TOP 10 IT IMPLEMENTATIONS OF THE YEAR

Implementations that have broken new ground, implementations that have revolutionalized businesses, not-for-profits or government. Implementations that can be role models for others …. Those are what we started looking for, when we announced the best IT implementation awards.The world over, there are forums to honor good work done in the area of IT implementation. But, not so in India, which wants to be the IT back-office to the world. At least, not so far.

Is it that India is lacking in good IT implementations? Consider CONCERT, the Countrywide Network for Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing, of Indian Railways. Be it scale or social impact, be it business benefits or proven operation ability, or be it geographical scale, it would easily stand up to the best elsewhere. And, it has been operational for not one or two years, but since 1985 when it first debuted in Delhi. Consider Contests2Win. They proved that B2C interaction over the Web could pay dividends at a time when everyone had written off B2C.  

It is in this background that PCQuest announced the first IT implementation awards.  

The awards were decided using a three-step process: nominations, shortlisting and jury verdict.  

The nominations were public. Over 6000 printed nomination forms were mailed out to people in the IT industry as well as in user organizations. An equal number were also e-mailed out.  

Over a 100 unique projects were nominated. In the second step, the number of nominations was reduced to 50, based on the criteria announced. Projects that were unwilling to be considered for any reason (confidentiality, national interest, etc) were removed at this stage.  

This reduced the number to 50. Based on preliminary investigations and research of available secondary data, 20 of these projects were shortlisted for detailed investigation. We investigated the top nominations, collecting over 15 pages of

information on each project in a standard format. Sumit Sharma coordinated the entire awards' effort.  

The investigation report was taken to an eminent industry-user jury in the third step. The jury met in Delhi to debate and decide the final winners. The PCQuest team members acted as advocates for the individual projects that they had investigated, presenting their cases to the jury. It was the jury

that decided to confer five awards this year.

By Anil chopra, Juhi bhambal, Krishna Kumar

e-Chaupal: ITC International Business Division

Project Head: S Sivakumar, CEO, ITC IBD and VVR Babu, CIO, ITC  Location: Six states. To extend to more

The e-Chaupal project scored high in all the four categories under consideration: innovative idea, technologically challenging project, delivering social benefits and bringing business benefits. No wonder then that the jury was unanimous in its opinion that the project is the best IT implementation project in the country.

Much has been written about the social benefits that ITC's e-Chaupal project has been delivering to the farmers in rural India. Strangely enough, this project has its origins back in 1999 in four terms that are currently buzzwords in the IT industry: CRM, supply-chain management, de-risking and knowledge management!

That was the time when ITC's then agribusiness division was facing serious challenges to its very existence. The division was into agricultural products trading: commodities trading. The country was opening up and trading majors were seriously considering local operations. Also, commodities trading does not offer may barriers to entry, with commodities (say, Soya) from one region being easily replaceable by the same commodity from another region of the same specifications. To entrench its position, ITC decided to treat the business as a service business, and to look for non-standard needs of customers.

Thus was born project Symphony, which in turn gave birth to the e-Chaupal initiative.

The first step under Symphony was a CRM initiative to understand the needs of customers, particularly their non-standard needs. Eighty customers in 35 countries, who contributed to 70 percent of the divisions turnover were identified for this effort. Based on the information collected, ITC identified a $1 billion opportunity space in which it could operate! That led to the second step of the project. To meet these opportunities, ITC had to deliver on quality and quantity specifications, which meant that it needed better control over its supply chain, right up to the producer. Now the agricultural commodity market in India is based on the village mandi system, where producers or middlemen bring in the produce to be sold. Usually, the mandi system does not monitor the quality of the product. Also, the produce gets aggregated, so that quality information is lost anyway. It is in this context that e-Chaupal was conceived as a supply-chain management system, reaching right up to the producer.  

e-Chaupal combines a Web portal in the local language and PCs with Internet access placed in the villages to create a two-way channel between ITC and the villagers. The project started with a pilot in June 2000 in Madhya Pradesh with Soya-bean farmers. Currently, it covers six states, and multiple commodities like prawns, cotton and coffee with 4000

Chaupals.

Plans are to reach 15 states by 2010, covering 100,000 villages with 20,000

Chaupals.

A set of websites provides the farmers with information on best practices and prevailing prices in the local and international markets. E-mail acts as the conduit for communication between individual farmers and ITC. Farmers can ask ITC about farming practices and also sell their products to ITC through the system, etc.

Each e-Chaupal is equipped with a PC with Internet connectivity, printer and UPS. In case the power supply is erratic, a solar panel is provided, and if Internet connectivity (read, telephone lines) is not up to the mark, then a VSAT connection is provided along with another solar panel to support that.

Currently, field testing of notebooks in place of PCs is on in Madhya Pradesh. The IT part of each e-Chaupal costs about Rs 1.3 lakh. Each e-Chaupal is estimated to pay back for itself in 4.5 years.

By building a network of warehouses near the production centers and by providing inputs to the farmers and test output at the individual farm level, ITC is able to preserve the source and quality information of produce purchased. By helping the farmer identify and control his inputs and farming practices and by paying better for better quality, ITC is able to improve the quality of produce that it purchases. In the commodities market, these two combine to help ITC create the differentiator that it set out to establish in the beginning.  

This effort has paid rich dividends in the domestic markets as well. It is able to customize its products to local tastes as it is able to identify source of inputs accurately. For example, the Ashirwad brand of atta that is sold in the Delhi markets has a different combination, compared to the one sold in the South.

The e-Chaupal network is now being used to sell ITC as well as third-party products to the villages. It is also being used to provide services like rural market research to those interested. "The next stage of the project," in the words of Chief Executive of the IBD, S Sivakumar, "is to provide IT-enabled services to the villages, services like health advisories, education and e-governance." They are eagerly waiting for broadband Internet as set out in the recent TRAI approach paper to become a reality.

The bottom line: Leveraging   IT to deliver business and social benefits.  

TECHNOLOGICALLY CHALLENGING: Enterprise application integration ICICI Bank

Project Head: Girish Nayak, IT Head, Technology Management Group   Location: All India

ICICI was formed way back in 1955. It was an initiative of the World Bank, the Indian government and various representatives of the Indian industry, with the objective of providing medium and long-term project financing to Indian businesses. Since then, it's been highly active in the financial sector, setting up entities, taking over financial institutions and growing by leaps and bounds every year. So much so, that by 2002 it had become a giant institute made up of lots of smaller entities. This made communication between various groups extremely difficult. The only system in place was a homegrown middleware solution, which was developed in 1999 for the credit-card business. This had a few linkages to other entities, such

as demat and core banking. But, this wasn't a very scalable solution.  

When the business volumes increased, the middleware wasn't able to cope up. That's when the group decided to consolidate and integrate all the heterogeneous systems so that they could easily communicate with each other. In other words, an enterprise-application integration exercise became the need of the day. In all, it covered 11 different applications and five different channels. These include core banking, credit cards, demat, bonds, loan-management system, loan against share system, customer-information file, ATM switch, utility bill-payment system, corporate customer-information system and staffware workflow system. Plus, it integrates the various frontend channels, such as IVR, Web, Iview (for internal branch access) and call center.

The process was so complex, with so many groups involved, that first a month-long envisioning exercise had to be performed just to bring everyone to the same level of thinking and expectations. The actual implementation followed, and was done in two phases. The first took about 90 days and involved migrating transactions from the middleware system to the new EAI system. This part of the implementation went live by May 2002. Subsequently, phase two was initiated, which took another 90 days. This added additional systems and transactions to the new system.  

The implementation is expected to last several years, and will undergo constant upgrades and changes with growth in the transaction volumes.  

The EAI project was headed by Girish Nayak, who's the IT head of ICICI's Technology Management Group. He's been with ICICI since 1994, and is responsible for orchestrating the technology strategy for the ICICI group. He's also an alumni of IIM-Ahemedabad. He was a part of the steering committee that gave directions to the project and took key decisions. There were two people from the TMG group who provided the vision, project- management skills and arbitration. A person each from the retail and wholesale was there to provide functional skills, detailing and co-ordination with various departments. Pure functional people from different groups were also taken part time. Finally, there was a parallel tech implementation team that

coordinated and detailed the technology involved in the deployment.

The bottom line: This project was implemented from the point of view of setting right ICICI's IT infrastructure. The EAI project helped in making the IT infrastructure easier to maintain. The job of getting eight to 10 systems and several frontend channels to talk to one another is a technological challenge in itself. That's why the jury decided to choose it as the most technologically challenging project.  

MOST INNOVATIVE IDEA: Government of Andhra Pradesh

Project Head: Praveen Prakash

Location: Hyderabad, Secunderabad and Renga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh

Then it was conceptualized, eSeva was the first of its kind in the country, with citizens being able to pay government dues and take licenses and certificates from any counter at any of the citizens facilitation centers built under the project, or at the eSeva website,

www.esevaonline.com.  

eSeva was conceptualized and started in December 1999 (ahead of the Kerala government project FRIENDS, which got piloted in June 2000) to provide a one-stop venue for services of various central and state government departments for the residents of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, and subsequently in entire Andhra Pradesh. The rollout was first done in the twin cities and is now on in the Renga Reddy district.

The project has a three-tier IT architecture at the district level, with a data center at each district being the core of the setup. Every eSeva center in the district will have computer terminals with printers attached, and one card printer for printing licenses. Each facilitation center is connected to the data center by leased lines with an ISDN connect as backup. Individual departments connect to the data center and update data both from their database and the data center and transact information back to their own departmental databases.

For the twin cities, the IT setup at the data center is as follows: three Sun E250 servers with 100 percent redundancy and two Compaq ML 530 database servers with 100 percent redundancy, Oracle 9iAS application server running on Solaris 8, Oracle 8i database on Win 2000 Server, one firewall server, one Web application server and one network-monitoring server running CiscoWorks on Win 2000. When the setup is replicated at other districts, the individual specs and versions may be updated. The frontend is Java based. The project is being implemented on a turnkey basis by CMC Computers and Ram Informatics.

The initial business plan was to earn revenue for the project from three sources, viz, transaction-based service charges on citizen-to-government transactions, similar service charges on transactions for other businesses and revenue from advertisements on receipts and on the Internet transaction portal. Of these, only the first is currently operational.

Before the jury met to decide the winners, there were some questions on the future of the project, given that the elections had led to a change of government in the state. Subsequently, however, the new chief minister has assured that the existing e-governance projects that are beneficial to the population will continue. Also, the jury was of the firm opinion that current developments, if any, will not detract from the project's standing as a pioneering effort in e-governance in the country.

The bottom line: The first to use IT to enable citizens facilitation, the click and mortar way.  

MAXIMUM BUSUNESS IMPACT: Load Manager Sony Music

Project Head: Ishwar Jha

Location: All India

Imagine doing business in a highly unorganized sector, where you have to fight rampant piracy, where the margins are thin and where buyer behavior changes very quickly. Welcome to the music industry. This is where a hit album could sell millions of copies, while a bad one could fizzle out in just a few thousand. Given these conditions, how does a music company know how many copies to manufacture? If it makes very few copies, and the

album is a hit, then it may not be able to manufacture and push out more copies on time. However, if it makes too many copies, and the album fizzles out, then it has to bear the cost of high inventory. To add insult to injury, more products fail than succeed in this industry.  

It was with this sort of background and market that Sony sought out to develop a solution that would facilitate demand forecasting and help it sell more numbers in the market. The Load Manager, which is a logistics optimizer and demand manager, was implemented to help Sony determine the real situation of its products in the market. It could analyze real-time data and generate various exception reports based on it, such as stock-out, over-stocked, under or over-selling items. So, if a particular album was doing really well in the North, but lay like dead stock in the South, then the software was able to raise an alarm about this, so that Sony could quickly move the dead stock up North.  

The product has been developed using SQL Server, IIS 5 and Lotus Notes mail server. The database server connects to Sony's sales and inventory system at the backend. The users connect to it through IIS using their Web browsers. Finally, the mail server is used by the team to collaborate through messaging. The project was developed completely in-house, and no external help was taken.  

The bottom line: What made the jury consider this project for the award? It was the fact that there was a lot at stake every time the company put out a music album in the market. If it failed on its judgment, then the losses in terms of inventory would be huge. However, if it made the right decision, then it could make a lot of profit. Since the software enabled Sony to get a proper real-time analysis of this highly dynamic market, they managed to cut down on inventory and obsolescence. This helped them enhance their bottom line considerably. According to Sony, their overall service level has gone up from 68 percent pre-implementation to 92 percent post implementation.  

MAXIMUM SOCIAL IMPACT: Online Rail Ticket Booking System IRCTC, Indian Railways

Project Head: Amitabh Pandey, Group General Manager, IT Services

Location: All India

Then IRCTC's (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation) online ticket-booking system was launched in 2002, ticket bookers were surprised at such efficiency from a PSU site. All they had to do was to register at IRCTC's site, book and pay for their tickets online, which were duly delivered to their doorsteps. Then, people only in a few cities: Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkatta and Mumbai: had the luxury of not waiting in long, winding queues to buy tickets. Today, IRCT has extended its delivery service to 120 Indian cities. What is interesting is that it has actually found takers in these smaller cities. In the month of April 2004 alone, IRCTC logged three bookings from Tumkur, four from Tiruvalla, 21 from Tirupati, 39 from Trissur and 54 from

Tirupur.  

Today, IRCTC is also boasting of getting bookings from abroad: travelers living abroad and planning to travel to India are booking Indian Railway tickets online, which then get delivered to their hotels or any other domestic address when they reach India. Though this number is fairly small today, it's a big step for any Indian e-commerce site.  

How was this project conceptualized? Indian Railways computerized its ticket reservation system (PRS: Passenger Reservation System) 20 years ago. This was done by CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems). At that time each PRS terminal was a discrete, non-networked machine. So, if you had to go from Delhi to Mumbai and onward to Pune, you had to stand in one queue to get the first leg of your journey booked and then in another queue that ended at another computer to get the other leg booked. Then, 10 years later the Railways' PRS system was networked. This meant that though you could get all your tickets booked at one counter, you still had to wait in a queue. And, now you have the Online Rail Ticket Booking system, which brings the booking counter to your desktop and the tickets to your doorstep. This is not a new concept; it is an extension of the two-decade old computerized PRS system.  

The PRS system stores all the data and does all the bookings. The Internet system works as a bridge between you and PRS. It takes your query to the PRS, which checks for availability and does the booking, and displays the results to you. Both the PRS and the Internet system separately calculate the fare, which are then tallied. If they do not tally, the transaction is aborted. Otherwise, the Internet system displays the fare, including the courier charge (Rs 40 for sleeper class, Rs 60 for upper classes), to you. Your ticket gets booked (on the PRS) only once the payment gateway tells the Internet system that the payment has been successful. As a next step, the payment gateway and the PRS give the authorization codes to the Internet system. The PRS also gives it a PNR number. You are then presented a PNR number and an IRCTC transaction id, using which you can track the status of the delivery of your ticket.

Once the booking has been done, the PRS authorization code goes to the printing stations, which run both the PRS system and IRCTC system in different windows. An operator manually copies the PRS authorization from the IRCTC system and pastes it on to the PRS system, which then prints the ticket. An admin module helps distribute this workload and do

reconciliations.

The hardware that was used is: Web servers (2 x 2 CPU Proliant DL 360,), application servers (2 x 4 CPU Proliant DL 580), database servers (2 x 2 CPU Proliant ML 570,), firewall server (same configuration as Web server), power backup (2 x 6 KVA Libert UPSs with 16 nos 26 AH external batteries), bandwidth to existing PRS (2 MB/sec over dedicated fiber) and bandwidth to the Internet (5.5 MBPS leased to Satyam). The system resides in Delhi.

Who made this ambitious, Rs 5 crore project possible? Indian Railways outsourced the Internet booking project to IRCTC, one of its subsidiaries. IRCTC, in turn, gave out the application design, programming and maintenance work to Broadvision, California, working out of Bangalore. Since the Internet system piggybacks on the PRS, IRCTC also tapped into the knowledge of the Railways old hands who knew the PRS well and the external people who had developed the PRS. Then there was a small team of youngsters and a few Railways retired employees to see the project through. Amitabh Pandey, Group General Manager, IT Services, headed the project with help from J Vinayan, Joint General Manager Operations. The backend of the main system now continues to be looked after by CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems).



What next? With Internet booking, IRCT made the existing PRS available on the desktop. They are now toying with the idea of making it available over the
cellphone.  

The bottom line: The site has made ticket booking hassle-free for millions of train travelers in India.  

THE NEXT FIVE

FRIEND: Dept of Information Technology, Kerala  



Project Head: Dr Achut Shankar S Nair, Director C-DIT and Mohanachandran M R, Deputy Director and Head

e-governance division, C-DIT

Location: Kerala

The word FRIENDS here is an acronym for Fast, Reliable, Instant, Efficient, Network for Disbursement of Services. Fast, instant? Surely that is a repetition? Considering the long queues that tended to form in front of counters at the RTO, the Electricity Board or the University, the repetition is perhaps warranted. The aim of the project is to provide a single-window payment mechanism for government-to-citizen interaction in the state of Kerala. It started off as a pilot project in the capital city of Thiruvananthapuram in June 2000. Subsequent statewide rollout started in June 2001. Citizens who walk into a FRIENDS center are issued tokens, and queue management is also computerized, minimizing waiting time.  

The project, under the aegis of the Department of Information Technology of the state government, is deployed on a three-tier Web-based architecture, and has been developed and is being run by C-DIT (Center for Development of Imaging Technology). The centers, in all the 14 district headquarters of the state, are connected over the Internet to the remote data center hosted at C-DIT headquarters and to the data stores of the respective departments. In the initial days of the project, the direct connect to the data stores of the participating departments was missing, partly because some of the departments themselves were still to be computerized. Recently, updating the departmental databases has also been automated. The frontend has been developed using ASP while the administrative module is in VB. The database is MS SQL. HP has supplied the PCs and the servers, while the printers have come from Epson, TVSE and

Wipro.  

The project is still work-in-progress in terms of the services being added and in geographical scope. There are plans to roll out FRIENDS centers in all the 140 assembly constituencies in the state and even to make its services available through Akshaya centers.  

How does one measure the success of this project? Citizens that we spoke to have been very happy with the facilitation at the centers. In the words of Mohanachandran, Deputy Director of C-DIT, FRIENDS, centers have notched up billings of over two hundred crore rupees and "no centre anywhere in Kerala has had to undergo a technical shutdown even for a single day since inception."

The bottom line: Better ambience, better service, faster, single-point payment of government and PSU dues.  

AVTS: Delhi Transport Corporation

Project Head: Deepak Sharma, Dy CGM (IT, Tr and Pub)

Location: Delhi

In Delhi, its local bus-transport service, DTC, is using DGPS (Differential GPS), GIS and trunk radio sets to keep track of its fleet in real time. Currently, AVTS (Automatic Vehicle Tracking System) is in its pilot stage, being implemented in 200 buses.  

Anyone who has traveled in a DTC bus knows that the buses often do not show up on time and do not stop at designated bus stops, while the drivers are notorious for over speeding. From the commuters' point of view,

AVTS, which will tell the control room the location of each bus and create a live communications channel between the driver and the control room, attempts to address these problems. From DTC's perspective, it will allow for better bus scheduling and a quick replacement in case of a breakdown or accident.  

Each bus is fitted with a VMU (Vehicle Monitoring Unit), which calculates the position of the bus through DGPS and communicates it to the control room over UHF. It has a small display, a processing unit, a set of 14 easily identifiable icons (such as fire and injured driver) and a numeric keypad, which the driver can use to send 99 more messages. A list of these combinations is available in each bus and the drivers are trained to use the

VMU. AVTS is using DGPS and not GPS because the former is more accurate. At the control room's end are a database server, communications server, application client and a display system (with GIS interface). The person at the control center can send and receive messages to and from the drivers, see the real-time movement of the buses on the GIS map and replay any previous route of a bus. It can also generate reports on fleet utilization, kilometers traveled, fuel consumption (bus and depot wise) and driver- wise performance. For example, DTC can take corrective action if it discovers that it is losing revenue as a bus is consuming more fuel because it is taking a circuitous route.The system uses a GIS map of Delhi that shows DTC stops, bus depots, the routes to two depots (the pilot covers only two of DTC's 33 depots) and other landmarks such as hospitals and fire stations. In fact, the biggest issue that DTC faced was getting the GIS map of Delhi; it took them a year to develop it.  

The Rs 4 crore project has been worked upon by DTC (Government of Delhi) and the Department of IT (Government of India) and the implementation has been done by CMC. The system runs on Sun Solaris and Win NT, with Oracle as the RDBMS and VB at the

frontend. The operations team includes supervisors, conductors and foremen.  

Where does the project go from here? DTC plans to extend it to the vehicles of other government departments, such as the fire and police departments.  

The bottom line: The project will make commuting easier for DTC's daily commuters and make DTC save money by streamlining its processes.  

CCOM: SRL Ranbaxy

Project Head: G Radhakrishnan Pillai, IT Head  Location: All India

Someone in your family suddenly faces a medical emergency and has to be rushed to a hospital. The doctor prescribes medical tests, which can't be done by a local diagnostic lab, and test samples have to be sent to a distant lab, and would take 48 hours for the test reports to come back. If you're in a remote area, then it could take even longer. It would be a boon for the patient and the doctor if this time could be cut down. That's one part of what CCOM does. The doctor or hospital collects test samples and sends them by courier to SRL's main test center in

Mumbai. The reports can be accessed online from the CCOM website. This cuts down the report-delivery time by half. SRL Ranbaxy is into specialty testing and is constantly doing research to evolve new tests. Its main test center is in

Mumbai, where a complete lab-management ERP system has been set up. There are nine other labs across the country, which aren't as advanced as the main center, but can do at least a few specialty tests. While on one side, it uses CCOM as a communication channel with doctors, hospitals, and its 500 odd franchise collection centers, it also uses the same as a sales-force automation tool. Its sales force is responsible for keeping doctors, hospitals and collection centers informed about SRL's latest tests and research. They act as knowledge-transfer agents for SRL

Ranbaxy. Unfortunately, once they have passed on the information to doctors, they have no way of knowing if the doctors actually prescribe any of them to patients. The CCOM system helps the sales team keep track of this.  

The backend system for the report-delivery mechanism of CCOM is built on an Oracle 9i application server, while the application that allows doctors and collection centers to view patient reports has been built using

VB.NET. The application server and database are hosted by Satyam Data Center in

Vashi.  

The bottom line: The new system has helped SRL Ranbaxy to stay in constant touch with doctors, hospitals, collection centers and

its sales force. From the social angle, it is helping patients even in remote locations get faster medical benefits.  

RELIANCE R-CONNECT: Reliance Infocomm

Project Head: Dr Vinod Vasudevan, Head Wireless Data Group

Location: All India

Earlier, Sehwag ki Maa could SMS her blessings to Viru using a Reliance

cellphone. But, now using the same phone, she can send him an e-mail or even do a text or video-based chat with him (provided, of course, that Viru bhai is not playing cricket and is connected to the Net somewhere). That, in essence, is what the Reliance R-Connect project has been able to achieve: provide high-speed Internet access to existing users of Reliance wireless CDMA phones. Here, the 'high' can go up to an amazing 153 kbps, around three times what you get on a regular analog dial-up modem.  

A number of things had to be done to achieve this, like setting up an IP network on the backend and optimizing the CDMA network to ensure that it gave the best performance. Plus, to really increase its usage, Reliance had to ensure that the necessary connectivity cables and dial-up software were easily available in the market for various CDMA phones.  

The results of this project have been astonishing. According to Reliance, out of its seven million subscribers today, about five

million are using this service, and are spread across more than 1100 cities in India.  

R-Connect is based on Reliance's current CDMA2000 1xRTT technology, and provides secure, authenticated connectivity. Plus, a certain amount of bandwidth has been reserved just for data access. The complete infrastructure, including the back haul and IP network, belong to Reliance, and the entire network is managed from one place: the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City in New

Mumbai.  

The major elements of the R-Connect architecture include the CDMA air interface, which handles the connectivity between the wireless handsets and the MSC (Managed Service Provider). At the backend, the main element is the PDSN (Packet Data Serving Node), which is responsible for enabling a PPP (Point to Point Protocol)connection between the wireless node and the Internet. An AAA Radius Server handles user authentication and generates accounting records, keeping track of how long a user was logged in, how many bytes were transferred, etc.  

The project started in December 2002, and a pilot for the same was done between April-July 2003. A separate Wireless Data Group, headed by Dr Vinod

Vasudevan, was responsible for making the project happen. As far as the lifecycle of the project is concerned, it will remain until a new technology is introduced that will replace

CDMA.  

The bottom line: This is the only project that has brought high-speed, low-cost, Internet access to places where it had literally been non-existent till now. It's helping a large section of Indian consumers to become a part of the global village. The near future will see throughputs increase, and a large number of other applications emerge from this. Surely, implementing this project was no small task.  

AKSHAYA: Kerala Government

Project Head: Aruna Sundarajan

Location: Kerala

Kerala already enjoys the formidable reputation of being the first state to become one hundred percent literate. Akshaya is an attempt to make the state a hundred percent e-literate as well. 

Akshaya is not about a great architecture, but about an idea. In fact, the execution is in the form of computer-usage training centers that also double up as cyber cafes and possible service centers for other businesses in the future. The project has already been rolled out in the northern-most district of

Malappuram, which has already achieved hundred percent e-literacy.

The bottom line: After education for all, e-education for all.