environment is largely coming from the threat of loss of reputation that arises from attack on websites that are your public face. About 270 Indian official sites have been hacked in recent times. So far, we have not really tried to undertake forensic analysis of the incidents and close the loopholes. With the changing forms of attacks, we need to be &Risk Management proactive and deal with policy and administrative

grated

Data Management

Noise Reduction

Correlation & Visualization

By Arvind Mehrotra, President APAC,

s Critical ies ‐‐ Apps ies

Intrusion Protection

framework in governments is still weak. I am yet to come across any govt in India that has adopted an ISMS (Integrated Security Management Policy) policy. This needs to be addressed on a priority basis. The third challenge is that as we adopt ICT in governance, we are increasingly deploying multiple sets of technology without knowing exact roles of each set. Consequently, there might be multiple systems performing the same function. In the absence of a data analysis engine that can collate and analyse data across systems, and manage the dataset, this might go undetected. In addition, in the absence of a centralised analytics system, the information being generated from diverse deployments often goes unutilised. This too needs to be addressed. Lastly, we also need to address the absence of proper controls and an assessment and risk mitigation strategy. At present, there is no process that can judge the performance of a technology deployment against pre-defined performance criteria and against its adherence to policy guidelines. There is similarly no proper framework to analyse whether or not the technology is able to adequately protect the data assets. All this needs to change. The earlier model of governance working in unconnected silos is being replaced by a new paradigm of interconnected applications and integrated datasets. We now need a process view that addresses all issues in an integrated manner. A Security Operating Centre dealing with security incident management services and adoption of the CTO/CIO model in governments for better management of our information assets need to be adopted with urgency.

• A on wide • Diffe envi

Insuff Risk M

• Insu I susc • Ther cont

information management and security

eGovernment in Bahrain With a clear strategy and focus on citizens, Bahrain has made a successful foray in adoption of ICT in governance By Feras Ahmed, Director, Services and Channels Enhancement, eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain

s per the Kingdom of Bahrain’s eGovernment Vision, our objective is “To be the eGovernment leader committed to provide all Government services that are integrated, best‐in‐class and available to all through their channels of choice helping Bahrain transform as the finest country in GCC to visit, live, work and do business” Under the leadership of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, a number of economic and political reforms have been undertaken across the country and egovernance is one of them. For any initiative to be successful, you need political will, political support and political drive. The egovernance initiative has been driven by a Supreme Committee for ICT (SCITCT) which governs the entire

programme and enacts its policies. It is headed by the Deputy Prime Minister and a number of other ministers are members of the Committee.

The eGovernment Strategy 2007‐2010 B h i E Bahrain Economic Vision 2030 i Vi i 2030 “Build a productive and globally competitive economy through efficient and effective government to ensure every Bahraini has the means to live a secure and fulfilling life and reach their full potential” to live a secure and fulfilling life and reach their full potential Effective Government

Efficient Government

Fulfilling Life to Citizens

eGovernment Vision “To To be the eGovernment leader committed to provide all Government be the eGovernment leader committed to provide all Government services that are integrated, best‐in‐class and available to all through their channels of choice helping Bahrain transform as the finest country in GCC to visit, live, work and do business” Individuals

Government

Businesses

Visitors

An illustrative diagram showing eGovernment strategy of Bahrain for 2007-10

The eGovernment Strategy 2007-2010 The eGovernment strategy was implemented in 2007 for a three year period. The strategy focussed on an effective, efficient govt that fulfils citizen’s lives. We focussed on all sectors of the population, be it individuals, business, government and even visitors to the country. It is aligned with the economic vision of the country and the motto was “Towards a better life”. e-Goverment is more than mere automation of govt. All our efforts have kept citizens at the focus of the programme. The initiatives have have been designed to offer services through a variety of channels (web, mobile, voice, onestop-shop), with an overarching concern for security management and information security. We now offer 200 unique egovt services from over 40 govt entities. Of these, 55 unique services are also offered on the mobile platform, including payments – a service for which we have built custom security as the SMS farmaework is not secure. The e-governance infrastructure has made it possible for any person to avail of a service within a 2km span anywhere in Bahrain. The National Enterprise Architecture Framework (NEAF) has been critical to the success of our egovernance initiatives. We believe there is positive correlation between egovernance capability and architectural maturity. The more advanced your architecture, the more likely you are to have better egovernance capabilities. The NEAF puts in place a nationwide, cross-govt strategy for bringing all govt services on a common platform, and also addresses issues of information management and security in an integrated fashion. It was developed after comprehensive study of processes in different ministries and has helped the govt in business process re-engineering so that all ministries are now well-placed to offer e-services. Training and capacity building have been very important parts of the overall strategy. Without building a culture of information architecture, safety, and information management across govt entities, it is not possible to provide satisfactory and secure services to citizens. We have undertaken extensive training and capacity building programmes for govt officials that have enabled our trainees to act as catalysts of change in their respective organisations. Having successfully implemented the strategy 2007-10, we now have a new strategy for 2011-16 that has been formulated after intensive cross-sectoral consultations. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Financial Inclusion

Banking on Inclusion It has to be admitted that today, more than ever before, technology plays a vital role in bringing about integration in society of all social and economic classes

Technology Platforms

By L P Rai, Deputy General Manager, State Bank of India

inancial Inclusion is a crucial link and a substantial first step towards achieving inclusive growth. More than 40 percent of Indian population is unbanked and more than 51 percent of farm households have no access to formal or informal sources of credit while 73 percent have no access to formal sources of credit. The financially excluded sections largely comprise-marginal farmers, landless labourers, self employed and unorganised sector enterprises, urban slum dwellers, migrants, ethnic minorities and socially excluded groups, senior citizens and women. While there are pockets of large excluded population in all parts of the country, the north east, eastern and central regions contain most of the financially excluded population. There are various reasons for exclusion in our country. Physical access is a deterrent in

remote, hilly and sparsely populated areas with poor infrastructure. Lack of awareness, low incomes/assets, social exclusion and illiteracy act as barriers. Distance from branch, branch

TECHNOLOGY CHANNEL WISE PROGRESS Number in Lakh; Rupees in Crores 'NO FRILLS' Accounts through BC Channel

31.03.2011

30.06.2011

Balance

Number

Balance

Number

Balance

S Smart / Non‐Smart card t/N S t d

38 71 38.71

23 32 23.32

51 79 51.79

39 03 39.03

53 80 53.80

48 52 48.52

Cell Phone messaging system

0.45

0.77

1.85

3.31

1.78

2.58

SBI Kiosk Banking

0.06

0.09

2.34

15.03

5.11

29.33

Total BC channel

39.22

24.18

55.98

57.37

60.69

80.43

Average Balance Per Account in Rupees (whole bank) Average Balance Per Account in Rupees (FIP villages)

102

133

296

360

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

It has to be admitted that today, more than even before, technology plays a vital role in bringing about integration of all social and economic classes. Accessibility, affordability, appropriateness and benefits determine how deep financial inclusion penetrates the social fabric of the village. The central government and the Reserve Bank of India have been promoting the idea of financial inclusion for large segments of our population through the use of IT-based, e-governance initiatives. Within this model, banks can outsource their facilities through agents (i.e. Business Correspondents) who would conduct branchless banking on their behalf in the remotest of villages, using tools like biometric cards or mobile phones that deliver services based on GPRS technology. This model is meant to reach the last man located at the bottom of the pyramid. SBI Tiny Card is an initiative for financial inclusion. An extensive ID profile is created on the card. Some information fields are compulsory and others are optional. Optional fields can also be captured in the future and written post-issuance on the card with control of the back-end system. The card is currently being used as a means of payment of government benefits directly to the poor.

KIOSK Banking

Number

Technology

31.03.2010

timings, cumbersome documentation and procedures, unsuitable products, language and staff attitudes are common reasons for exclusion. There is higher transaction cost apart from procedural hassles. KYC requirements are stringent. Inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing banking services and subsidies.

SBI KIOSK Banking is a facility provided by State Bank of India wherein customers need not go to the SBI branch to make different transactions. These kiosk banks have the facility of cash and check deposits; while their withdrawal actions are similar to those of ATM. Existing customers who are not enrolled for kiosk banking may also use the system for cash withdrawals and deposits. A Customer Service Point (CSP) has a personal computer, internet connection, printer and biometric device, while the kiosk banking system opens no frills account of the poor people.

Financial Inclusion

Reaching the Un-banked

need of financial support. Without financial inclusion, banks cannot reach the un-banked. Only 30000 rural branches of banks are supposed to serve over 8 lakhs villages. Technology and financial inclusion are the popular coinage in banking parlance in the country. Several banks and technology solution providers have ventured to provide information and communication based solutions for financial inclusion.

Without financial inclusion, banks cannot reach the un-banked By AVV Prasad, Additional Commissioner, Department of Rural Development, Andhra Pradesh

Smart Card Project

‘A

In the smart card, data is encrypted and card is prepared. Once the KYC norm is fulfilled and bank account opened. The smart Card is personalised and issued to each beneficiary. It is state driven intervention. This is an establishsmall loan, a Service Area Approach has become dysfunctional for most of the villages. Denial of service to millions of ment of last mile banking - banking outpost savings account poor is in fact a disservice. Poor are starved of credit, forced to pay usurious rate of interest. Urban Poor at each Gram Panchayat. Disbursement of or an insurance also left out. Service Area Approach is not appropriate model for financial inclusion. Social Security pensions and MGNREGS wage policy can make payments is done in this project. Chip based a great difference If technology permits‐rural Areas should be served on same terms as the urban areas. The poor shall not smartcard is backed by bank a/c as identity to a low-income family. They enable people have to pay usurious interest rates; in fact, they shall not be charged more than the rich. Service area card for disbursement. Disbursement is done to invest in better nutrition, housing, health banks always fall short of people’s expectations as well as needs. It should not be extended to FI. through business correspondent. Bank lays the and education for their children. They ease the Multiple players may be permitted: First come, first serve; newer, better services; cheaper and faster entire infrastructure. The Government pays strain of coping with difficult times caused by service. Let people choose whom they patronize. 2 percent as commission on the total amount crop failures, illness or death. They help people plan for the future.’ paid. The approach is to create branchless banking infrastructure by establishing a network of Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the Quote of Deepak Kumar business correspondents in each village. United Nations The CSC is a strategic cornerstone of the National e‐Governance Plan which provides access to Banks and Government work together to Financial Inclusion is delivery of banking information, backed with relevant infrastructure and end‐to‐end services that would allow rural open accounts and issue smartcards to the poor. services at an affordable cost. This is banking population, the opportunities to enhance their quality of life. To begin with, certain Government benefits for the disadvantaged and low income groups. like social security pensions and NREGS wage When an individual opens a bank account, interest earned thereon is a saving and having Page 2 as Box payments are delivered through this network. he becomes a part of the growth process. The an account would help when the person is in The endeavour is to establish a banking outpost in each village to include the unbanked poor.

Extent of Financial Exclusion

Challenges

Households

•

• • •

• •

70,000 bank branches and 1.5 lakh post offices for about 6,00,000 villages. 51.36% of rural households are financially excluded. 44.9% of total earners have bank accounts. Only 28.3% of total earners ( who earn less than Rs.50,000 ) have bank accounts. Only 54 persons per 100 have savings account. Only 13.0% of total earners ( who earn less than Rs.50,000 ) take credit from banks.

Social Group

Populati on in ‘000

% Included

% Excluded

S.C

15592.6

50.23

49.77

S.T

11924.1

36.32

63.68 48.58

OBC

37043

51.42

Others

24688.4

49.42

50.58

Total

89248.1

48.64

51.36 In million

Institution / End-March

1993

2002

2007

Scheduled Commercial Banks

246

246.5

320.9

Regional Rural Banks

30.5

36.7

52.7

Primary Agricultural Credit Societies

102.1

125.8

Urban Co-operative Banks

41.6

Post Offices

47.5

60.2

60.8

Total

454.6

487.1

610.3

Total Accounts per 100 adult persons

Source: Report on Currency and Finance 2006-08 (IIMS Survey, 2007), NABARD report

There are various challenges. Banks need to create a separate vertical for financial inclusion-Capacity building and Venture Project mode. Service Area Approach has become dysfunctional for most of the villages. Denial of service to millions of poor is in fact a disservice. Poor are starved of credit, forced to pay usurious rate of interest. Urban Poor also left out. Service Area Approach is not appropriate model for financial inclusion. If technology permits, rural areas should be served on same terms as the urban areas. The poor shall not have to pay usurious interest rates. In fact, they shall not be charged more than the rich. Service Area banks always fall short of people’s expectations as well as needs. It should not be extended to financial inclusion. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

citizen centric service delivery

Fresh Paradigms of Governance By Arvind Mayaram, Additional Secretary and Financial Advisor, Ministry of Rural Development, Govt. of India

ndian IT capabilities have been recognised around the world, but another aspect of the IT revolution in India â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that of a game changer in governance is only being recognised now. Although governance in India has never been easy, it is becoming more complex in the light of increasing expectations from life. The concepts of crisis of rising expectations and relative deprivation that started gaining prominence from the 1970s have now acquired centre stage in terms of citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; expectations from government. People are not satisfied with whatever the government is able to deliver and with increased exposure to the rest of the world, people want the experiences of

e-governance

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

developed countries to be replicated in India. This increase in aspirations is a big challenge for government and leveraging IT to reform the system of governance and make a transition to a whole new paradigm of governance which is more predictable and transparent than the present system. Predictability of the system and its processes is perhaps more important than transparency in terms of providing satisfactory governance. IT is changing the rules of governance as we know it and helping us better meet expectations of people. The introduction of IT in different ways to improve governance is of utmost importance and is becoming increasingly critical to the process with every passing day. Concerns of effective service delivery and on larger issues

such as probity in public life and in governance can be better addressed with increased leveraging of the strengths of IT. Important schemes such as the MGNREGS and services such as providing passports have shown the qualitative difference IT can make to delivery. The Ministry of External Affairs has met with great success in utilising social media for engaging directly with stakeholders. We need to encourage innovativeness in designing the integration of IT in service delivery and take government closer to people. Going forward, I think sky is the limit as far as possibilities of leveraging IT are concerned.

citizen centric service delivery

Social Media in Public Diplomacy Introduction of IT in different ways to improve governance is of utmost importance and is becoming increasingly critical By Navdeep Suri, Joint Secretary and Head, Public Diplomacy Division, Ministry of External Affairs

he mandate of the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs is to explain India and India’s foreign policy to people overseas and within India itself. In an attempt to reach out to younger people who are the future leaders, it was felt that in addition to traditional media, social media also needs to be leveraged. Being present on social media helps the Ministry engage directly with its stakeholders. This generates instant feedback to information put out by the Ministry and also enables us to respond to queries, comments and substantive issues of foreign policy.

Building a Global Community of Indophiles In 2010, the Public Diplomacy Division became the first GoI entity to start using Twitter. Since then, the Division has acquired more than 12,000 followers – Foreign Offices of other countries, thinktanks, newspapers, bloggers and interested individuals from India and abroad. The Public Diplomacy Division also joined Facebook and has more than 5,000 friends – majority of these

which thousands of officials from abroad are imparted technical training in India and all costs are borne by the Government of India. We recently started an ITEC page on Facebook with the objective of continuing our engagement with these officials. In a short time, over 600 people have joined this page. Indian embassies around the world have also been asked to get on social media and use it to engage with locals and promote communities of people interested in India come up around these initiatives and stay connected through social media. In a short time, more than 40 embassies have joined various social media platforms. The Ministry is also present on YouTube through which we are showing shortened versions of films on India. One of these films on The Musalman – the world’s oldest Urdu newspaper from Chennai and hand written by calligraphers, - recently went viral and notched up over 55,000 views. Overall, clips on our YouTube channel have been viewed over 1,00,000 times. In this way, a global “friends of India” community is being organised by leveraging the power of new media.

The Libya Experience

from overseas and a good proportion from the Arab world. The demographic composition of our Facebook friends - 64 percent are between 18-34 years of age and 46 percent in the 18-24 years age bracket – shows that our intention of using new media to engage the youth from across the world has been a success. The Ministry has been conducting the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme since 1964 under

Libya�Evacuations

@ForeignSecNRao Nirupama Rao Ambassador informs that people from Sirte being brought to Tripoli to be flown home. Libyan gov providing security. 3 Mar via Twitter for BlackBerry® @ericvmarsh Eric Marshall @ForSecNRao Dear Mam Mam, No words words....to to appreciate your efforts, My heartily - Million thanks to and your team, My sister reached home safely. 4 Mar via web

The real power of citizen centric delivery through new media was revealed when we started evacuating Indians from Libya recently. We put up detailed schedules of evacuation on Twitter and this received widespread appreciation. A tweet asked us about our operations in Misratah as till then all our tweets were about Tripoli and Benghazi. The port in Misratah being closed and most Indians being concentrated in Tripoli and Benghazi, no evacuation operation was being conducted in Misratah. The tweet set off a chain of communication which culminated with us organising an evacuation of roughly 350 Indians from Misratah, out of a private jetty. Such an initiative would perhaps not have been possible without the instant interaction afforded by social media. I have been in government for 28 years and all we get is brickbats. The appreciation received for our efforts shows the potential of social media in government as a tool of engagement with people. In order to truly leverage the power of this medium, one needs to communicate effectively, get the information across to people and respond to feedback. As our experience shows, rewards would then flow in the form of appreciation. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

citizen centric service delivery

Improving Public Service Delivery e-Governance is just one of the tools for enhancing service delivery. In order to improve overall delivery, issues of access, information, equity and efficiency & responsiveness have to be addressed By Naimur Rahman, Director, One World South Asia & MD, One World Foundation India

overnments have made significant investment in service delivery and this has resulted better reach to these services. Some governments have also “Right to Service” legislation to ensure timely delivery of specific services.

ICT Ecosystem for MGNERGS

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

The effectiveness of service delivery can be measured on four benchmarks: access, information, equity and efficiency & responsiveness. Access implies the ease with which the citizens can avail the entitlements and/or facilities. Better access is the first step towards improving service quality. Availability of relevant information on issues such as details about decisions & functions, allocation of public resources, and the way citizens can interact with the system helps improve service quality. Most of the public services are targeted to serve the poor and marginalised. Equity and fairness therefore become central to service delivery framework. Finally, entitlements and rights of the people must be delivered efficiently – with agreed standards of quality and reliability, and at the least cost. Government agencies delivering public service must be responsive to the citizen. This is one of the basic tenets of democracy.

Instruments of Improving Public Service Delivery

Systemic Issues in Public Service Delivery In order to improve service delivery, there is a need to address the major systemic issues in a satisfactory manner. Corruption in delivery of services is compounded by the monopoly power enjoyed by most service providers. Bureaucratic processes add further complexity to citizens’ interaction with the state. and affect service quality. The providers often lack the capacity to provide a satisfactory level of

Benchmarks of Effective Public Service Delivery

services. Weak accountability mechanisms and inadequate civic pressure for quality service also lead to poor delivery.

Public service delivery can be improved through a number of instruments. First among these is Process Innovation for Simplifying Transactions. Here, IT can play a major role and many projects have utilised the power of IT to significantly improve service delivery. For example, the Tribal Research and Training Institute, Pune has made use of Geo-Informatics for ensuring quick clearance of claims made under the Forest Rights Act 2005. The time period for processing applications has been cut down from 4 years to 45-60 days. Similar breakthrough initiatives have also been implemented in other areas such as improving MGNREGS delivery through hand-held devices in Rajasthan and the computerisation of paddy procurement under PDS in Chhattisgarh. Decentralisation promotes improvement in efficiency and also increases responsiveness by matching public services with diversified preferences of the people. It also promotes participatory planning at the local level. This in turn, enhances the potential of local innovation with accompanying productivity gains. Enhancing public accountability through devices such as social audit, Citizen Report Cards, Community Score Cards and Public Expenditure Tracking Survey etc., performance of service providers can be monitored quite effectively.

ict leaders’ conclave

Assessing National e-Readiness Our surveys show that Europe is leading in egovernance implementation, but the developing world is also catching up fast By Seema Hafeez, Sr Economic Affairs Officer, Division for Public Administration and Development Management, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs

overnments today are looking to reform processes to increase transparency and accountability, improve access to services, improve response times and service quality, and make governance a participatory process. Egovernance is a major tool in this endeavour. Measurements of e-government therefore provide some insights on the performance of the governments. The UN Dept of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) has been coming out with an e-readiness index since 2003. The index presents a comparative ranking of the 193 UN Member States according to their state of e-government readiness. The survey is available online at http://www.unpan.org/ egovkb/global_reports/08report.htm

Objectives of the survey The survey aims to provide a comparative assessment of 193 countries in the use of e-government and ICTs for delivery of public services; act as a benchmarking tool for monitoring the progress of countries towards higher levels of e-government and e-participation service delivery. The E-government Readiness Index is a composite index comprising the Online Service Index, the Telecommunication Infrastructure index and the Human Capital index. The website assessments in the Survey represent an ascending four-stage model based on a state’s online presence. This is illustrated in the adjoining figure.

Highlights from the survey Some interesting highlights from recent surveys are: • Majority of the UN Member States have vigorously embraced electronic service delivery. • Since 2003, 189 out of the 192 UN Member States have set up government websites for online information and services • Six of the top ten world e-government readiness leaders are countries from the European Region. Several developing countries are among the top 35 e-ready countries and ahead of some developed economies, 2010 • Efforts at linking up various government departments are at an early stage worldwide.

• 61 % of the countries had more than 10 ministries/departments connected to the Home page. • 39 or one-fifth of all 192 UN Member States , countries offered online form submission • 31 countries offered users the possibility to make online payments with credit or debit cards.

Important lessons The most important lessons learnt from 7 years of UN Global e-government readiness are that approaches to e-government programme offerings differ from country to country; there is a wide variety in e-government development models and that the “how” of what countries choose to dispense online is a function of “what” they want to focus on and “why” they want to focus on the issue(s). Based on the survey governments could explore the following issues: • What is the domain of e-government in the national government • What should be the objectives of e-government in the service of the citizen • Is one conceptual model of ‘how to’ for e-government and service delivery indeed feasible or desirable or each country, each village, needs to tailor it according to its needs and level of development • What are the challenges and barriers to e-government and e-participation service delivery from the government perspective In addition, national governments need to readjust and realign the human, capital and technological systems to adapt to innovations; establish policy frameworks for integrating ICT and e-government in national planning processes; establish ICT focal points in governments and develop institutional arrangements and form South-South partnerships for ICT led development

Trends in future e-government The real benefit to e-Government lies not in the use of technology per se, but in its application. Innovative e-government programs re-shape the relationship between national, regional and local actors. Trends of future world e-government are likely to contribute to more participatory, and potentially more democratic, governance around the world. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

ict leaders’ conclave

An Ecosystem of eGovernance in Gujarat By Ravi Saxena, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat

ICT in Governance @ Gujarat Strong Policy Structure

Organizational Structure & Infrastructure

Collaboration & Strengthening of Decision Making

Collaboration and strengthening of decision making is very important as most govts often find different departments pulling in different directions. A consolidated unique platform on which all policy actions emerge is therefore essential. Towards this, we have created IT Committees in each department for single window techno-commercial approvals of ICTled initiatives in governance. Representation of the S&T Department and Gujarat Informatics Ltd on these committees ensure that the application development takes place in a common direction and is based on a common infrastructure.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

Faceless and 24X7 Government

Transactional Delivery of services to the citizens ii

On line Portal Citizen Centric Information

Query from data base Two way Communication

Paid Services One day y governance centers

One stop shop for Citizen Centric Services Delivery

Broadcasting & g Dissemination

e.g.

e.g. WEB SITES

Enquiry based Exam results Grievance,

Cit Ci i City Civic centers; e‐ dhara;

Collaborative & Shared data bases

2002‐03

2004‐05

Interactive

Informative

2006‐09

2010‐11

Converged Infrastructure

Mobile and Telecom in Governance IT and Infrastructure Optimization Cost Efficiency and Reconsideration Virtualization & Cloud Computing

2011‐12

Time Line

get subsidies and get land records certified, for example. Presently, we are in the Transformational phase which aims at providing 24X7 faceless government. In this phase, online portals with 130-140 services would be made available to the citizens. Every Gujarat village has internet connectivity and is also connected by the GSWAN, and power is available 24X7 across Gujarat. This is essential for success of egovernance initiatives as without reliable connectivity and power supply, it is very difficult to provide ICT-based services. Convergence is the next objective for the state. In this phase, we aim to implement modern technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing. We also wish to optimise the existing IT infrastructure and make increasing use of the mobile and telecom network in governance. Digitisation of information, and merging existing datatbases into a single, shareable database is one of the major challenges we wish to take up in the next phase.

ncreasing access to technology is one thing, but the objective is to reach the last person in the queue, and to deliver the benefits that he or she is entitled to. This is the pillar of the policy that we implemented in Gujarat. In order to set up the ecosystem of egovernance, a strong policy is the essential first step. The four pillars of policy for creating this ecosystem are illustrated in the accompanying figure.

Citi Citizen Centric Approach

Convergence

Transformational

e Gov vernancce

With a strong policy framework, Gujarat is continuously moving up the value chain in terms of use of ICT in governance

ICT @ Gujarat YoY ICT @ Gujarat YoY

The Gujarat State Wide Area Network (GSWAN) connects 26 districts, 2226 taluka headquarters and approximately 14000 villages. GSWAN is perhaps one of the largest intranets in the world. We can have video conferences and direct grievance redressal conferences of the CM with local functionaries.

Evolution of ICT in Governance We began with the Informative phase in 200203 and created simple websites aimed at information dissemination. The strategy moved to the Interactive phase and applications based on two-way database queries were implemented. One example is information on examination results based on roll no and DOB etc. In 2006 we moved into the Transactional phase with paid services and one-day governance being delivered online. People could go to civic centres and make payments of dues,

Business Process Reengineering Technology is not a challenge for delivery of services to the people. Technology or egovernance is just a vehicle, somebody has to be ready to ride on it, and reach the destination which is clean, transparent, effective, efficient govt where the citizen doesn’t have too many interfaces to reach the central governance area. That calls for a lot of engineering of the business process, which were established as far back as the 19th century by the British and in many areas, the same is still going on. These are neither amenable to technology and neither desirable for carrying out the delivery that is intended. Reengineering these process and making them amenable to modern day governance and technologies is a major challenge for the goverments in India and in the state of Gujarat.

directory issue 2011-12 eGov magazine is pleased to announce the release of 3rd edition of its “Annual Directory 2011-12’’ to be published in the month of October 2011. It is a unique opportunity for IT vendors to get featured and connect with Government, Solution Providers and other stakeholders in the ICT fraternity and the Governance sector. Being the only ‘one-of-its-kind’ for Indian market, this annual directory is a comprehensive compilation and showcase of latest products, solutions and innovations in the ICT for Governance space, helping various stakeholders to connect. It also serves as a quick reference for everyone in the domain and helps keeping abreast of latest technologies while facilitating purchase decisions and planning.

The reach • Heads of e-Governance initiatives at various levels of government from India and abroad • Important functionaries from International Development Funding agencies • Important functionaries from the corporate sector, banks and PSUs, including CIOs and CTOs • Public Administrators like Municipal Commissioners, District Magistrates, Mayors • Heads of Academic Institutions, Hospitals and Medical Colleges • IT vendors

previous directory Advertisers Mastek • LG • Forbes Technosys • Alvarion • Check Point • EMC2 • ADC • Red Hat • Emerson Network Power • Digilink • Shreenath Smart Technologies • And many more...

Key features of the directory • Brand Profile- Detailed company profile of all advertisers (one page complimentary company profile with every full-page commercial advertisement) • Directory Listing- Alphabetical wise listing of vendors/solution providers with company name & contact details • Product matrix- This graphical representation will list various products being offered by each company Benefit to advertisers • Wider visibility and reach among decision makers • Strong brand presence and strategic positioning • Complimentary product profiling with matching page space • Maximum ‘return on investment’

T0 get FREE LISTING in the egov directory issue 2011, visit www.egovonline.net For editorial queries contact Sonam Gulati, sonam@elets.in, +91-8860651647 Anand Agarwal, anand@elets.in, +91-9873977006 For advertising queries, contact Ragini Srivastava, ragini@elets.in; +91-8860651650 Jyoti Lekhi, jyoti@elets.in; +91-8860651634

ict leaders’ conclave

Fruits of IT Revolution By N Ravi Shankar, Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India

n the ad-world, there is a saying: “When you think of colour, you think of Jenson and Nicholson”. Paraphrasing that, today when you think of IT, you think of India. While it is very heartening to see India as an IT power in the software arena, it is also disheartening to an extent. This is so because almost all of IT has been for the benefit of our clients outside of the country. What about IT penetration within? I think that’s something which is a wake-up call, not just for the govt but also for industry, academia and citizens as well. One very important initiative currently underway is the creation of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) that will connect institutes of higher learning and research across the country. It is a high-speed gigabit bandwidth network that will connect more than 1500 institutes of defence, space, atomic energy etc.

Under the National Mission for Education through ICT, 20,000 colleges across the country would be given access to educational content by creating an overlay of educational content over the infrastructure provided by the NKN. Through this Mission, students of smaller institutes and those in far-flung areas would be able to access the world class faculty of premier institutes. This will cure the significant handicap of shortage of quality as well as number of faculty that these institutions typically face. If we take a look at India’s demographics, 50 percent of Indians are under 25 years of age. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to see that the creative forces of this youth are unleashed in productive activities and the opportunity is to build a worldclass skilled force in IT so that we can continue to build on our leadership position. With over 800 million mobile connections as per the latest

TRAI report, it would not be an exaggeration to say that India has been witness to a mobile revolution. The mobile phone is going to be the most popular access point in rural areas, as laptops and desktops face problems of access and availability. The penetration of mobile services and localised content would be a huge factor in Indian growth. This is also going to help promote financial inclusion in the country. Internet for all is the cornerstone of the Indian polity and we have to see that broadband goes to villages to enable us to reap the fruits of the IT revolution.

Unlocking Value with Open Source

here are four major future trends that are coming up in a big way as far as technology is concerned- Cloud Computing, Open Data, Social media and Citizen-Driven Governance. Red Hat deals with Open Data or Open Source out of these four. Open Source enables user-driven innovations and cuts down the cost too. All the innovation that a traditional setup does in matter of few months sometimes open source enables it in a much lesser period of time. Today all the major software giants use open source. Open source offers 39 percent reduction in customer Application time, 5percent more application per year. IT decreases management cost by 89 percent and 49 percent increase in productivity. Red Hat has defined

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

By Anuj Kumar, Managing Director, products come from outside Red Hat. It offers the best possible solutions in lowest possible prices without ever compromising on the quality of the product. What gives Red Hat the confidence is that at the end it is all user-based innovations and is coming from user base or the consumer base. We have around 100,000 projects currently with us and are looking at going beyond the targets set. Red Hat has also teamed up with the Georgia Institute of Technology to look into the causes and the worldwide growth of open source

Why Open Source? the open source industry and set standards in open source industry. Red Hat offers all the flexibility without compromising the quality of the software to the customers for today’s environment. Red Hat being a premier player in the Open Source domain, it is a proud factor that 80 percent of our

Open source simply creates better software. Everyone collaborates, the best technology wins. Not just within one company, but among an Internet-connected, worldwide community. New ideas and code travel the world in an instant. As a result, the open source model often builds higher quality, more secure, more easily integrated software.

ict leaders’ conclave

Building Nation Through e-Governance Our partnership with government agencies has helped achieve significant gains in different domains By Sambit Sinha, Head- Defense and Central Government Business,

-Governance is a tool for ensuring good governance. It is a form of e-business in governance and refers to processes and structures needed to deliver electronic services to the citizens. Efficiency, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, speed and accuracy are some of the salient features of e-Governance. Here are some projects implemented in partnership with the government which have enabled e-Governance in the country.

G2C – Patient Care in Hospitals

G2B/G2C – Travel & Transportation Domain Indian railways is one of the world’s largest networks. In 2005, we were asked to automate the movement of the rolling stock spread across 74 Control Offices for a better planning and decision making environment across 7000 railway stations, covering 104,000 km of route and handling 17m passengers every day. It took us four years to implement our charter which was to automate the Manual Recording System that was over 150 years old, having been implemented at the time of introduction of the railways in India. Increase in revenue, improvement in punctuality and better management of freight operations have been the major gains of this project. The Railways can now understand how to better utilize the inventory and rolling stock, and can also plan to improve punctuality of trains. Today you can track trains in real time online. This is made possible by accessing data from our application. Converting operations from a manual to a computerised mode was a big challenge, particularly in the smaller towns and villages

2200 locations across India through notified health centres numbering over 1500. Multi-department engagement, integration of diverse systems across 150 Hospitals and 1400 dispensaries, multi-department engagement and handling the huge volume of data are some of the key challenges we faced in the project. This solution would have significant benefits for govt employees. The beneficiary can avail of medical facilities from any centre; the processing of claims related to medical expenses have been expedited significantly; the system has eased coordination across 1500 plus Health Centers as manually-created records have now been replaced by electronic databases. Easy availability of data will also have significant positive impact on the quality of decision-making.

where familiarity with computers is not as common as in our metros.

G2C - Policing Domain we are implementing a Crime and Criminal Tracking System which will give seamless access to data pertaining to criminals and crimes across the country. Here again the challenge is to integrate 14000 regional nodes and 6000 head police station. Integrating diverse system, migration of historical data, handling multilingual records etc., are some of the major challenges in this project. The benefits from this project would be significant in terms of seamless flow of information across police stations across the country and we see this impacting lives of citizens in a very significant manner.

G2G - Insurance Domain We have implemented an ERP Solution for implementing a Health Insurance Scheme for more than 10m Govt Employees across

In Delhi today, all MCD hospitals run our application. Right from patient registration to discharge, the entire process has been automated. One of the largest municipalities in the world, MCD offers free medical services to all residents of Delhi. A resident can today walk into any MCD hospital, give his pathology sample and view the report online in the evening. Such facilities were earlier available in private hospitals but to see such facilities in government hospitals is really good. Integrated online electronic medical records; effective utilization of hospital resources; better control on inventory; integration of online Electronic Medical Records and easy generation of statutory and operational reports have been some of the major benefits of the project.

Challenges In a disparate IT landscape, project delays were significant. Business process change manangement is another significant challenge, as is capacity building and building acceptance for new systems. Creating a Standard Financial Model for egovernance projects, Business Process Change Management and handling internal politics that hinder progress ane other important challenges any egovernance project faces. So far we have seen more penetration of ICT in the urban sector, but we believe going forward, we believe the rural sector would be a major beneficiary. Green computing, service delivery over the UID framework and Social Computing would be major drivers of egovernance initiatives in the coming times. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

ict leaders’ conclave

ICT in Coal Sector in India An e-Procurement system has helped us reap major benefits and has also benefitted our suppliers By Ashok Kumar Singh, Director (Technical), Project & Planning, Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd

Major Benefits to MCL

MCL has reaped a number of benefits from implementation of the e-Procurement System. Elimination of subjective judgments in evaluation of bid; elimination of human error in the evaluation process; a consistent tender evaluation process; increase in bidder base leading to better competition and lower prices for the company; quick evaluation of bids leads to drastic reduction in cycle time of procurement; reduction in downtime cost and project overrun cost; decline in unethical business practices by the bidders and minimisation of unnecessary litigation and investigations due to a transparent process and a clear audit trail are some of the major benefits of the process that have aided overall business in a very significant manner.

stablished in 1992, Mahanadi Coalfilelds Ltd (MCL) is a subsidiary of Coal India Ltd. Headquartered at Sambalpur in Orissa, we produced 104 million te of coal in 2010-11, becoming the 2nd largest producer of coal in the country. We are a Miniratna company operating 24 mines and employing approximately 20,800 people. I would like to share with you one of the major ICT-based projects we have successfully completed in our company.

e-Procurement of Goods, Works & Services MCL has successfully implemented an e-Procurement system for all its goods, works and services. The system has been implemented by NIC following a process study by Ernst & Young. It has been put online on the website https://mcl.ori.nic.in/nicgep/app and all tenders, announcements etc., from the company are posted on the site.

MCL e-Procurement Site

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

of Bids. Each input screen is designed in such a manner that whenever the user enters invalid data he gets appropriate error/alert message. In case of successful completion of the process the user/bidders get an appropriate feedback . The supporting documents of bidders are verified before deciding the award of work. There is a punitive action for defaulting bidders including debarring them to participate in future tenders for one year in case they fail to furnish the required supporting document in support of their online declaration of information.

Major benefits for Bidders All types of tenders such as those pertaining to procurement of different types of works, coal extraction, loading and transportation, hiring of vehicle and procurement of materials (including Multi Currency bids) are now done exclusively through this dedicated portal.

Innovative features The procurement system has a number of innovative features, which are briefly discussed here. The process of evaluation of technical and price bids has been automated, thus expediting the of finalization of tenders. Bidders are not required to upload and send any document for the evaluation of their Bids. The evaluation of the Bids is done based on the information or data submitted by Bidders on-line. The portal software is so designed that Bidder is forced to submit the data required for the evaluation of the Bids in a structured and objective format only, in order to facilitate automatic evaluation

The bidders have also been benefitted by adoption of the system. Ease of bidding from anywhere and at any time; reduction in cost of bidding; ability to track tender status; decline in unethical practices; electronic payment of charges; faster communication through e‐mail & SMS; ability to modify and withdraw bids online; automatic detection of mistakes in bidding by the system, reducing chaces of rejection of bid on technical grounds and instant feedback regarding compliance with regard to eligibility criteria are among the major benefits that our bidding partners have reaped from the system.

Awards The success of the system has also been recognised and appreciated through awards such as the Award for Best project under Citizen’s Choice in Government to Business Category in eIndia 2010 amd the Award for Best Project by the Confederation of Indian Industry in 2011.

ict leaders’ conclave

Digital Bangadesh: Progress and Plans The focus of our plans has been to use ICT for improving delivery of services to citizens By Anir Chowdhury, Policy Advisor, A2I Programme, Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh

he current Bangladesh government took office in early 2009 but in late 2008 they published a “Charter for Change” that talked about poverty, human resource dev, employment, health and power and energy as the four key areas. Underlying all this is IT-facilitated socio-economic development which we call Digital Bangladesh.

Focus 2: Demonstration and Upscaling We are seeing some encouraging signs under various initiatives. For example, the e‐Purjee system generates SMS‐based purchase orders for sugarcane farmers. From 2 mills in 2009, it now covers 15 mills. This has empowered farmers, increased transparency and improved efficiency of mills. This experience has given confidence to policy makers that ICT can actually improve service delivery. In the last few years, we have moved from a process of automation to one of improving services. The citizens have also seen how ICT can help them in many different ways. The eTathya

Focus 4: Leadership Development Technology only contributes a small part to the egovernance revolution. Business Process Reengineering and change management form the bulk of the task of improving service delivery. Elected representatives, officials at different levels, media personnel, private sector and citizens are being targeted for developing a leadership for the entire effort. Focus 5: Execution through Partnership Through a partnership of the public sector, the private sector and people, backed by technical assistance from development partners, we are working towards converting the vision of Digital Bangladesh vision into reality.

Digital Bangladesh Charter for Change Focus 1: Change of Mindset Unless the bureaucracy and politicians do not change the way they see service delivery – not as patronage but as an obligation to people, improvements would be difficult. We are seeing a change in mindsets and hence a decrease in harassment and reduction in costs and time of services. The driving slogan here is “Citizens will not go to services, services will come to citizens”

Focus 3: ICT Infrastructure Development Development and optimal utilisation of ICT infrastructure is a key focus area. About 15 years ago Bangladesh Railway lent its fibre to Grameenphone which is owned mostly by Telenor and that caused a cell phone revoulution in the country. The Power Grid Company of Banglasdesh has recently given its fibre to the private sector so that a broadband revolution can happen. We have identified about 156000 institutions around the country for this revolution.

Kosh is an encyclopedia where about 200 partner organisations are working to aggregate livelihood information in multimedia format. We are also planning to develop a National Population Register which is going to be a ground-breaking effort as far as interoperability is concerned. An interoperability framework has already been published and the NPR will make it happen. Standardization of Services and Interoperability Labor

Police services

Education

Immigra tion Legal services

Birth registration

National National Population Register

Taxes & VAT

Health

Voter ID Loans

Social safety safety nets

Licenses

Focus 6: Planning and Coordination ‘Strategic Priorities for Digital Bangladesh’ aims at identifying the role of technology in socio‐economic transformation by 2021. This has now been mainstreamed into National Planning in the 6th Five Year Plan. We have developed egovernance focus points in every ministry and the entire effort is coordinated from the PMO. The ICT priorities are becoming sectoral priorities in health, education agriculture etc.

Lessons Learnt The focus till recently was on automation. Most efforts aimed at automating particular functions of govt without looking at how it would help the citizens. That is now starting to change. We have not yet touched cities, but have started at the lowest level of govt. The top level is making policies and plans but actual implementation is happening on the ground, leading to central planning and decentralized implementation. We have also learned from the mistakes of others and from our own, and reward innovation and risk taking. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

builDing capacity | connecting people | serving citizens Driving economy | breaking barriers

1-3 December 2011

BangaBandhu InternatIonal ConferenCe Center, dhaka, Bangladesh

organIsers

Co-organIsers

www.e-asia.org a2I programme

In assoCIatIon wIth

Bangladesh Association of Call Center & Outsourcing

partner puBlICatIons

realizing Digital nation easia 2011, with the slogan realizing digital nation, is an annual international Information and Communication technologies (ICt) for development event with the objective of reinforcing technology and knowledge-centric growth and needs of asia vis-à-vis Bangladesh, through capitalisation of market economy and boosting human development. this event commemorates the 40th birth anniversary of Bangladesh and celebrates the progress of digital Bangladesh agenda

of the government. digital Bangladesh by 2021 vision is a 21st-century globalized-world form of a vision of equitable prosperity portrayed by the founding father of the nation 40 years ago. since then, Bangladesh has made significant progress in human development index and ranks third in the world. Conference Highlights: plenary and technical sessions, focused workshops, seminars, discussion round tables, debates & more ...

Exhibition: showcasing projects, programmes, government Initiatives, Initiatives by private sector agencies/ corporations, demonstrating innovative ICt products, solutions and applications, etc. target audience: policy-makers, senior government officials, Industry leaders, International development, agencies, Civil society, academia, and Investors, etc.

It is our pleasure to announce ‘call-for-papers’ for the easia 2011- asia’a premier ICt event. the papers should be based on, but not restricted to, the following themes: 1. Building Capacity 2. Connecting people 3. serving Citizen 4. driving economy 5. Breaking Barriers selected papers will be given an opportunity to present at the eworld forum 2011 • Last date for Abstract Submission: 20th September 2011 • Notification of Acceptance of Abstracts: 1st October 2011 • Last date for Full Paper Submission: 20th October 2011 • Notification of Acceptance of Paper: 1st November 2011

pers a P r o Call f wledge and no es ing K Shar st Practic Be .org -asia n rs@e pape @csdms.i a ankit

p orshi n s n o Sp hibitio & Ex uiries Enq rg sia.o @e-a sales

rds y Awam on cere nce in

xcelle ing E chnology is n g Reco tion & Te a Innov .org -asia ds@e r a w a

Expo

ices eServ sing Delivery a c w Sho ts and e uc Prod

event

eworld forum awards

Honouring Innovations in e-Governance

Public Choice award for project http://india.gov.in/ in eGov Portal category

Public Choice award for project e-PROCUREMENT IN MAHANADI COALFIELDS LIMITED in G2B Initiative category.

Jury Choice award for project e-Services in G2B Initiative category.

Glodyne receiving the Public Choice award for project eShakti - ICT enabled MNREGA in Bihar in G2C Initiative category

State Election Commission, Gujarat receiving the Jury Choice award for project Online Voting System in G2C Initiative category

Geological Survey of India receiving the Public Choice award for project GSI Enterprise Portal in G2G category

Forbes Technosys Limited receiving the Public Choice award for project ANY TIME BILL PAYMENT KIOSKS in ICT in Public Sector Undertakings category

Ministry of Education, Bangladesh receiving International award for project Teaching Quality Improvement se Project in eGovernance Initiative in Education category

Orissa e-Governance Services Limited receiving the Public Choice award for e-Registration Project in Electronic Delivery of Services category.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

eworld forum awards

event

Project Management Unit-VTF, Vietnam receiving the International award for project Improvement of Computer Usage and Public Internet Access in Vietnam in Rural Governance Initiative category

HCL Infosystems Ltd & SMKC receiving the Jury Choice award for project SMKC E-Governance Project in Urban Governance ICT Initiative category

NIC, Rajasthan receiving the Public Choice award for project SUGAM Single Window System in eDistrict Initiative category

Department of Agriculture, Sri Lanka receiving the International award for their Official Website in ICT Enabled Agriculture Initiative category

TCS receiving the Public Choice award for project PowerIT in Innovative ICT Initiatives in Governance category

Srei Sahaj e-Village Limited receiving the Public Choice award for project Srei Sahaj State Data Centre in Data Centre Initiative category

Department of Rural Development, AP receiving the Public Choice award for project AP Smart Card Project in ICT Initiative in Financial Inclusion category

Department of RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AP receiving the Public Choice award for project eMMS in mGovernance Initiative category

eGovernment Authority, Bahrain receiving the International award for project Bahrain National Enterprise Architecture in Innovative ICT Initiatives in Governance category

GDCO receiving the International award for project GDCO Sudan in Initiative Promoting MDG category

CRIDA receiving the Public Choice award for project Knowledge Share Centers in ICT Enabled Agriculture Initiative category

IKSL receiving the Jury Choice award for project M-Powering Farmers in ICT Enabled Agriculture Initiative category September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

ict in agriculture

How Well do we Know Our Farmers? Agriculture sector provides about 15 percent GDP, about 55 percent employment opportunities but we still donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a database on farmers By M Moni, Deputy Director General (Agriculture Informatics), NIC, MCIT

griculture sector provides about 15 percent of our GDP and about 55 percent employment opportunities. 80 percent of people still reside in rural areas and more than 80 percent of farmers are small and marginal farmers. But in this country we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a database on farmers. The last level of contact of farmers with the government is the block level agricultural officer. The excuse can always be given that it is not possible only to reach each and every unreached. But now the ICTs are available, fibre optics can reach everywhere.

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2011

It is now possible and pertinent to use these ICT tools to reach out to the unreached masses in rural areas and enlighten and empower them with information for their betterment. The main issue here is the lack of information about the farmer. A national database on farmers and their resources is required to reach them. A very key issue is of supply chain management in agricultural produce retail management. In fruits and vegetables sector, India loses about 55,000 crore every year because of storage problems, processing problems and logistics problems. Managing the produce and incorporating a proper process in place to make each and every step transparent so that there is no loss or black marketing is a key issue in front of us and technology can help in a big way. There is a strong need of establishment of a National Centre for Agricultural Informatics and Communication with a mandate to undertake agricultural Informatics development, regional planning, research, education, training and extension for achieving sustainable agricultural development and getting a 3600 view of Indian agriculture. The Governance Structure can be as suggested by the TAGUP Committee Report 2011 of the Ministry of Finance. The present Agriculture Development Plan which is being implemented at district level has raised some pertinent questions: Has the plan be shared with the farmers in their languages? Were they consulted before the development of plan? Have they asked the representative farmer if he understands the plan and is ready to implement it? The answer to all of the above was that it is certainly not possible to ensure all the above conditions. Then what is the use of such a comprehensive plan when the beneficiaries are not being included at any stage from development to implementation? The bottomline is that we are in dire need of organized data regarding the farmers so as to reach all of them and to make them aware of latest technologies and applications. We need to use the ICTs for this and thus ensur an empowered community of farmers who are not dependent on weather for their crops and who know how to use their produce.

RNI NO. - UPENG/2008/25234

UP/GBD - 71/2009-2011