The Hindu Business Line : Rapid strides in e-governance

Now ‘e-governance’ has morphed from a catchword to an absolute necessity. In future, States’ efficiency would be measured by the extent of their e-governance. Tamil Nadu, by any reckoning, is in the vanguard of this movement too.

As a first step, not wanting to be dependent upon private players for the connectivity backbone, the Government has decided to build a backbone on its own. Out of this decision was born the Tamil Nadu State Wide Area Network, or TNSWAN. The TNSWAN is the first State wide area network in the country that has commenced commercial operations since December 2007.

The overall cost of the project for five years is Rs 181.69 crore. The share of the Central Government in this project is Rs 97.17 crore and that of the State Government is Rs 84.52 crore.

HCL is the technical consultant for the project and TCS is the build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) operator. The bandwidth for the project is leased from BSNL.

The TNSWAN provides the connectivity backbone for the State over which voice, data, Internet, intranet and video conferencing services have been launched. 708 points of presence (POPs) have been established all over the State linking the State headquarters to every district (31), taluk (395) and block headquarters (282).

The work of providing horizontal connectivity to individual offices is now being taken up. Offices located within the premises where the POPs are located are being provided with local area network (LAN) connectivity.

Offices located within short distance of the POP are being covered with extended LANs. Offices at a distance from the POPs are to be covered with leased lines, broadband or dial up connectivity. The use of wireless modes of connectivity is also being contemplated.

Having ensured connectivity, the State Government has taken the next step of providing services to citizens, using the network.

5,440 service centres

As many as 5,440 ‘common services centres’ are to be set up – one for every three villages in the State.

Three of these centres were inaugurated in April by the Chief Minister, Mr M. Karunanidhi.

The rest will be rolled out by the end of 2008. 3i Infotech and SREI have been issued letters of intent and they will be implementing the project.

The significance of the projects is enormous. At the centres, there would be the physical front end of the service delivery mechanism and would deliver Web-enable anytime, anywhere access to information and services in rural areas.

Various government-to-citizen services (G2C) such as land records, registration, certificates, ration cards, electoral rolls and cards will be offered to citizens. Similarly business-to-citizen (B2C) services such as railway and bus ticketing, utility payments, online education, banking, insurance, agriculture, telemedicine etc. will also be offered through these centres.

Mission mode

Fifteen mission mode projects have been selected under the National e-governance Plan (NeGP) in Tamil Nadu.

They are: Land records, commercial taxes, registration, agriculture, food and civil supplies, health, panchayats, education, treasuries, municipalities, transport, employment, industries, social welfare, and secretariat computerisation.

Detailed project reports (DPRs) have been formulated for all the above projects. Out of the above, three projects, namely, commercial taxes, food and civil supplies and treasuries have been selected under the ‘e Bharath’ scheme of the Central Government. Funds for the implementation of these three projects are expected from the Centre soon.

At the taluk level, taluk offices under the Revenue Department of the State Government have been computerised under Tamil NILAM (Tamil Nadu infosystem on land administration and management) project to offer the following citizen-centric services: Issue of land ownership certificates (Chitta extract and ‘A’ Register extract), birth/death certificates.

These services are at present available only at the respective taluk offices. Under this project, these services will be made available over the Internet.

Thus, citizens can avail themselves of these services at anytime, from anywhere. The project will be completed during the current year.

Data centre

State data centre is one of the key infrastructure projects envisaged under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). A sum of Rs 55.80 crore has been sanctioned for this project by the Union Government.

The first phase of this project has been completed at a cost of Rs 12 crore by ELCOT, making Tamil Nadu the first State in the country to have such an advanced facility. This is a modern data centre with the entire required infrastructure. This will host all Government-to-citizen (G2C) and Government-to-government (G2G) applications for internal Government processing and online services to citizens.

The facility was inaugurated in April.

Work on the second phase is progressing and is expected to be completed this year.

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