AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE IN ASSOCIATION WITH
TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT
PLUS INTERVIEW
The Government of India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs embarked on the ambitious MCA 21 program to prepare the Ministry for the 21st century, enabling significant ease in doing business in India.
Tanmoy Chakrabarty from TCS talks about how IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government.
TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY
Entity Ministry of Corporate Affairs Industry Central Government Offering Corporate & Regulatory Services
The Government of India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs embarked on the ambitious MCA 21 program to prepare
the Ministry for the 21st century, enabling significant ease in doing business in India.
CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES
M
CA 21 is the fl agship program of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), the ministry which is This was a responsible for all corporations in India. It was also the first program massive project under the National eGovernance Plan’s (NeGP) and we wouldn’t Mission Mode Project (MMP) programs. The MCA 21 program was defined by the Government of have succeeded without the India (GoI) and was awarded to TCS on a BOOT concerted efforts of all the MCA model in 2005. The MCA is a Ministry in the Indian government, and TCS officials involved.” primarily concerned with the administration of the Companies Act, 1956, other allied Acts, rules and Mr. ANIL KUMAR BHARDWAJ, regulations framed thereunder mainly to regulate Director, Ministry of Corporate Affairs the functioning of the corporate sector in accordance with law. The MCA, thus, plays a critical function in enabling businesses to function in India, and is instrumental in ushering in international best practices for governance and compliance. As the country’s economy started expanding at the world, and the Indian corporate sector has a significant rate, the MCA required a system that played a significant role in this growth process. would reflect India’s corporate governance goals In order to maintain the growth momentum and for the 21st century, and also create a businessaccelerate it in the long run, the MCA, under the friendly environment and transparency for both Government of India, wished to provide Indian and Indian and foreign corporations. foreign corporations with best-in-class services MCA 21 program is a holistic service transformato promote higher levels of investment in India. tion project which was defined to deliver compreHowever, the MCA was swamped with the rehensive services to corporations across India. It was cords of around 700,000 registered companies in conceptualized with the stakeholders rather than India, all maintained in paper files. Maintenance, the departments at the centre and with the other sorting, storage and retrieval of this huge volume key elements built around them. The program was were cumbersome and time-consuming. Inforimplemented in a record time of 78 weeks. Since its mation about companies was frequently incomimplementation and rollout in January 2007, there plete, often inaccurate, and tedious to extract. have been constant changes and improvements Though a citizen charter was defined for service to meet with regulatory, delivery, it was neither compliance and service possible to follow nor delivery improvement measure. Tracking of Companies incorporated till date > needs of MCA. non-compliant or de1,100,000 (10% year on year growth) TCS has helped the faulting companies was MCA leapfrog into the difficult, and the lack Service time reduced by 50% 21st century and provide of transparency in the corporations with ease working of the departand transparency in ment made service deRevenue to government up by 4 times functioning, thus bringlivery for corporations ing the country in aligna complex process. ment with its current Limited modes of Revenue leakage 0% (versus un-quantified) and future needs. payment of fees were available and reconPublic documents viewed online > ciliation of receipts BUSINESS 1,900,000 ( 20% year on year growth) was never possible unSITUATION der the manual system Over the last four years, PAN India implementation of – leading to possible the Indian economy has revenue leakages. been among the fastest electronic stamp duty Citizens and company growing economies of
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TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY
45 million
representatives had to personally visit the Registrar’s offices, to conduct business, which were limited to 20 locations across India. With the twin objectives of eliminating the above pain points and of repositioning itself as an organization capable of fulfilling the aspirations of its stakeholders in the 21st century, the MCA decided to automate the functioning of the ministry and move from a paper-based environment to a paperless one. TCS, with its proven track record of delivering complex IT solutions to meet governments’ demanding business needs, was the ideal choice and was selected by the MCA to be its partner in this engagement from amongst a selected list of vendors, after a rigorous selection process.
representative, thereby eliminating travel usually required for such clarifications. MCA 21 also provided a transparent mechanism for processing documents in a standardized manner across India – this enabled corporate representatives to track the progress of the applications filed and also receive electronic notification and communication. MCA 21 program also used digital signature certificates (DSC) to ensure integrity and non-repudiation of signatures on electronic filing. This alongwith the Role Registry implemented in the project for all stakeholders ensured that only authorized signatories can digitally sign the documents. This eliminated cases of fraudulent filing and instilled confidence in the Government and legal entities on the integrity of MCA 21 filing. As part of this project, all corporate representatives acquired DSCs – in fact, this was, and continues to be the single largest usage of DSC’s in India and possibly, in the world. Furthermore, the implementation of e-Stamping ensured that for all documents requiring Stamp Duty to be filed with MCA, stamp duty was paid electronically rather than making multiple physical visits to acquire stamp paper and scan and file. All the above initiatives made MCA 21 a completely paperless operation – a first of its kind anywhere in the world. MCA 21’s eFiling enables various corporations to fill in data, verify it at their convenience and then do “pre-scrutiny” online with MCA 21 portal, after which authorized signatories can affi x their signatures. This eFiling model covers all the interactions between corporations and MCA, thus introducing a structured dataoriented filing as against the paper-based filing. This structured data has become a holistic national corporate information database. MCA has also launched the XBRL-based filing of annual return and balance sheet for 30,000 corporations in 2011. One of the major side benefits which the program yielded was to the financial community. The process of “charges filing” established a centralized charge database for corporations across all financial institutions (FI), thereby en-
the number of pages digitized and loaded into the electronic repository
MCA21 ACHIEVEMENTS The MCA 21 program delivered total transformation by which more than 300 services of MCA were available online to corporations and professionals on a 24X7 basis. This included various application as well as regulatory services. The system also enabled electronic interaction between the government official and corporate
In our pursuit of continuous improvement of regulatory functions and following international best practices, MCA has introduced Balance Sheet and P & L Statement filing using XBRL instance document for select class of companies. This indicates a giant leap forward in getting the financial information from corporations which can be checked while filing and can be put to regulatory analysis using software tools.” Mr. ANIL KUMAR BHARDWAJ, Director, Ministry of Corporate Affairs
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As part of a citizen charter of MCA, a number of transformational changes have been implemented towards green initiatives vizPaperless operation for all interactions Anytime and anywhere access to all facilities – no more physical visits to MCA office Comprehensive electronic interaction – no more physical visits to MCA office Electronic stamp duty – no more visits to multiple entities Usage of digitally signed certificates – convenient signing of documents with electronic document, since physical document is not needed Enabling payments via National Electronic Fund Transfer Modes – no more visits to the bank Inter-operability through gateway for government entities - for accessing MCA 21 information as per approval Comprehensive corporate information data – available online suring public availability of all charges. This has immensely helped FIs to enable better control during the loan granting process. The MCA 21 program has been successful due to the unique Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, which was adopted by the Ministry and the Operator (TCS). Change management was a priority, both within the Ministry as well as to external stakeholders like corporations, professionals. This involved extensive training across India, covering more than 15,000 representatives, besides incremental training which is available online to stakeholders and comprehensive communication model across all channels such as electronic media, paper and so on. MCA’s senior management and its operational managers at various RoC/RD have played a very important role in this successful transformation. MCA had established a senior level steering committee with participation from heads of other ministries within the Government of India to direct the program and ensure that appropriate decisions are taken. This “empowered committee” used to meet frequently during the implementation phase and later periodically to make strategic decisions for the project. The core committee was entrusted with the responsibility of directing and managing the program operationally under the overall directions of the empowered committee. All operational decisions were taken at the level of the core committee. A strong program monitoring unit (PMU) was also established by the Ministry.
To summarize, MCA has gained a better image both in India as well as abroad, due to increased efficiency arising out of automation that has led to a quick turnaround time with fewer errors, and transparency in dealings. Other benefi ts for the MCA include better decision-making and greater data-based policy formulation due to accurate and real-time availability of information and formation of National Corporate Database and an improved ability to focus on increasing compliance to relevant laws. MCA 21 has not only delivered the planned impact on various stakeholders, but has also succeeded in keeping the program up to date with evolutions to meet regulatory, compliance and filing requirements.
RECOGNITION AND ACCOLADES MCA’s successful implementation of its fl agship e-Governance project - MCA 21, has grabbed many an eyeball. The project itself has been so successful and game-changing that any article or discussion on e-Governance would be incomplete without mentioning MCA’s achievement. It has also won several awards and accolades, some of which include the ‘National Award for e-Governance’ - for best government process re-engineering, ‘DataQuest Pathbreaker Award,’ ‘DataQuest e-Governance Best Vendor,’ ‘Prime Minister’s Award for excellence in Public Administration 2008,’ and ‘Skoch Award for National Significance.’
TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW
TOWARDS
IDEAL
E-GOVERNANCE Challenges of serving the Government are many. Tanmoy ChakrabarTy, VP, Government Industry Solutions Unit, TCS talks about how IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government.
TANMOY CHAKRABARTY, Vice President, Government Industry Solutions Unit, TCS
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How can the Government achieve better governance using Information and Communication Technology (ICT)? As the citizen’s expectations grow, there is increased pressure on the Government to deliver affordable, accessible and high quality public services at all levels - central, state and local. Governments have now recognised that old governance and delivery models are not likely to meet the citizen’s aspirations, and technology can be the transformation catalyst. Most stakeholders now clearly understand the power of digital systems in their capacity to offer effective governance solutions, achieve outreach, efficiencies and scale along with transparency and consistency. In India the huge gap between demand and supply necessitates technology enabled interventions to achieve scale, outreach and affordability. In other words, the old ‘brick and mortar’ model needs to be replaced by ‘click and brick’ model. Another e-governance challenge in India is to take public services to every village and hamlet. Addressing these challenges will require unprecedented deployment of current and emerging technologies and a radical transformation of how the Government works. Hence, we also need to emphasize interoperability of multigeneration and multi-vendor technologies and open-standard based technologies. ICT has potential to help meet good governance goals in India .Yet, that potential remains largely untapped to date. Why is this so? For a nation that has made its mark in the global IT space, India has yet to fully reap the benefits of IT as far as e-Governance is concerned. The central government has mandated that three per cent of the total budget allocation per department must be spent on e-Governance. Unfortunately, a lot of this money is returned unspent at the end of the fiscal year. There is a huge gap in the Government in terms of the capacity to visualize and implement large end-to-end and enterprise wide IT Systems which can bring about a change in the Government. Most departments within the Government follow an outlay-based approach when it comes to resolving their technology needs. The IT arms of various departments follow the practice of purchasing hardware, software, services and networks from multiple vendors. Any successful IT transformation requires an overall holistic and planned approach and rather than a silo-like practice. A systemsintegration approach and a single point of accountability is required and not the age old method of looking at IT as a commodity to procure. When the government starts to look at IT as a service to avail, it will be able to bring about radical changes and show results. Challenges of serving Government clients are quite atypical, since the impact is on a larger audience. The user base has diverse education and literacy level, thereby making training and change management an imperative. IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government. India is recognized as a global leader in IT delivery services, but it suffers from very little internal IT development in the country. How can this be corrected? TCS believes that the Government must recognise the ability of IT to improve the quality of life of every Indian citizen. It is a matter of changing the mindset from outlays to outcomes, rather than the cost of the technology. We need to remove the un-
willingness to change, which entail a psychological, rather than a technological, effort. Armed with expertise in areas such as intra-government efficiency, fiscal management systems, revenue augmentation through tax and VAT, citizen service delivery, police reforms, government healthcare delivery, urban municipal administration, among others, TCS hopes to work with the government to transform governance and make it more responsive and accountable to citizens. What are the lessons learnt from previous e-Governance initiatives and how have they helped shape the Indian eGovernance strategy? The MCA 21 project, undertaken for the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under the National e-Governance Plan was widely successful. This had brought about the convenience of electronic filing, electronic payment mechanisms, the use of digital signature certificates and so on. Another successful example is that of APonline, a bilingual portal that TCS created for Andhra Pradesh. This portal was accessed through 2,300 kiosks around the state by thousands of people who could not afford a computer. It provides information, payment services and interactive services such as applying for a caste or land entitlement certificate, or getting inputs on seeds or fertilisers to name a few. Another project, the Passport Seva Programme for automating the passport issuance process is currently in its implementation phase. Successful e-Governance programmes have shown that citizens do not hesitate from paying service fees if they are sure that the technology will save them time and effort, and ease the process of accessing government services. How is TCS helping bring transparency and efficiency into the system by partnering the Government? Governments today are increasingly getting into Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to bring in technology-enabled transformation to their processes to enable effective service delivery to its citizens. By partnering with the Indian government in e-Governance projects, TCS is helping to bring transparency and efficiency into the system. TCS has extensive experience in successfully developing and maintaining replicable and holistic solutions in public-private partnership mode. Our areas of focus include intra-government efficiency, citizen service delivery, social development, defence and security, revenue and taxation, public infrastructure and public healthcare. Recognising that the necessary momentum to digitize governance can only be achieved by getting into the PPP engagement models of service delivery, TCS has ventured into many innovative commercial models with Governments including BOOT (Build, Own, Operate, and Transfer), transaction pricing and joint ventures.
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