IT Implementation Trends in Government

Government departments and its processes have been eternally associated with

long queues, endless rounds of govt offices for even a simple registration, red-tapism,

corruption and of getting stuck in the age-old manual processes. But while

auditing for Best IT Implementation Awards 2010, we got to see many govt

projects embracing IT to ensure transparency in public processes, to improve the

accessibility of its services to citizens and to allow for better governance.

The scale of these projects ranged from region specific to to pan India.

The two key drivers of e-gov projects have been National e-Governance Plan (NeGP)

and Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005. Where roll out of National e-Governance

Plan (NeGP) envisions bringing public services closer to its citizens, the RTI

Act 2005 requires each public authority to computerise their records so as to

disseminate it widely, and proactively publish certain categories of information

so that citizens need not request information formally everytime. An analysis of

the past year's Best IT Implementation Awards nominations clearly showed a trend

of wide adoption of Business Process Management and Automation (BPM & A)

technologies and shifting of many government services from paper-based to

online.

This time also we saw a similar trend with a spike in BPM and A projects

where govt processes moved on from manual to digital, leading to automation of

processes. We also saw projects where some G2B and G2C services went online,

thus speeding up the service delivery to citizens and eliminating their need to

visit govt offices every now and then. We saw some unique ones like MP State

Education Portal, addressing the challenge of successful implementation of Right

to Education Act 2009; another e-gov project designed to smartly tackle the

challenge of managing one of the largest gathering of people that happens for a

religious purpose in the whole world itself - Kumbh Mela; and Tsunami Early

Warning System, a Business Intelligence and Decision Support System project,

meant to issue timely alerts to the administration on predicting a tsunami.

IT Implementations received from Govt. for Best IT Implementation Awards 2010

Challenge of transparency in govt processes



BPM and A projects and implementation of web-based interface is simplifying
working of the govt  bodies, reducing manual errors, and the time and effort

that was required previously. They are also providing a centralized, easily

referred database and leading to a lot of cost savings. But on the top of all

this, they are also leading to transparency in govt processes by removing the

manual interface.

An example of this is the IT deployment by Central Board of Excise and

Customs which developed ACES (Automation of Central Excise and Service Tax), an

e-governance portal, a work-flow based application. It has made e-payment of

service tax mandatory w.e.f . 1.10.2006, for all assessees who have paid (in

cash plus through CENVAT credit) a service tax amounting to Rs 50 lakh or more

in the preceding financial year or in the current financial year. Also Indian

Railways took up the initiative of introducing transparency in its public

procurement processes, by shifting from a paper-based public procurement process

to an e-procurement process covering 16 zonal railways & 6 production unit

processes.

IT enabled improved governance in Andhra Pradesh by enabling the submission

of public grievances by the petitioner to District Collector through — Prajavani,

a web-based software in the local language Telugu that enabled a petitioner to

submit public grievances, through any internet cafe at a very nominal charge.

The petitioner accesses the software through a common user ID and password and

can submit and track his/her petition online. Also the district collector can

clearly monitor the performance of various departments on action taken w.r.t the

grievances submitted by public.

Challenge of implementing RTE Act, 2009



The Govt has mandated effective execution of the Right To Education Act,

2009 through implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.  Also managing School

Education Department's operations has become important to effectively fulfill

the intentions of RTI Act, 2005 of providing transparent and accountable

governance. With this managing various stakeholders of the school education

departments of each state through a common platform, has become a necessity. MP

State, in a first of its kind initiative decided to deploy IT to fight this

challenge and implemented MP State Education Portal. This portal is enabling

tracking of 1.60 crore students, with nearly 1.12 crore students in govt

schools, more than 1.6 lakh out of school children and more than 1 lakh children

with special needs. It is also managing and administering around 1.15 lakh govt

schools located in more than 90,000 remote habitations with around 3.50 lakh

teachers and support staff.

Providing timely and critical information



If an early warning could have been provided to the inhabitants of the India

coastline before the Indian Ocean tsunami bashed us in Dec 2004, the massive

devastation could have been averted to a large extent. In reponse to this need,

the Tsunami Early Warning System was envisioned by the Ministry of Earth

Sciences, and set up as a part of Indian Nation Center for Ocean Information

Services (INCOIS) by 2007. This DSS sends tsunami warnings, and alert messages,

list of affected villages and measures for evacuation to the Ministry of Home

Affairs, Andaman Nicobar administration, Central & State disaster management

centers and district administrators of coastal districts. Also, the citizens

registered with the website, get tsunami alerts through various media like email

& SMS.

Kumbh Mela witnesses millions of devotees thronging religious cities

periodically. Managing and offering security to such a massive crowd was an

extremely challenging task. To resolve this IP Surveillance systems connected

over a secure wireless network spanning all 4 critical locations (Rishikesh,

Haridwar, Muni Ki Reti, and Neelkanth) were installed and the wireless system

was integrated to a centralized command & control center located at Haridwar.

This led to information feeds flowing in from different locations that enabled

real time remote monitoring. This inturn aided in informed decision making for

crowd and traffic control.

Another interesting project was how Department of Agriculture, Govt of Kerala

resolved the challenge of reaching out to the farmer community with the right

agricultural information at the right time through a BI and DSS project,

Karshaka Information Systems Services and Networking (KISSAN).The project has

adopted a multi-modal delivery approach and integrated various platforms like

Internet, television, telephone, mobile, video streaming etc, letting the

farmers  choose the medium.

Technologies deployed



Some of e-gov projects used Open Source technology like LAPP (linux, apache,

postgressql, php) and GNU Linux distributions. Database servers used in the e-gov

projects were either SQL servers or Oracle 10G. J2EE technology had widely been

deployed over .NET. The Tsunami Early Warning System used Geospatial

technologies like ArcGIS Desktop 9.2, ArcSDE 9.2, ArcGIS Engine 9.2, WebGIS

technologies like ESRI ArcIMS 9.2 and for datawarehousing used IBM Ascential

Datastage.

Future outlook



We asked some of the project heads about key challenges that their domain

faces, that are yet to be resolved and the way forward. We received some

interesting inputs which revealed the challenges associated with bringing the

benefits of IT to rural India, which constitutes around 70% of the country's

population.