E-Governance News: 7/9/09

I'M HERE TO MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE, NOT TO GIVE INFY CONTRACTS: NILEKANI
Asha Rai, September 6, 2009
The Economic Times

Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), was in Bangalore last weekend to be part of his mentor N R Narayana Murthy’s daughter Akshata’s wedding festivities. And uniquely, he spent the better part of a day running around collecting different types of identities for himself!

He dropped by at the Bangalore Club to collect his permanent membership card before rushing to the RTO to collect his driving licence. Next time he renews his licence, it should sport his unique ID. That in a way sums up the scope of the task Nilekani has set for himself. Of providing Indians with a unique number that will pop up in their passports, ration cards, PAN cards. Singular yet universal.

In a wide-ranging interview, six weeks after moving to New Delhi, Nilekani talks on the challenges of the job and even more of living and working in New Delhi.

You still don’t have a Delhi phone number, an official e-mail ID. What gives?

(Laughs) We are a start-up!

Have you got your Ambi with a siren?

I removed it. I have a Tata Indica...

Why?

We are a start-up . I have to get on with my job. The car I drive is not important.

And gunmen?

(Looks shocked at the idea) Of course not. How can I roam around with them? I like my anonymity.

How much salary are you getting?

I don’t know. But whatever I get I will give to the Prime Minister’s relief fund.

How do you find Delhi after Bangalore?

Obviously it is a very different world. It is a move from the private to the public sector. To government. That itself is a very major shift. Second, it is a move from Bangalore to Delhi. Third, in a curious kind of way, though I am moving to government, it is like moving to a start-up. Moving from an established situation to a startup. Actually that for me is the most unsettling. At Infosys I had all the systems in place. Those have to be re-built and should take a couple of months. Meantime, work cannot stop. I am in that in-between period where I have to do many of the things that in Infosys I would have delegated.

Have you figured out how the system works from the inside?

It’s a steep learning curve. For example, getting people. How you get officers allotted to you? There’s a process to be followed. How do you get office space? How are meetings organized? How do you document these meetings? All these are new in a government sense.

You are supposed to get people from the private sector in addition to government officers?

That again is a process. You have to put in place a recruitment process to select the right people. In principle, the idea is accepted that it will be a combination of very talented people both from government and outside. The challenge is mixing these people from different backgrounds into one seamless team.

Will your family move to Delhi full time?

No. But Rohini (his wife) will start coming often. She’s there next week. My kids were both home on summer break (they study at Yale University). We have a challenge in moving fully to Delhi. My mother, who is 84, is in Bangalore and at this age we can’t disturb her. We have a 9-year-old dog. Rohini has to hold the fort in Bangalore. I am shuttling. I leave for Delhi on Monday mornings and am in Bangalore over the weekends. I am also developing the technology team in Bangalore, so it is work-related too.

Does this job require a lot of networking?

I have been meeting ministers, secretaries, chief ministers. The plan is to meet all the CMs. Central side have met most of the people. This is a massively cooperative project. This isn’t a project where you work in a corner, in an isolated environment and build something. Because it touches every Indian resident and every government department, it can work only in close cooperation with them. A lot of it is networking, diplomacy and meeting people.

Isn’t the Rs 120 crore allocated too little?

For the time being it is adequate.

Tell us in brief about the project: investment, partners, vendors, people, technology?

Investment, I don’t know yet. People, a few hundred from our side. The main thing is it’s a partnership model. UIDAI itself will be in the business of giving numbers. The card, or whatever is the device, will be issued by the respective partners who will deal with the Indian residents. Let’s say NREGA. It has given job cards for 65 million families. They will be our partners. They will use UID as identification as part of their application. Similarly, income tax will use UID on the PAN cards. Same with the PDS system.’

So UID won’t be a card like a PAN card?

We might send you a letter with a number and say please keep this letter safely . That is just information. Usage happens when say, the passport has the UID number. Eventually what will happen is that the UID number you get will start permeating the system. It will become ubiquitous. What’s important is that you get the UID only once, then you can use it anywhere. That’s the big change. You enrol once and get an identity for life. That’s the big USP. That’s how it reduces transaction costs, improves service for the people.

Timeline for this?

In 12 to 18 months we want to roll out the first set of numbers. We will work with the registrars. Depending on which registrar comes on board first and starts issuing will decide who gets it first. We have very strong partnerships happening with NREGA, PAN, health insurance.

There’s talk of thousands of crores worth of business this will generate. Can we have some clarity on this?

First of all, the investment will be distributed . It is not just UID authority. In fact, the partners will be the ones issuing the cards, the ones investing in biometric equipment, etc. We are forming a biometric committee shortly to come out with biometric standards . A lot of work in this area has already happened in India. It isn’t as if we are doing it all new. We need to aggregate it.

When do the software companies come in, at the design part?

There’a software piece. At some point we will have to bid out to manage the centrally-managed service provider.

Aren’t you worried about the conflict of interest that everyone’s talking about if Infosys were to bid for a piece?

(Exasperated) See, I haven’t taken this up to award contracts to Infosys. There will be very high standards of integrity, transparency in procurement. Even if there’s the slightest situation of potential conflict of interest, I will recuse myself from the decision. We will appoint an empowered committee.

E-REGISTRATION OF LAND TRANSFER SOON
Kolkata, Berhampur September 07, 2009
Business Standard

The Orissa government has decided to introduce e-Registration of land transfer replacing the present system of manual registration. In the new system a vendor or registrant public has to pay user fees besides the stamp duty and registration fees required for transfer of land.

“This facility will be available in all sub-registrar offices in the state” said state’s revenue minister, SN Patra.

The government has also decided to increase the number of sub-registrar office from 72 to 100 and the tehsil office to 316, he said. The minister was addressing a function of the Data-Entry Operator-cum-Assistant Association here.

“The e-Registration facility will not only ensure transparency, but also make the process of land registration hassle free for the public who will get their land deeds instantly. The process for issue of Encumbrance Certificates (ECs) is also being computerized which will help the administration to issue ECs to the applicants immediately.

The computerization of land records will help in disposing of the long-pending mutation cases and fetch more revenue to the government, the minister said.

Several southern Indian states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnatak and Tamilnadu have already introduced the e-Registration facility.

As part of its administrative reform, the government has decided to restrict the number of staff in a tehsil to 22 including the tehsildar. As the government intends to fill up the assistant posts lying vacant in tehsils soon, the data-entry operators working in tehsils on contractual basis have a good chance to get permanent appointments, the minister said, referring to their demands for regularization of jobs.

The government had engaged about 600 data-entry operators about three years ago on contractual basis for a period of six months with consolidated remuneration of Rs 4000 per month at the tehsil level. The tenure of their job was extended twice by one year on each occasion.

IT COMPANIES STILL WAITING FOR PROMISED DOMESTIC BOOST
Venkatesha Babu, Bangalore, September 07, 2009
Mint

In 2006, when the Union government outlined its ambitious National e-Governance Plan, or NeGP, covering 26 critical projects involving an investment of Rs 23,000 crore over five years, there were high expectations among information technology (IT) firms.

For India’s IT companies that relied heavily on the US and Europe—some two-thirds of their total revenue comes from these regions—NeGP widened the domestic market and provided an opportunity to work with the government.

Its projects needed core infrastructure, support and technical assistance in various areas, including agriculture, income tax, land records, pensions and passports.

Similarly, when the government introduced an offset clause on defence purchases—making it mandatory for foreign firms to procure locally components worth 30% of the total value of the contract—Indian IT companies again sensed opportunity.

Government projects, defence and homeland security seemed to be the next wave to power the growth of IT companies.

But three years after the announcements were made, only a few of the projects have been awarded.

“Nobody can deny the scale and size of the opportunity. (But) yes, there is a gulf between the ideation to implementation stage,” said Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice-president and head of the global government industry group at India’s largest software firm Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, or TCS. “The entire process is slow, and we would like to see greater momentum in the decision-making process.”

TCS gets around 7.8% of its total revenue from the domestic services market, including a few of the government projects awarded so far.

The single largest IT project the government has awarded in recent times is the Rs1,182 crore Panchdeep, by the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation to Wipro Ltd, the country’s third largest software firm, to improve management of healthcare facilities.

Wipro’s annual revenue from the project, spread over six-and-a-half years, would be just under Rs200 crore.

Anand Sankaran, chief executive of Wipro Infotech, the arm that handles IT businesses in the domestic and West Asian markets, concurs with Chakrabarty.

“A number of other opportunities like the state wide area networks, state data centres, the Army and Navy wide area network, and power sector IT implementation across state electricity boards, all are very promising. The worry has been about the pace of awarding them,” he said.

Wipro gets around 8% of its total revenue from the domestic IT services market. In 2008-09, it earned Rs400 crore from the government and defence verticals, and hopes to end the current fiscal year with Rs1,000 crore from these.

Infosys Technologies Ltd, India’s second largest IT company, earned a mere 0.9% of its revenue from the domestic market in the April-June quarter. But it, too, has won deals for setting up an integrated coach management system for the Indian Railways and a project from the department of industrial policy and promotion.

“We see a huge opportunity not just in IT services but also providing hardware and software,” said Puneet Gupta, vice-president, public sector, International Business Machines Corp., or IBM, India and South Asia. But a big handicap in working in this sector is that the “contracts, sometimes, are just decided on L1” (or the lowest bid), Gupta added.

WIPRO TO DEVELOP E-GOVERNANCE SOFTWARE FOR CORPORATION
Kochi, September 7, 2009
The Hindu

The e-governance project of the Kochi Corporation has moved a step further with the civic authorities deciding to entrust the task of developing the software with Wipro.

Wipro had earlier prepared the project report for the Kochi Corporation.

According to officials, the company would depute its officials to various departments of the Corporation for assessing the software requirements. The assessment would take around four months to complete. This would be followed by software and hardware development, civic authorities said.

It would take at least one year for the e-governance system to become operational. With e-governance in place, payment of property tax, registration of birth and death, utility services, filing of grievances and suggestions and submission and approval of building plans would go online.

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission has funded the Rs. 8.7 crore project.

The officials of the company will also train and support the officials of the Corporation for one year in running the system.

WE’RE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Mahafreed Irani, September 7, 2009
The Times of India (Delhi edition)

In a first of its kind, a contest for government websites by the Government of India has been announced. The Web Ratnas will be awarded this month but for most citizens who have used these sites, the contest is nothing more than a celebration of mediocrity, more Razzie than ratna.

Although India likes to flatter itself into thinking it’s the software giant of the world, its government websites are objects to ridicule. Dead links, flickering images, flashing text, under construction warnings, phone numbers that do not exist and email IDs that bounce are the salient features of most GoI portals.

The aesthetics are alarming too with multi-coloured, gaudy fonts blinking and winking at different speeds. Interface and usability analyst Bhooshan Pandya calls the design disastrous. “They lack aesthetic value and therefore affect the trust quotient of a user,’’ he says. “Animated banners only distract the user from reading. The ministry of defence website breaks every rule in the book.’’ B G Mahesh, CEO of Oneindia.in, suggests that users put on a pair of goggles before logging on to the gaudy health ministry’s site. An announcement on the page reads, ‘Let your eyes live on. Donate your eyes to someone.’ But because it moves so quickly from right to left, users say, “We will be the needy after trying to read that.’’

Although many of the blinking icons flash ‘New’, they are rarely updated. What more notorious example than when H1N1 swept into India. Several state government websites including that of Maharashtra (which celebrates 2009 as E-Governance Year and whose server has been down for over a week) didn’t carry so much as a sneeze on the flu.