Maximum Social Impact: Food Corporation of India

IISFM (Integrated Information System for Foodgrains
Management) is an MIS solution implemented by the NIC for the FCI. It captures
the entry and exit information of food-grain stocks as it enters each FCI godown
along with the exact means how it came there. Italso generates drill-down
reports for everyone from top management to the operations executives on the
exact positions of stocks in any godown in the country in a couple of clicks.
Coupled together, this project can help ensure

India

's food security for a long time to come. Also, it brings in transparency and
help curb mismanagement of food stocks.

Business problem  Tracking the national food stocks kept at widely dispersed FCI godowns
IT solution Comprehensive stores and inventory mgmt solution that tracks movement of food grains
Implemented by NIC team headed by Dr Ranjana Nagpal, Senior Technical Director
Technology platform  ASP.NET, MS SQL Server 2005, MS SQL Reporting Services 2005
	Dr Ranjana Nagpal, Senior Technical Director, Natinal Informatics Center

When a consignment of food grains enters the FCI system, it
is weighed on entry along with the wagon or truck it came in and stored. Later,
the bags maybe shipped to other FCI godowns or sent to state godowns or sold to
traders or the PDS and other food-scheme retailers. Bags that are passing
between FCI centers are not weighed again for exact measurement, but rated
weights along with moisture parameters are treated as sufficient. This leads to
different quantization for the same bag of food grain from the time it entered
the FCI system to the time it finally left, along with losses due to leakage and
so forth. Collecting all the and analyzing the information at nearly 1,200
depots, 166 district offices, 23 regional offices, 5 zonal offices and the
central HQ at Delhi is a mammoth task and the case just cries out for
computerization.

NIC's solution uses a set of data capture screens,
customized per role of the FCI user: the unloader, the quality inspector, the
receiver, the dispatcher and so on. The actual data entered goes into the same
database along with details of the wagon or truck it came in. Consignments that
arrived or left on different days in parts are all connected with each other
using index numbers. All reports are accessible to the FCI staff over the
Internet at a specially created portal, hosted and maintained by the NIC. That
is, a report on the status of a particular godown in a remote village in Kerala
can be seen by another user in

Assam

-thus, bringing greater transparency to the system. It helps reduce old stocks
at different locations and dispose them off early since crop-year wise reports
tell you which godown in which location has which year's stocks. The system
uses Microsoft SQL Server

Reporting Services 2005 for generating the reports with
different user-configurable pivots and filters. This also lets users export and
save reports in various formats.

The benefits of this implementation have impressed the FCI
and the Indian government to the extent that it is now planned to be extended to
the State Warehousing Corporation's godowns as well as those of other stocking
agencies.