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Our Bureau

Hyderabad, Aug. 18 Smart card and barcode solutions provider Bartronics India Ltd has been awarded a pan-India Rs 400-crore smart card project under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana.

This project seeks to cover those accessing healthcare facilities at the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation’s hospital network.

Encompassing 6.39 lakh villages across 609 districts in the country, this project is to be implemented over 2 to 3 years, according to Mr Sudhir Rao, Managing Director of Bartronics. Each district will have over one lakh beneficiaries.

Speaking to Business Line on Monday, Mr Rao said this smart card solution will store data and enable people to access medicare in Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) hospitals providing specific ceiling limit to a family.

Based on the SCOSTA system, each smart card will store data on a 32 k micro-chip with bio-metric identification features and help ESI hospital staff to read the data through card reader-writer devices.

The SCOSTA standard-based operating system for smart cards has been developed by Bartronics and National Informatics Centre, under the Ministry of IT and Communication.

SCOSTA refers to System for Transport Application Standards Application and was initially used in transport departments for driving licence and vehicle registration cards through smart cards. However, this has now been standardised for other applications and for the Government project, he said.

According to the deal, Bartronics will carry out operations such as data-capturing, uploading, smart card preparation, issuing and installation of card reader-writers at specified ESI hospitals. It also includes training for ESI personnel.

Based on the rollout, this smart card solution might also be extended to other types of benefits through ESI system, Mr Rao explained.

“The rollout of this solution will depend upon the support and cooperation of various State Governments and we believe that the revenues from this deal will accrue next year,” he said.

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