National Informatics Centre (NIC) has been the pioneer of IT in the government sector, playing a key role in many things that are considered good in the Indian government. But the private sector is hot on its heels today for government business, and NIC faces huge management and technology challenges. Gaurav Patra & Shipra Arora find out if NIC’s best days are over

Ever since its inception in 1977, NIC has been moving steadily towards its goal of being at the pinnacle of information technology in India. “NIC was basically created to provide informatics support to the Central government. It was former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who decided to expand its services to the state governments and union territories,” says Dr N Vijayaditya, director general, National Informatics Centre. The biggest leap in this direction was taken in 1988, when NIC’s satellite-based computer communication network, NICNet, went into operation. NICNet is one of the largest VSAT-based networks of its kind in the country. The organisation has a nationwide presence—from remote Leh to the tropical Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

The organisational set up of NIC encompasses its headquarters at New Delhi, state units in all the 29 state capitals and six union territory headquarters, and district centres in more than 540 districts of India. The organisation employs a large pool of technical manpower. At the NIC headquarters, a large number of Application Divisions exist, which provide complete informatics support to the ministries and departments of the Central government. “For different processes we have different groups or divisions. This helps us in keeping track of our day-to-day functions. Every division is accountable for itself,” explains Dr Vijayaditya.

NIC computer cells are located in almost all the ministry headquarters of the Central government and apex offices, including the Prime Minister’s office, the Rashtrapati Bhawan and the Parliament House. Apart from this, NIC has various Resource Divisions at the headquarters, which specialise in different areas of IT and facilitate the Application Divisions as well as other NIC centres in providing services to the government. At the state level, NIC State Centres provide informatics support to their respective state government, and at the district level lie the NIC District Informatics Offices, which strive hard to provide effective informatics support to the development agencies, revenue agencies and legal agencies in the district. “The best and most credible thing about NIC is that in the case of technology their work is quite commendable,” states Umesh Vyas, vice president, ITES, QAI India.

In order to promote information technology in the country, focusing on Internet technology-based value-added services in the areas of industry, business and commerce, NIC has also established 22 National Information Technology Promotional Units (NITPUs) at major industrial/commercial cities like Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Chennai, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kanpur, Kochi, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mumbai, Nagpur, Panipat, Patna, Pune, Shimla, Tripura and Vishakapatnam. These centres provide videoconferencing facilities; EDI services and other Internet-based services over NICNet.

NIC carries the distinction of being the largest IT organisation in the country and has set up a satellite-based, nationwide computer communication network, called NICNet, with over 1,400 nodes connecting the Capital, the state capitals and the district headquarters to one another. “NIC has taken pioneering steps over the years in assisting many government bodies in their IT adoption policies. It provides a Web front for almost all major government organisations and indeed has a valuable array of information stored in its tremendously vast website. It is a massive body with operations spread far and wide,” feels Neelesh Arora, CEO, Total Info India.

Dr N Vijayaditya wants to see NIC as a centre for excellence in e-governance, not only in India, but across the world

Showing the way
NIC has definitely played a pivotal role in the adoption of IT at a lot of organisations, especially in the government sector. NIC’s role also has been very important in creating IT awareness among the masses. The organisation is still trying hard to IT-enable the government bodies that still don’t use IT. “Government bodies would not have achieved anything without NIC, especially on the Internet front,” says Arora. When software development was a term that was still pretty much unknown in the public domain, NIC was the first one to venture into software development for government departments. “It not only helped in developing the critical mass towards reaching IT goals but also played a pivotal role in making different government departments aware about IT,” says V Sadasivam, deputy director general, technology, Department of Posts. “NIC’s effort is commendable as there was nobody in the field to guide government departments. Even today, our dealings with private operators are guided with the experience we gained earlier from NIC,” he adds.

NIC’s role has been significant in creating awareness and knowledge about IT and the efficiencies it brings, among smaller government departments. “By creating awareness among smaller government departments, NIC has developed the government IT market, by bringing into the IT fold even those people who otherwise do not have much knowledge about IT,” says Sanjay Bahadur, deputy secretary, BRIW, Department of Coal, Ministry of Coal & Mines. It works this way: Once a department gives a pilot project to NIC, that particular department becomes more aware and starts looking at other IT services as well. They even start looking for options available from private players, which helps in developing the overall Indian IT sector.

In conceptualising needs at the Centre and state levels, NIC has been well ahead of the times. Some of its projects have been critical in developing the overall Indian IT market. These include videoconferencing and the ERNet project. Most experts agree that ERNet especially was a path-breaking effort. This project adopted Internet protocols even before these protocols were available for commercial use. This was probably ERNet’s biggest USP at that point of time. Putting school examination results online is another credible project.

As far as the rural sector is concerned, a number of state government projects (most of them in partnership with the Rural Development Ministry) relating to disaster management, land records management, and Rural Bazaar were the initiatives taken by NIC. NIC has been instrumental in creating the government market for IT projects and creating IT awareness and literacy levels in the rural sector. “NIC has played a very important role in developing the rural IT market in India by increasing awareness about computers and computerisation. With the advantage of its extensive reach, NIC has been able to spread IT awareness at the grassroots level,” says Pawan Kumar Agarwal, director technical, Ministry of HRD. “Private service providers will usually try to skim the creamy part alone. When it comes to the hinterland where returns are not immediate and also quite low, the government is the main provider of IT services. Even in the future, NIC will continue to play an important role in the development of the rural sector and in taking technology to far-flung areas,” he added. Again, NIC’s initiatives in the rural sector will lead to the entry of the private sector in these areas.

NIC & e-governance
E-governance is the key to making IT relevant to ordinary citizens. E-governance is a culture, which changes how citizens relate to governments as much as it changes how citizens relate to each other. “We have helped most states in executing their e-governance set ups,” says Dr Vijayaditya. Though computerisation in different sectors in the districts has yielded fruitful results, the concept of introducing e-governance to implement citizen-IT based applications in the district was the next logical step. Keeping this in mind, NIC introduced WebCITI (Web-based Citizen IT interface). This is an e-governance project building a citizen-IT interface for services offered by the district administration. A pilot is on at Fatehgarh Sahib in Punjab. The services on offer include issuance of certificates, licenses, permission for conferences/rallies, etc, and benefits from socio-economic schemes.

NIC is also involved with many other state governments and central government institutions as far as their e-governance initiatives are concerned—some of them are on the lines of the Fatehgarh Sahib project. “NIC has played a critical role in terms of development of the rural sector and far-flung areas. They also need to be credited in developing whatever e-governance is being seen in the country,” says D K Mukhopadhyay, economic advisor, Ministry of Textiles.

Other e-governance projects include: NIC along with the state government of Karnataka initiated the Land Records Computerisation System. This is the first e-governance project in the state. This fully online system can carry out mutations on land records data. With the help of this system the public can now have easy and quick access to land records on demand and can also lodge requests for mutation to their land records. Since the Internet has proved its potential as a powerful and effective means of disseminating information, it is here that the importance of having good government Web-enabled interfaces comes to light. The Web-enabled government-citizen interface, named Lok Mitra, is one such step of the Himachal Pradesh state government in that direction. The most interesting aspect of this project is that the Himachal Pradesh government has identified NIC as the e-governance wing of the state in its IT Policy 2001. Apart from this, NIC along with the state government of Chhattisgarh has also initiated public grievance redressal. In Bihar NIC has created a sales tax administration management information network. This package helps the state government in keeping track of the commercial tax department, which administers seven acts of tax, namely-Sales Tax, Central Sales Tax, Entry Tax, Entertainment Tax, Electricity Duties, Advertisement Tax and Hotel and Luxury Tax. This is already functional in 32 circles of the state.

NIC is also serving the legal community through IT since 1990, when the COURTIS (Court Information System) project was commissioned for streamlining registries of various courts. Today, all the High Courts have been computerised and interconnected through NICNet. All these successful implementations show that NIC not only has an understanding of the technical requirements of the states, but also has a thorough understanding of the basic needs of the people of those states. “Implementation of e-governance is not just installing a software package. It is much more than that. One needs to understand the project very well and also should make sure about user awareness,” says Vijayaditya.

According to Neelesh Arora, private players would do much better in the government space given a fair chance to compete with NIC

NICNet—backbone of WAN set up
NICNet, the backbone of NIC’s communication set up, has over 1,400 VSATs installed and is poised to experience phenomenal growth in the next couple of years. There is no single VSAT technology that can meet the requirements of all sections of users. Hence, NICNet has been upgraded to support a variety of VSATs—CDMA, TDMA, FTDMA, SCPC, DAMA and receive-only VSATs. The network uses state-of-the-art technology in C-Band as well as KU-Band. “We tried to figure out which was the best available technology option then. So, we evaluated quite a few technology options. And also, at that point of time, telecommunications infrastructure was not that great. We finally decided to go with VSATs, the best available technology option available at that point of time,” informed Dr Vijayaditya.

In order to meet its networking requirements, NIC has been operating an 850-node CDMA network and a 20-node SCPC network. To fulfil growing demand from NICNet users for direct Internet access from their premises (eliminating the last-mile problem) and to support a number of value-added services, NIC has recently introduced three new types of SATs—FTDMA, DirecPC and IP Advantage. The FTDMA VSAT system is a private communication network designed for bi-directional traffic that includes interactive transactions, batch file transfer, data broadcast and voice communications. Broadcast of audio and video can also be included as add-on options. DirecPC is a high-speed satellite broadcast system featuring a PC plug-in card satellite receiver. In order to receive the DirecPC broadcast carrier, a PC should be equipped with an ISA adapter card and a 1.2/1.8/2.4 -m antenna.

The system provides a 12 Mbps broadcast channel from a single uplink earth station called Network Operations Centre (NOC). Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption-based conditional access ensures that a receiver PC may only access that data which it is authorised to receive. The IP Advantage VSAT is comprised of ISBN (Integrated Satellite Business Network) and DirecPC. ISBN is a two-way transmission system for data traffic between a hub and many remote locations or Personal Earth Stations (PES).

All ISBN traffic is carried digitally between the hub and remote PES via one or more transponders aboard a geostationary satellite. The applications supported on the IP Advantage network include corporate communication, e-mail, EDI and Internet/intranet solutions, Web-enabled database access, data and video broadcast, multimedia broadcast and package delivery. So far NIC has installed hub-based wireless access networks at Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Agartala and Warana Nagar, providing NICNet and Internet access to 70 remote locations. These remote locations have LANs with a large number of nodes. Installations are in progress at Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Shillong. “In Delhi, almost all the major NIC computer centres located in different buildings are now connected by wireless links,” says Dr Vijayaditya. “There are many NIC computer centres in each of these buildings sharing one wireless link. In such cases, wireless access network provides an effective and low-cost local access solution,” he added. NIC has plans to install hub-based wireless access networks in all state capitals and important towns. This will provide most NIC users with high-speed local access.

Another important networking service provided by NIC is its e-mail service over NICNet. The different types of e-mail services provided include SMTP, UUCP and X.400. The NICNet e-mail service is distributed over many mail servers located at different NIC centres. These are inter-linked with each other such that mails can be exchanged amongst all types of services. The e-mail service is also integrated with a X.500 directory, which makes it possible to search for and locate e-mail addresses very easily. It is also possible to send fax messages through e-mail since a gateway is provided for conversion of messages for fax recipients.

The best and most credible thing about NIC is that in the case of technology their work is quite commendable, says Umesh Vyas

Most favoured?
Over the years, NIC has been able to bag quite a number of government projects. A majority of its clients are from the government sector. The question is, why do most government departments go to NIC? Does NIC now compete on a level ground with the private sector? Do they approach NIC by default or do they get better quality service at NIC? “Yes, IT projects by various government departments and ministries are being given to NIC by default,” says Mukhopadhyay.

Sadasivam thinks otherwise though. “They are not exactly there by default. Every government department is free to choose the agency based on different parameters. In our case NIC was chosen voluntarily.”

“There is no rule as such making it mandatory for ministries and government departments to give all their IT projects to NIC. They have the liberty to go through the market,” explains Vivek Angara, assistant director general, Events & IT, Ministry of Tourism. Yet, others insist that though it is not compulsory or mandatory for government IT projects to be given to NIC, historically there has been an unwritten practice to do exactly this. And in some cases, the tendering of projects is just on paper. Dr Vijayaditya feels otherwise: “NIC does not have a monopoly. We are one of the players. It is our ability that helps us in bagging projects,” he says. He further states that private players are in so many other areas, whereas NIC’s speciality is only in e-governance where they are the best in the business.

Contradicts Arora: “Given a chance to operate within the government space, I am sure private players can do a lot better. If private players are allowed in a fair and competitive environment to compete with NIC, the quality of information and efficiency in IT adoption will be a whole lot better.” Even a source from the Ministry of Information Technology revealed, “NIC is not fighting on merits, rather it is surviving on monopoly.”

But whatever the case may be, the fact is that NIC today has the maximum number of government projects in its kitty. This is partly because most government departments prefer to give their projects to NIC because of its all-India presence. They also prefer to give their projects to NIC because it saves them a lot of hassles, which come when they giving projects to private players. For instance, for departments who wish to give their projects to a private player there are a lot of tendering hassles and difficulties in budget provisions. That’s why they prefer not to get into these problems and simply give projects to NIC. Besides, NIC is a fellow government organisation. So, budget provisioning is not that difficult. For big projects NIC can get the money directly from the user ministry’s budget allocation. It is almost like transferring funds within the government. The end result of this situation means that only 10-15 percent of government projects is with private players.

Private competition
Liberalisation has brought in a new concept to the Indian market—competition. As a result of this, the consumer is getting better products or services, or at least he’s supposed to. This has also forced a number of government organisations to either choose the disinvestment path or to change their business strategy. For private players this has meant mergers and acquisitions. How is NIC positioning itself after the surge of private players in the IT arena? Is it facing any competition now? “I do not think so! In fact, the coming of private players may have increased the efficiency of NIC as we have a benchmark now. It also helps to assess the performance of private players too. This competition helps the users—namely the government departments,” says Sadasivam.

One of the biggest advantages that NIC has over private service providers, as far as government IT projects are concerned, is thanks to the huge reach that it enjoys. For government departments confidence levels are higher with a government entity like NIC rather than with private players. “When choosing a partner for delivering our project on the All India Engineering Entrance Exam we chose NIC because we could not have the same level of confidence with a private service provider as we had with NIC. NIC also enjoys greater comfort levels with government departments and ministries, as compared to private service providers,” says Agarwal.

Cost effectiveness is another factor that goes in favour of NIC. Apart from some commercial applications or services, many other services are being provided free-of-charge to the government. These include basic services like Internet, e-mail, basic software for tracking of files/papers and correspondence. Some other services that NIC provides are available at far lower costs as compared to private players. “But when it comes to services like software application development, NIC is not that cost effective,” explains Bahadur.

However, change may be slow in coming, but coming it is. “NIC started out as a main player in the government arena. However, its role in government projects has been minimised,” feels Angara. Of late, a trend is emerging—more and more government departments have started moving on to private service providers for their projects. If this trend continues, a few years down the line private players would have an equal footing with NIC when it comes to government project opportunities.

Pros and cons
Most organisations would spend a lifetime trying to gather a tenth of the information that is available to NIC today. Whether you are looking for information pertaining to tax laws or something as obscure as provisional data from the Bharatpur district census, NIC has it all. “Although they are very rich in information, a lot of this information is lost somewhere in the huge website. If this information were put across in a better manner, NIC would see a dramatic rise in popularity. And this is just one facet of their operations that I am touching on. The list of areas for improvement can go on and on,” says Arora.

NIC’s mammoth size means it needs a highly efficient management. It is not easy operating as a government body when your operations are spread across every corner of the country. Add to that working with almost every government institution in every conceivable IT-related field possible, and efficient management is critical to ensure that commitment towards quality of service stands at all times. “For any organisation there is always scope for improvement. NIC should think of streamlining its project management. Perhaps the resources available with it are not adequate to meet the burgeoning demand. It should think of an improved recruitment programme so that it meets the needs of the customer in time. It has a major role to play,” says Sadasivam.

With the mindset of government departments towards IT changing, NIC now needs to look at constant technology upgradation and design optimisation issues. A whole lot of attention needs to be focused on R&D activities in order to be able to provide efficient and quality service offerings to its customers. “One area where NIC needs to improve itself is in R&D activities and constant technology upgradation. Though it tries its best to update itself, there is some resistance to acquiring new and latest knowledge, as in any typical government set up,” explains Mukhopadhyay. Adds a source in the Ministry of Information Technology, “While NIC has had some success stories, it cannot keep basking in those past glories beyond a point. They are now marring their image due to their lack of professionalism, transparency and lack of quality services.”

V Sadasivam says NIC should look at streamlining its project management and also come up with an improved recruitment programme to meet customer needs

Besides, it seems that NIC is a bit biased towards one technology. NICNet is a satellite-based network. When they started out this was good enough. However, a satellite-based network may not be good enough to scale up as the years go by. As telecom infrastructure improved, what was required was constant technology upgradation and creating an IT set-up that’s a mix and match of the best-of-breed technologies available. However NIC sees this one differently. “There is nothing perfect in this world. There will be always be certain issues to be tackled. Every system has its weaknesses. So, one should not sit on it, but rather try and find the solution,” says Dr Vijayaditya firmly. The issue is—will NIC find the solution to this problem before it becomes insurmountable.

Whatever the fact may be, NIC also needs to be credited for the sheer scale and magnitude of its operations. No private player can boast of the network penetration and nationwide reach that NIC enjoys. Further, NIC is more intimate with government users and has domain expertise on government informatics because of its huge pool of experience in this sector. And NIC is also good at doing big projects in the area of e-governance, which is its main thrust area. But professionalism is one of the greatest lacunae at NIC. With a little bit of professionalism added to its culture, NIC can achieve greater heights. “They are big. They are influential. They are powerful. I just wish they were better managed. NIC as a whole is a challenge in man management,” says Arora.

Future proposition:
NIC has quite a number of plans in the pipeline. In the near future, it is planning to come out with both network-enabled and standalone applications for clients and will also provide much more bandwidth. NIC has also started working on standardising all applications, and in the process of introducing digital signatures for different government applications. A creation of a data centre, on lines of yahoo.com, is in the pipeline. This will help both NIC and its clients to better manage their teams and their day-to-day work. Ten years down the line, Dr Vijayaditya wants to see NIC as a centre for excellence in e-governance, not only in India, but across the world.

As mentioned before, to do this, NIC has to adopt a conscious approach in order to change the mindset of its users. In the days to come, NIC needs to look at issues like constant technology up-gradation and design optimisation. A whole lot of focus needs to be put on R&D activities in order to be able to provide efficient and quality service offerings to its clientele. Furthermore, NIC needs to be modernised in the area of management practices and bring in an Infosys kind of culture, which includes better management, more competitiveness, adhering to latest software engineering practices and project management issues. All this, while maintaining and retaining its underlined social values in terms of development of rural and less developed areas.