With vast amounts of public money at stake in poverty alleviation programmes, the government seized an opportunity to harness IT major TCS to help achieve its targets. Priyanka Joshi reports.
Charak is a lean young man with a wiry body, and a slightly gaunt face under a shock of hair. Three years ago, this often out-of-work farm labourer in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh got a job card, duly wrapped up in a plastic bag.
Charak is entitled to a guaranteed minimum of 100 days of work every year. His job card ensures that it is easy for him to ask for work, and to get payment. The extra money means that he earns enough even in the lean agricultural season to sustain his wife, Vinitha, and their three children.
They used to subsist on a thin rice gruel cooked with a pinch of salt and chillies. Three years after getting his job card, Charak and his wife can now afford fresh vegetables, and occasionally “some non-vegetarian curry, too”, he tells us. That is in part because his wife, Vinitha, has become a wage-earner too — with her own job-card — and gets paid every week for helping with initiatives such as village watershed development, restoration of water bodies, planting trees and building roads in the area. “Work is provided to every registered person within 15 days of getting an application,” says Ghija, a member of the Chittoor gram panchayat.
The rural employment programme exists in all the states, but Andhra Pradesh has seen perhaps the most effective implementation, because it has been tied to an e-governance initiative that makes the programme work smoothly. And Charak and Vinitha are among millions of people who have benefitted from such e-governance projects across the country.
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In Delhi, meanwhile, the crowds milling outside the regional passport office in Bhikaji Cama Place reflect the difficulties and time taken (many weeks) to get a passport — the demand for passports has been growing exponentially. The time taken is about to change; by next year, passports will be delivered within days (not weeks) of application.
Change is coming because of an ambitious Rs 1,000-crore Passport Seva Project that intends (according to project director T V Nagendra Prasad) to deliver all passport-related services in a timely, transparent, accessible and reliable manner. Conceived in the second half of 2006, this comprehensive reform of the passport issuance system is in partnership with TCS, which was selected as the service provider through competitive bidding.
The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by January. Four pilot Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) will be established in Chandigarh, Bangalore and New Delhi, in June this year. In all, TCS will be required to open 77 PSKs across India. “Once the project is completed, new passports will be issued in just three working days,” claims Tanmoy Chakrabarty, head of TCS’s Industry Solutions Unit. Police verification will be expedited through the electronic linking of district police headquarters with the passport seva portal.
There will be an all-India data centre, a disaster recovery centre, a network linking all passport offices, and an electronic file system for passport processing nationwide. “As the IT partner, we will be involved right from building applications to setting up secure data centres, disaster-recovery centres and a call centre for applicants,” says Chakrabarty.
TCS is one of the Big Three in India’s information technology (IT) space, along with Infosys and Wipro. But much more than the other two, who have focused mostly on external corporate clients, TCS has an active e-governance programme that is using the IT company’s ability to deal with large volume transactions at low cost, using information technology, to make life more hassle-free for millions of people in a dozen different ways, and to make government programmes more effective through a marriage with e-governance.
Andhra Pradesh can be called the pioneering state to try out e-governance, but it is not alone. Some 26 e-government mission mode projects (MMPs) will be rolled out nationwide by 2012, to operate on the public-private partnership model.
Big money is backing the initiative. The government has sanctioned Rs 10,600 crore, of which Rs 5,742 crore will be used for setting up Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the country. Communications and Information Technology Minister A Raja announced, at the recent launch of the Centre of e-Governance in Delhi, that of the sanctioned amount, nearly Rs 1,787 crore will be used for state-wide area network (SWAN) projects. He added that the government will set up one lakh CSCs across the country by March 2010.
Four years ago, a World Bank survey had thrown up some unsurprising numbers. It said that 33 per cent of the urban poor in Bangalore pay a bribe to get a service, or solve a problem, with a public agency. The numbers were 26 per cent in the case of Chennai, 20 per cent in Ahmedabad, 12 per cent in Kolkata and 6 per cent in Pune. The survey concluded that “corruption is a pervasive phenomenon in India’s public services”.
In response to such findings, or for other reasons, the government in 2005 allocated about Rs 6,000 crore for IT deployment. Nearly 60 per cent of this was to be directed towards hardware, with services getting 25 per cent, and software 15 per cent. It was in response to this government programme that TCS decided to launch its Government Industry Solutions Unit, with Tanmoy Chakrabarty at its head.
It turned out to be a smart move. Despite a sluggish start, e-governance projects in India today comprise a big opportunity for IT companies. Piyush Gupta, general manager (capacity building and knowledge management) at the National Institute for Smart Government, reckons that “state governments like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are parking big money in upgrading their state and municipal departments”. The IT industry too is waking up to this opportunity.
Despite the challenges of working with the government, TCS today is in a uniquely advantageous position. Partha Iyengar, research VP at Gartner (India), points out that over the next two or three years, though spending on IT hardware may be curtailed, the software market is likely to be the main driver of growth, and that the requirement of licences for the rollout of e-governance projects and internal applications will pick up steam. Given the kind of work that it has already done, and because of the global turmoil, “TCS will be in a favourable position to press its claims against international heavyweights such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard/EDS and Accenture,” adds Iyengar.
Chakrabarty now heads an 1,800-strong team and is positioned as the largest service-provider in the government sector, with a 32 per cent market share. Its nearest competitor, IBM, accounts for slightly less than 6 per cent market share, according to Gartner.
Given the TCS turnover of Rs 22,863 crore ($5.7 billion) in 2007-08, a 10 per cent contribution from the e-governance business could generate revenue of Rs 2,286 crore for the company. Gartner’s Iyengar points out that “A major take-home will be the strong linkages that the company will develop with state and central governments, which could help in winning future contracts. For example, Andhra Pradesh has spearheaded its e-governance initiative by forming a joint team with TCS.”
There seems to be no shortage of work. Last September, the Gujarat police awarded TCS a Rs 18 crore project to automate and electronically link the 483 police stations in the state. The Bihar government has announced its intention to work on six e-governance initiatives, with a budget of Rs 160 crore, beginning with the computerisation of state government offices.
Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi says that these include a Comprehensive Treasury Management Information System, a Value-Added Tax Management Information System, a citizen-centric portal (Bihar Online), the Integrated Workflow and Document Management System, and the Bihar State Wide Area Network (Bihar-SWAN). The state government has spent Rs 125 crore on SWAN and has set up a data centre at a cost of Rs 19 crore.
Hari Shiv Pandey, a chartered accountant in Patna, is delighted with the change that the citizen portal has brought about. “The Bihar Online portal has helped cut the time for getting birth, death and caste certificates to 4-5 working days; earlier it used to take 3-5 weeks, not to mention the umpteen visits to authorities that one had to make.”
TCS’s early lead in the e-governance segment has encouraged other companies to take a second look at their strategies. Infosys has set up a division aimed solely at Indian customers, and HP’s buyout of the technology services firm EDS is expected to help the parent company tap the Indian market. In part, the slowdown in other markets has forced companies to look for business from the government.
“This includes turning back to India, which had been spurned by Indian outsourcers so far,” says S Ramadorai, who heads TCS. He says his company is eyeing e-governance projects in three areas — intra-government efficiency, citizen service interface (G2C), and fiscal administration/revenue augmentation. The company has almost 60 projects from international governments, and is now one of the top 10 service providers in the Asia-Pacific market for the government sector.
TCS plans to set up satellite development centres across Eastern Europe, Latin America and South-east Asia. Such business is expected to contribute 10-12per cent of the company’s top line by 2010. In the Asia-Pacific, it has taken its first steps in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and some Saarc countries. Ramadorai reiterates: “The sales messaging is on outcomes for government, rather than technology.”
Back home, even as other IT players come round to the idea of e-governance being the key to good times during recession, the company is sitting pretty, with a sackful of projects from Delhi to Kochi and Maharashtra to Jharkhand. Now, wait for these to touch your own life.
| SOME E-GOVERNANCE PROJECTS The Jharkhand Agency for Promotion of Information Technology in association with the National Informatics Centre has launched the e-Nagrik service in Ranchi. They will facilitate government-to-citizen services for all residents. Under this, people can apply for birth, death, residential and income certificates online, and get them in a couple of days. While 106 centres became operational on March 4, there are plans to open 300 e-kendras in 55 wards of the city. The Drugs Controller General of India has announced that it will adopt a single window facility for clearing new drug approvals. Plans include setting up of a data resources centre to update all information vis-à-vis manufacturing, exports and monitoring of drugs so that anyone can get this at the touch of a button. Bihar has launched the e-Shakti project that will introduce contactless smart cards for workers registered with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for their wage disbursement, identification and other services. Smaarftech Technologies, a subsidiary of Glodyne Technoserve, in association with the state government, will implement and manage the project. Goa is launching ‘Cyber Treasury’, a state-wide area network that will enable entrepreneurs to pay commercial taxes, including VAT, online. Eventually, a bouquet of 32 vital services will be covered. |
| MANAGING GUJARAT Gujarat Informatics Ltd, along with TCS, has built an office management system that will include building a knowledge repository, providing inter-departmental interface, developing a security system, a document management system and database system for government departments. The system looks after the communication and exchange of documents between 2,500 employees of the state government department. |
| BIHAR PANCHAYATS Panchayat portals called Vasudha Kendras will be set up to enable villagers to connect with the outside world and will provide affordable and easy access to information about the government and its policies. |
| TAX SYSTEM FOR UGANDA TCS has won a transformational engagement from the Uganda Revenue Authority to design and install an integrated tax administration system. |