BARTRONICS EYES RS 500 CRORE FROM DELHI CITIZEN PROJECT
Narayana Krishna, Hyderabad
DNA
Bartronics India Ltd is expecting to earn at least Rs 500 crore per year revenue from its 'Aap ke Dwar' citizen services project, once it becomes fully operational, Sudhir Rao, MD, said.
The project, awarded by Municipal Corporation of Delhi, involves setting up 2,000 kiosks in the capital that will provide a single-window for services like bill payments, tax collections and others that a normal citizen needs from various government departments and private service providers.
Rao said the company rolled out the project on February 1 and currently 40 kiosks are operational. "Our aim is to install 2,000 kiosks by July, at least a quarter ahead of earlier schedule of October," he said.
The Aap ke Dwar project is on build-operate-transfer basis for a period of 9 years. The company expects minimum revenue of Rs 4,500-5,000 crore over the project period.
Bartronics is expecting steady growth during the January-March quarter and sees reaching then Rs 1,000 crore revenue mark for the current fiscal, as projected earlier.
CENTRE’S HEALTH SCHEME GOES PAPERLESS
Soma Das, New Delhi
The Financial Express
The Central Government Health Scheme, a health ministry arm which serves over 4 million beneficiaries in 25 cities, has managed to break free of the alleged net of local chemist cartelisation by going paperless.
In what marks a turnaround in the manner in which this government organisation procures its medicine, the Delhi arm of CGHS (serving almost half of total beneficiaries), which bought over 75% of the medicine from local chemists till 2007, now procures over 75% of drugs directly from the manufacturers, through its centralised system, mainly by outsourcing the task to public sector undertakings like HSCC.
While local chemists offer a discount of around 10-12% to the government organisation, the companies give a discount in the range of 25% to 30% on the same medicines. This was possible only after the CGHS adopted the online documentation and monitoring of the end-to-end supply chain and has been able to project the demand of medicines, after analysing the consumption pattern. The online initiative is gradually being expanded to all cities. “This has also resulted in reducing the time taken to deliver the medicine to the beneficiary. Earlier, CGHS would have to start the process of procurement only after the medicine has been prescribed in dispensaries, so that the patients in most cases had to make two visits, once to be diagnosed and second time to collect the medicine.
The online documentation has helped the organisation forecast the need of medicines and thus stock drugs according to the projected demand in advance,” a health ministry official told FE. “Apart from saving over 10% of procurement costs on account of higher discounts, quality issues can be better tackled when medicine is procured directly from the manufacturers. Firstly, medicine brands can be monitored and secondly, in case of any problem with the drugs, the accountability can be fixed on the manufacturer directly and immediately,” the official added.
A Comptroller and Auditor General Report in 2007 had noted that out of the total expenditure of Rs 460 crore on purchase of medicines for CGHS dispensaries in Delhi during 2002-06, the value of purchase of medicines made through local chemists was Rs 366 crore, which constituted 80% of the total purchase in Delhi. Similarly, the percentage of locally-purchased medicines in CGHS Hyderabad, Bangalore, Allahabad, Patna, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and Guwahati during 2002-07 accounted for 74 to 91% of the total purchases.
TN TO HAVE BIOMETRIC RATION CARDS
Jayaraj Sivan, Chennai
The Times of India
The TN food department is working on a biometric system to weed out bogus and duplicate ration cards.
The biometric card, to be introduced in June 2011, will have photos, prints of all fingers and high-resolution images of the iris (pattern-recognition techniques are used to identify high-resolution images of the iris, which is unique to every individual) of all persons listed in the card. Going by the number of cards in use, the exercise is expected to cover close to two crore families. Now, the card carries only the photo of the family head.
To avoid duplication of work, the food department is thinking of working on biometric identification along with the census department, which will collect household data in May-June for updating the population registry.
IT FOR ERROR-FREE POLL ROLL
Bangalore
The Times of India
There’s always a positive side: had the controversy-ridden BBMP elections been held on schedule in February, at least 3 lakh voters would have returned from the booths, disgusted at not finding their names on the poll roll.
Not so now. On Monday, around 3,000 names attached to four booths were corrected in just a half-hour, thanks to the new software introduced by Smartvote and Pluma Knowledge Solutions Pvt Ltd, to enable a clearer online search. It has come as a relief as the voter list is plagued by discrepancies.
Banaswadi had the worst voter turnout during the parliamentary elections and this might have continued through to the BBMP election too. Four polling booths in this area were found to have the same names on their voter lists, adding around 3,000 voters to the main list.
There are at least 252-odd booths in the city with similar problems, says Smartvote. “We introduced the software mainly to enable voters to start an easy search for their names on the voter lists online. However, in the process, we found that a number of names were exactly replicated. That set us thinking — what happened to the 3,000 names originally on the list?” asks Prithvi Reddy, co-founder of Smartvote.
TRAFFIC COPS LAUNCH ONLINE FEEDBACK FORM
New Delhi
The Times of India
The next time you have an unpleasant experience with a traffic cop who asks for a bribe or demands more than the challan amount, log on to the traffic police website and lodge a complaint. In an initiative aimed at bringing about more transparency in the police’s interactions with the public, a new online complaint facility has been started.
‘‘Thousands of people come into contact with our ground staff on a daily basis and a lot of the experiences are unpleasant. People can now post their opinions on our website and necessary action will be taken against the officials concerned after verification of complaints,’’ said Satyendra Garg, JCP (traffic). The feedback form can be accessed at www.delhitrafficpolice.nic.in.
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