Microsoft to launch rural portal

Microsoft Corporation's Indian subsidiary is planning to develop a rural portal to support multiple initiatives, including e-governance, through 50,000 electronic kiosks to be set up across the country in the next three years.

The software giant is roping in smaller IT players with local domain knowledge of each of the state for designing tailor-made applications accessible on its web-based IT platform.

In Andhra Pradesh, Microsoft has partnered with Hyderabad-based Vortex Technologies Limited to deploy the latter's flagship product, Softrack.net 2.0, which has enhanced features that would allow monitoring of rural issues, grievances and also to monitor funds through various schemes such as MP Local Area Development (MPLAD) funds among other things.

Tarun Malik, head of rural initiatives of Microsoft India, and V V V Satya, founder and CEO of Vortex, disclosed this partnership while launching the Softrack.net 2.0 product here today.

Interestingly, Vortex has showcased the experiences of Lagadapati Rajgopal, a young MP from Coastal Andhra, who has been using the web-based IT solutions provided by Vortex to monitor the issues and grievances of the people besides tracking the progress of various government schemes in his constituency for the past one-and-a-half years.

Andhra Pradesh legislative Assembly speaker K R Suresh Reddy, who formally launched the product, said the state would soon be launching e-Petitioning solution to enable people to directly inform the state legislature of their grievances so that the House could discuss and try to redress them.

He termed his initiative as an effort to bring people closer to the legislative body thereby reinforcing their confidence in legislature.

While the Microsoft's rural portal is expected to take a couple of months to become functional, its proposed partnership with its Andhra vendor is yet to be concretised, according to both Malik and Satya.

Speaking to mediapersons, the Vortex CEO said the company had priced its product at Rs 4 lakh and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) already placed orders for the product to implement e-Governance solution for four Parliament members on a pilot basis.

Malik said the proposed rural portal would support several transactions, including business-to-business, government-to-citizen and e-commerce solutions.

"Our main endeavour has been to ensure that the rural electronic kiosks are self sustaining. Towards this direction, Microsoft has already invested in various rural studies and research," he said.

According to him, Microsoft has already identified 4-5 local IT companies having products similar to that of Vortex in other states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to provide value-added services through its rural portal. He termed rural kiosks as the future access points to economic power.