Best Managed : Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board : TWADNEST

TWAD or Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board implements water supply

and drainage / sewerage schemes at a cost of around Rs.1500 crores every year

for all urban and rural local bodies in Tamil Nadu. To manage this huge task a

good MIS was required which can also improve the productivity in achieving total

transparency in the system. Before implementation of this project, data

collection and compilation was done from 114 offices of TWAD Board spread across

the entire state. Data were collected in each of 114 offices using standalone

applications and it was sent to the head office and regional offices via email,

CDs etc. The data collected at head office and regions were compiled using

another standalone software manually. This process was very time-consuming.

Hence the department planned to integrate the whole process using a

Internet/Intranet based app developed and implemented jointly by 'TWAD Board'

and 'NIC, Chennai'. The aim of this project is to use IT to implement

e-Governance in TWAD Board in order to attain improved productivity and

transparency in the organization.

Shri. A. Rajasekar, Manager (EDP) Q What were the key technical challenges that were faced while implementing this project? Choosing right technology and platform for this kind of a mega project, and then adhering to the open standard were the main challenges faced by the development team. Using the Ajax technique without compromising on security issues to enhance the user experience was another challenge. Using broadband Internet connectivity to access the online application till the time TNSWAN was connected to TWAD intranet again another QWhat according to you sets this project apart from any other in its class? What's the unique selling proposition (USP) of this project? The kind of efforts that have gone in towards building a centralized database, establishing the network infrastructure, improving the hardware and peripherals infrastructure of 114 offices of TWAD Board, the development of ERP like application software make this project unique in Government sector. The very fact that this application is being accessed by all the 114 offices of TWAD Board spread across the state itself is an indication that this project deserves a special mention. A comprehensive database of more than 1.5 GB covering various functional activities of TWAD Board has been developed and maintained successfully since April 2007 is another reason that sets this project distinct. Overall TWAD Board is the first government agency to implement this G2G e-Governance project of mega size in the state of Tamil Nadu.

After the deployment of the project, due to centralized system, the data

collection is done by automating the processes at the field offices. Now a lot

of periodicals, statutory schedules, daily reports, MIS reports and board

reports are generated by all offices online as and when required without the

need for any manual compilation. The application also provides a single platform

for automating financial accounting, HR management, project monitoring and water

quality management.

For the connectivity of all these 114 branches, TWAD had used NIC, BSNL and

TNSWAN as backbone networks. This backbone offered some additional benefits such

as a readymade platform video conferencing over IP. So TWAD had decided to

deploy Tandberg desktop video conferencing solutions on each offices. TWADNEST

can be accessed from the TWAD website which is a signal point of interface for

G2G and G2C. For government, it can provide MIS data where departments can see

the overall project status and money spent at a near real-time basis and can

drill down to the smallest level of data if required. For the customers, it

gives quite a few things. The first is the integration of this application with

the water testing labs spread across the state. The complete report generation,

test selection and billing for the labs is done through this system. Anybody can

bring samples to these test labs and can get it checked for pollutants by paying

a small fraction of money. At the same time, the board also conducts regular

tests across the state. Once the tests are done, the report goes directly into a

centralized database with the location information which is then ported on a GIS

map of the state. And using this GIS map, anybody, even a visitor can

immediately see the status and condition of water in different regions of the

state.

As of the hardware side of the deployment, unlike other government bodies,

TWAD hosts most of its application in its own datacenter situated at the Marina

Beach, Chennai. For running TWADNEST, they are using Server Platform with 64-bit

Dual Itanium2 processor of 1.5 GHz having 4MB L3 Cache per processor Intel E8870

Chipset / 16GB (2x8GB) DDR-SDRAM based servers on top of which Red Hat Linux

Enterprise System — ver.4 (64 Bit OS) is running. And for the database and

application server they are using Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition for Linux Web

Server and Apache-Tomcat 5.5 respectively. For building the interface they have

used mainly Java/J2EE Technologies, AJAX, HTML, CSS, and XML etc to give the

user a good and simple working experience. The board is expecting the life for

this project to be at least to twelve years.