Technology Sabha 2008

MCA 21: Transforming business through e-Governance

YS Malik, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India

After receiving the award, YS Malik gave a presentation on MCA 21 which has changed the face of the business environment. He gave a glimpse of the project and his experiences along with some advice for e-Governance project implementations. Earlier known as DCA 21 (Department of Company Affairs) was renamed as MCA 21 in 2004 when a separate ministry was created for company/corporate affairs by the UPA government. MCA 21 is one of the 26 project ideas promulgated by the Department of IT and MCA has received unprecedented support from them for this project. This was one of the first projects to be done via PPP and it was developed by Tata Consultancy Services.

“We must meet the aspirations and expectations of stakeholders,” said Malik. He went on to explain some key features of the project and said, “This is a comprehensive service and it is not just another computerization process. It is a full fledged e-Governance project with IT being an enabler.” This project takes care of more than 100 services and was finished in 78 weeks which according to Malik is record time and TCS’s 78 days implementation rollout was nothing short of a miracle. This was the first project in which e-filling was made mandatory by law. In order to make access of documents simpler, around five crore papers were digitized as part of the project. The security of the documents is handled by digital signatures and according to Malik, out of around four lakh digital signatures registered, about 3.2 lakh are in relation with MCA. With 25 back offices, the infrastructure of MCA 21 comprises of a data center and government security repository at Delhi and a disaster recovery unit at Chennai.

Talking about transition management, Malik said, “Some people do transition management in part whereas some believe in full transition and we chose the latter option. The biggest risk in this is non preparedness of the stakeholders because if they are not ready, the whole project can be a failure.” He further explained the whole transition process in which 24 seminars were held at the national level and 55 full day educational workshops were conducted by TCS. They even had a call center as well as e-mail-based support for the project. Explaining the numbers, Malik said that the site has an average hit rate of 2.2 million per day and has increased the efficiency of services. Activities such as the approval of a company’s name which used to take about seven days get done in a day using MCA 21. An activity such as the filing of annual returns which took about 60 days gets done instantly with this service.

Advising on project management he urged project heads to spend more time in planning and said that the infrastructure process takes time and that is where PPP can be used well. Transition management of internal as well as external stakeholders is a big task which should be taken care of. Finally, he believed that no matter what, maintaining and managing the PPP remains a big challenge.