NEW FACILITIES AT PASSPORT OFFICE IN
The Hindu Business Line
In order to issue passports expeditiously and error-free, the Regional Passport Office at
Those applicants who do not have access to Internet or are unfamiliar with online filing can avail of the services of ex-servicemen or physically-challenged at the passport office service centre by paying Rs 50, a press release said. The appointment date and time given by the system will be ignored and applicants are free to submit forms any day, any time during working hours of the Regional Passport Office (RPO), a release said.
A special passport adalat will be conducted at the RPO on June 27 and will be open to all those who have applied for a passport and have any grievance.
They can attend the adalat without registration or appointment from 10 a.m. to 12 noon. Passport office employees have volunteered to do this service on a holiday in order to help office-goers who are otherwise unable to attend daily passport adalats conducted at the RPO.
AG’S OFFICE SET TO OFFER SERVICES ONLINE
Thiruvananthapuram
The Hindu Business Line
The Office of the Accountant General (A&E), Kerala, will soon make available online a series of services related to general provident fund (GPF) and pension to government employees.
The Accountant General, V. Ravindran, said here on Tuesday that the office had embarked on an extensive computerisation programme over the past three years and the pension wing had been fully computerised now. The computerisation of the provident fund wing was set to be completed soon and beginning from August 1 this year, all final GPF withdrawal cases would be processed on computer, he said.
Ravindran said that the computerised dak management programme to monitor the receipt and disposal of all letters would be available soon on the office Web site – www.agker.cag.gov.in – which would enable the public to know the status of their letters.
COMMON SERVICES CENTRES FACE VIABILITY SNAGS
Surabhi Agarwal,
The Financial Express
Common Services Centres (CSCs), the gateway for rural India to access every sort of service — from banking, mobile connections & recharge, Internet use, e-learning and government services — is sputtering to a halt as companies are closing down a large number of them for being unviable.
This is happening when the department of information technology in the central government has just got the mandate to enhance the CSC network to 2.5 lakh from the original 1,00,000. President Pratibha Patil, in her speech to the joint session of Parliament this month, said the centres would be transformed into Bharat Nirman Kendras.
Only three small states—Haryana, Jharkhand and Sikkim—have managed to achieve a 100 percent rollout of CSCs. Private players like Reliance Communications have shut their centres in many states while 3i Infotech has been pulled up for sub-par rollout of the centres in different states, including Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Though the original target for setting up all CSCs was March 2008, just 40 percent have come up so far. “The complete roll-out of CSCs is now expected by mid-2010. It will take another three years to take the number up to 2.5 lakh,” Shankar Aggarwal, joint secretary of the department, said.
“In
3i Infotech, which was allocated 12,500 CSCs, is also under the scanner. “Though the company has not closed any CSC, it has failed to roll out the centres on time and is also not able to manage the centres,” the official said. 3i Infotech’s executive director & president (
Private players were hoping to lure CSC users to a host of private services they could provide on the same platform—like banking, e learning, Internet surfing and telecom. But there are only a few government services that are on offer. Even staples like land record or driver’s licences are not digitised across the states.
Even in states like Jharkhand, where a 100 percent rollout has been achieved, infrastructure hiccups like connectivity and power threaten their sustainability. An official of an infrastructure company closely linked with the project said the ministry of telecom & IT is doing a review at the ground level. “The picture is quite varied. While some CSCs are doing well, others have a question mark on their viability. The ministry is considering alternatives.” The revenue model for the CSCs envisages that only a third of their revenue will come from government services. Accordingly, the ministry had agreed to provide a viability gap funding of around Rs 3,300 per CSC for four years to the private party, assuming that each centre would generate Rs 10,000 per month. But companies like 3i Infotech and Reliance Communications were too optimistic about the level of expected revenue and, in fact, put in bids for negative VGF–meaning they were ready to pay the government for being allowed to set up these centres.
“The government consumer services would not be digitised in a day and will take some years to go fully online. That is why the subsidy was provided. But companies that failed to create a model based on that assumption are bound to suffer,” says Vikas Aggarwal, director, government sourcing, KPMG.
SOFTWARE WILL WEED OUT COP CORRUPTION
Manish K Pathak, Mumbai
DNA
Activists like Anna Hazare have often complained about corruption and money involved in police transfers.
But soon it may be a thing of the past.
The police department will have new software that will help store every detail of a policeman in the central server. And this data can be accessed by officers as well as the home minister while deciding on promotions or transfers. The police are in talks with a few companies, including Tata Consultancy Services.
State home minister Jayant Patil announced this on Tuesday. Patil was speaking at the inauguration ceremony of police quarters in Kalina. The process of receiving and processing requests sent by policemen to the office of the director general of police will be a transparent affair within six months, he said.
"Often, several policemen across the ranks send their requests to the DGP's office. These may range from seeking a transfer to a preferred place of retirement to seeking a transfer out of Naxalite areas," the minister said. "We are in talks with TCS and a few other agencies to set up an online software, which will be fed with extensive data about every policemen."
Speaking about the new software, an IPS officer said apart from transfer requests, the software would help expedite data retrieval. "We will have an improved system and this software will help maintain a database of manpower, police land and buildings, data related to all inventory and service matter, and statistics," he said.
Patil and several senior officers, including Mumbai police commissioner D Sivanandan, were present at the ceremony. "Earlier police quarters used to be small. But the new buildings are of better quality," Sivanandan said.
TCS LOSES RS 225 CRORE E-GOVERNANCE DEAL; REBIDS ON THE CARDS
Vineeta Pandey,
DNA (Mumbai edition)
Sukhdeo Thorat, chairman of University Grants Commission (UGC) and a favourite of former human resource development minister Arjun Singh, is in dock for allegedly favouring Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in the bidding process for its ambitious e-governance project.
The matter has now reached the Prime Minister's Office, which has sought a report from the ministry.
A vigilance inquiry has found "several irregularities" in the tendering process of UGC's Rs 225 crore e-governance project.
The project, cleared on March 13, 2009, was meant to make the functioning of UGC more transparent and paperless.
Though UGC has denied Chief Vigilance Commissioner's (CVC) objections on specific discrepancies, it still has not been able to justify the award of tender.
Sources in UGC said out of 20 bids received for the project, Wipro and TCS were among the three bidders short listed for the e-governance project.
Wipro is said to have quoted Rs 90 crore less than TCS.
TCS was awarded the project despite strong and serious objections from UGC secretary Raju Sharma, MHRD secretary R P Aggarwal and financial advisor S K Ray.
Sharma, interestingly, was later removed from his post for jotting his objections on the tender files.
The CVC has also pointed to procedural errors committed in the process of selection of the consultant.
For instance, the last date of submission of bids was extended by three days even though 19 tenders had already been received by then, clearly indicating that UGC wanted to favour a particular company.
Besides, two parameters, which had not been mentioned in the notice inviting tender were added later while short-listing the consultancy firms.
"The expression of interest for the work was published on 23/2/07 (Friday) and the due date for opening of bids was 27/2/07 (Tuesday). The time available to interested firms to submit their bids was thus unusually short. According to tender norms, a period of 21 days should be given to the potential bidders to respond. There is contradiction in various sections in the tender document which creates confusion about how the best value offer is to be judged," the CVC report further said. A TCS spokesperson told DNA Money "the company is not in any way involved in the selection process," and "would not like to comment on the issue any further".
Interestingly, the technical scores of TCS and Wipro were 95% and 75%, respectively. Though the firms were informed that they had technically qualified, their scores were not declared before the opening of commercial bids while the standard procedure is to announce it before opening of the bids.
The CVC said that the weightages given to technical and financial scores appear to be "biased unfairly in favour of the technical scores." This can enable a lower commercial bid to lose out to a much higher value bid having a higher technical score while a fair and objective system should judge two technically qualified bids primarily on cost basis.
The CVC observed that the total value of the project may not have been correctly estimated and may be on the higher side. Besides, it has noted that the project could have been managed better by starting small and expanding thereafter.
"The commission has also observed that the cost projections need to be revised because prices of hardware have fallen since the project was first approved by the UGC," the report said.
The CVC has clearly said that though it ordinarily does not interfere in the tendering process but in this case "in view of the above observations the commission feels that it may not be prudent for the UGC to go ahead with the project in its present form. The process needs to be reviewed and made more professional and transparent," it observed. Sources said a retendering of the project through smaller contracts is more likely next.
ID CARDS
The Hindu Business Line
The Union Cabinet, on Thursday, is expected to clear the establishment of the National Authority for Unique Identity Authority (NAUID), likely to be headed by the Co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies, Nandan Nilekani.
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