• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager
• BL Club
• Smartbuy

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth
• Events 2007

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

— Ramesh Sharma

E-governance deal: Mr Shivshankar Menon, Foreign Secretary, and Mr S. Ramadorai, CEO, TCS, at a press conference in the Capital on Monday.

Our Bureau

New Delhi, Oct.13 In a move aimed at ending the serpentine queues and the long wait in issue of passport, the Government, on Monday, awarded the Rs 1,000-crore ‘Passport Seva Project’ contract, entailing digitisation of the entire passport services, to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

The e-governance project is expected to speed up the process of issue of new passport to three working days, subject to police verification.

Passports applied for under the ‘tatkal’ scheme would be dispatched on the same day, subject to address and police verification.

“This is the second mission mode project to be implemented by TCS after MCA-21 project. The ‘Passport Seva Project’ is expected to transform citizens’ experience with regard to passport services and delivery,” Mr S Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director of TCS, said at a conference here.

While the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) would continue to perform the sovereign function such as verification and grant of passport, all peripheral activities would be done by the Mumbai-based IT company.

TCS is the prime contractor for the project, which would be implemented in partnership with other companies including CMC (for services), IBM (infrastructure), Nortel (networking) and EMC (storage) amongst others.

While the entire project is valued at about Rs 1,000 crore over a six-year period, TCS said it has not computed the net accruals to the company, or others.

Taking steps to make passport service more people friendly, the MEA aims to nearly quadruple the number of passport counters to 1,250 from the current 345 and bring the entire process of issuing the travel document online. As many as 77 fully computerised new Passport facilitation centres would be opened across the country. To speed up the process of police verification, a secure network is also being set up.

The Passport facilitation centres would act as primary hubs to support activities such as biometric capture, photograph, payment and verification and grant of passports in the presence of applicants for most cases. Complete tracking of process would be possible in the system.

Police nodal offices will be facilitated by TCS personnel and the Passport forms would be downloaded (as well as uploaded after filling up the form), eliminating the logistic delay. A call centre would be established to help the applicants with information regarding passport procedures and the status of submitted requests.

Bangalore and Chandigarh will be the first to get the new Passport Seva Kendras by March 2009 which would be functional on a pilot basis.

“The construction of IT application would involve 150-200 people, while the passport facilitation centres would have 1,500 people,” Mr Tanmoy Chakrabarty, Vice-President & Head, Government Industry Solutions Unit (ISU), TCS, said.

More Stories on : Software | E-Governance | Tata Consultancy Services Ltd

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line