Case Studies

The value of IT in governance

State and central governments have realised the benefits of IT. Four deployments that highlight the benefits of e-governance in ensuring productivity are detailed by Atanu Kumar Das

The GRAMSAT project

The Government of India decided to connect different blocks across Orissa under the ambit of a project called GRAMSAT. To do this it enlisted the aid of the Indian Research Space Organisation (ISRO). The National Informatics Centre (NIC) was assigned the responsibility of setting up a VSAT network in 350 blocks of the state. After making a thorough technical and commercial evaluation, NIC short-listed Hughes Technology as the supplier of the VSAT solution for the state-wide block level network.

The principal applications include the Internet, development information network (DIN) and the national resource information system (NRIS). The goal was to eradicate illiteracy in the rural belt.

Hughes Escorts Communications was given the responsibility for rolling out the entire network including the installation, commissioning and implementation of the hub and remote sites. A dedicated hub was established at NIC, Delhi, to cater to the needs of the project. The hub is operational on a 7 metre Ku Band antenna with Hughes DirecWAY platform at the baseband level. The present outroute and inroute configurations are 8 and 4 Mbps (aggregate) respectively. The remote sites have DirecWAY 6000 series two-way broadband VSAT system with 1.2 metre Ku Band antenna and 1 watt Radio Frequency Transmitter.

The network has been successfully implemented on the DirecWAY platform that offers various modulation and coding schemes as well as several types of inroute access methods to give optimum performance for different applications while minimising the required inroute bandwidth. It also supports several QoS and performance enhancement features such as spoofing, prioritisation, compression and packet filtering.