The Hindu Business Line : Maran unveils national e-gov plan blueprint

THE MINISTER for IT and Communications, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, and the Secretary, IT, Mr D.S. Mathur, at a press conference in the Capital on Wednesday. - Ramesh Sharma

New Delhi , June 14

Taking a step closer to making Government services accessible to the citizens at their doorsteps, the Minister for Communications and IT, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, today unveiled components of the ambitious National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) covering 26 Mission Mode Projects and eight support components to be implemented at Central, State and Local Government levels, at an estimated cost of Rs 23,000 crore over the next five years.

"A body serviced by the Department of IT and chaired by the Prime Minister is being constituted to provide a thrust to the implementation of NeGP. An apex committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary has already been set up to oversee the implementation and provide policy and strategic directions," Mr Maran said at a conference here.

State-level services

At the State-level the Mission Mode Projects (MMP) would include services around road transport, land records, commercial taxes, employment exchanges, agriculture, civil supplies, treasuries, land registration, police and education, while at Central level it will cover areas such as insurance, Central Excise, National ID, pensions, e-Posts, banking, passport, visa and income-tax.

As an example, within the ambit of land records, a citizen can avail himself of services such as getting a copy of Record of Rights, certificate of land title, payment of land revenues, Application for Mutation, and issue of mutation certificate. Each service would have a defined service levels. For instance, the service level for issue of RoR may be 15 minutes.

Infrastructure pillars

The services would be supported by three infrastructure pillars to facilitate Web-based `anytime, anywhere access'. These include 100,000 common service centres (based on STD booth model) in six lakh villages by end of 2007, to act a physical access points for integrated delivery of all Government services to citizens; State Wide Area Networks, currently being implemented by 20 States; as well as National Data Bank and State Data Centres.

Cost structure

Commenting on the cost structure of the project, Mr Maran said the funding for various projects and components of NeGP would be done through Plan and non-Plan budgetary provisions of the respective Departments in Central or State Governments.

"Some projects are also being implemented on a self-financing model through levy of service fee adopting Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model, but this will not be priced exorbitantly," Mr Maran said, but did not comment on the pricing for the services.

He said the financial approvals were being obtained by individual departments based on specific project proposals. The NeGP is tentatively estimated to cost about Rs 23,000 crore, of which components (core infrastructure, support and technical assistance) would cost Rs 10,000 crore and the mission mode projects about Rs 13,000 crore, over the next five years.

"The States and the Centre are already spending about Rs 3,000 crore per year on various e-Governance services. However, today these services exist as islands, and the idea is to integrate them and bring them on a standard platform. As far as the software is concerned, it will be for the individual departments to choose the software. Government will encourage Open Source and other software. NIC will work with departments to ensure that the standards are common across all these departments so the services can be integrated on a common network," Mr Maran said.

The scale of the project can be gauged from the fact that the implementation of NeGP would involve 500 implementation agencies, two lakh sites and an estimated 70,000 man-years of effort. The time limit for complete roll out of some Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) such as Land Records, Transport, Registration, MCA-21, Income-Tax, Central Excise, and Common Services Centre is 6 - 12 months, while other services would become available progressively as per time schedules drawn up by individual departments.