Ministry of Finance-E-Lekha

E-Lekha is developed by National Informatics Centre for the Controller and
Auditor General (CAG) to update and monitor daily reporting of expenditure in
sync with the budget allotted to a ministry and its sub units and schemes. This
software is positioned at the lowest level of accounting and helps in optimum
utilization of the resources for monitoring social projects initiated by various
ministries/departments of the central government.

At the lowest level of this system, runs an application called COMPACT. This
is a client-server application, which runs on servers in each Pay and Accounts
Office and in the offices of all the ministries across the country. Accounting
personnel are given access to the COMPACT server, where they can record the
expenditure of that particular office for that day.

At the end of the day, a single tamper-proof TXT file is generated from the
COMPACT system, which is then uploaded to the e-lekha server using its Web based
interface. In this way, e-lekha gets all the daily fiscal data from each office
across the country.

	Project Specs Business problem: Daily data collection from dispersed locations, lack of transparency IT solution: Web based portal, which can capture data from legacy systems as well from its own Web based system Impact: CAG can now get daily reports from all the PAOs across the country and can create instant reports Implementation partner: NIC
Dipankar Sengupta,Technical Dir, NIC

Ministries can also use this system to monitor their fiscal health for the
year, month or on a daily basis. They can even keep track of which PAOs have

submitted their daily reports to e-lekha and which are pending. They can also
monitor how their allocated budget is being used in various projects and
schemes. Each ministry then has to upload a monthly report to e-lekha, which is
then accessed and compiled by CGA.

The CGA then generates a report at the end of the financial year, which is
presented in Parliament.

With the help of this project, monitoring the country's financial health has
become very easy and a great amount of transparency has been incorporated into
the system.