Other Finalists - Green IT Projects : Indian Railways : e-Procurement System

Indian Railways procures goods/ spare parts for Railway's production and

maintenance requirements. The manual procedure of procuring them was subject to

varied malpractices and aberrations, and hence they deployed IREPS (Indian

Railways e-Procurement System). The  objective of IREPS  is to increase

transparency in the tendering process and reduce  cycle time for procurement.

Developed by Center for Railways Information Systems (CRIS), the solution is

hosted on a website, www.ireps.gov.in. The site provides a secure platform to

users for online transactions for procurement. Railway users can upload their

tender documents and open tenders online. Vendors can access the tender

documents through this site and submit their bids online duly encrypted at their

end. IREPS site is being used extensively for procurement of materials by all 16

Zonal Railways and 6 Production Units. More than 80,000 tenders have been

uploaded by  Railways till date.

Presently, more about 10,000 tenders per month are being uploaded by

Railways. More than 8,300 vendor organizations are registered with the site.

Vendors are able to work 24X7 from comforts of their offices/homes and need not

visit Govt  offices for routine works. Also, the bids being sent in by the

vendors are digitally signed  along with a time stamp at the vendor end thus

ensuring a concrete layer of safety and authenticity eradicating false bids.

Two factor authentication using DSC, 128 bit Verisign SSL Synchronization of

servers Time with IST acquired from National physical laboratory has helped

eradicate the malpractices resulting from multiple bids by the same vendor.

Railways being a Govt organisation had to face many problems in the

deployment of this online solution. Among the challenges faced were management,

ensuring data integrity and confidentiality and non-repudiation of information

and its authenticity; providing support to various classes of users with

different level of computer literacy etc.

Since the adoption of this online system, Railways has been able to fulfill

the requirements for which the process was initiated. Reduced procurement time

cycle and efficiency reduction in tabulation time from 23 days to instantaneous

with tender opening, reduced time for dispatch of tender documents, technical

scrutiny, etc by 50 % and ad costs by 30% have been the major gains from this

system.