November 12, 2003

By Ron Piovesan, News@Cisco

Although countries are increasingly coming to rely on technology to streamline their operations, there are few governments that face the daunting challenge of providing essential services to a country of over a billion people. But in India, where the rate of technology development and adoption is growing at a rapid pace, state governments have come on board to implement new IT solutions to better offer services to their citizens.

Such is the case in West Bengal, a state in the northeast of the country that has as its capital Kolkata (Calcutta). The state is a historical, cultural and intellectual centre, known in the rest of the world as the former colonial capital of India, the home of Darjeeling tea, the location of Mother Theresa's mission and the birthplace of Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Now, West Bengal is expanding on this past and is taking a step into the future, building its reputation as a leading e-government state. To better connect with its more than 80 million citizens, the state government completed the development of the West Bengal State Wide Area Network, or WB-SWAN.

As in the rest of India, West Bengal has many small rural communities, which all need to be included from the outset in any planning of an e-governance system for the people. In West Bengal, there are almost than 350 districts, or "blocks" that divide into more than 5400 counties, or "gram panchayat." Within each individual panchayat, there may be as many as 15 small villages and towns. The state plans to use the WB-SWAN to provide government services to every corner of the state in a more effective way.

"The vision is to get the state connected vertically and laterally," says Mr. S. K. Mitra, managing director of Webel, an agency of the government of West Bengal. He continues to explain that technology can help streamline processes across the more than 50 state government departments, which include such areas as urban development, finance, law and order, health, education, treasury, commercial taxes and irrigation. Improved communications across these departments will then help the state better integrate them down into the governments at the district, or "block" level, and then down to the panchayat level.

Mitra divides the new e-government services into two broad categories, government-to-government (G2G) and government-to-citizen (G2C). Early successes have been in the G2G area, most notably with the treasury and finance departments.

"The Treasury department is the government's ATM (automatic teller machine)," says Mitra. "Before the WB-SWAN, we could only monitor the state's cash situation on a weekly or a monthly basis. Now, we can monitor the state's cash-flow on a daily basis."

He says this helps the state gain a better sense of how it is spending money, and then make rapid decisions as needed. For example, by being able to daily monitor the collections of commercial taxes, the government was able to determine the interstate movement of carrier trucks and make related decisions on roadwork and maintenance.

But the area of which Mitra is most proud is the state's new G2C initiatives, specifically in the field of heathcare. One such initiative is with the Kolkata-based Hospital for Tropical Medicine. There, the hospital has been using telemedicine techniques to assist doctors in rural areas as they analyze and treat panchayat residents with a variety of ailments.

"For many patients it is very difficult to travel all the way to Kolkata to get treatment," says Mitra. "There is also a comfort factor for the patients as well; they feel better being examined in their own village. Using telemedicine, we are able to disperse hospital expertise into the districts."

He goes on to explain that the system works by having an examining doctor at one end who is with the patient in the village and who is in constant contact via a voice and data connection with a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine, who is at the other end. With the two doctors in constant communication, the panchayat resident has the benefit of being able to be treated by both a local doctor and a hospital specialist. Although the hospital doctor may suggest a prescription if necessary, to keep the medical process as close to the patient as possible, says Mitra, it is the examining doctor who has the final word on treatments.

A Cisco converged wide-area network provides the single infrastructure for data, voice and video to bring all these applications to the citizens of West Bengal.

A state government that is also interested in using a wide area network to better serve its people is Gujarat. This state, located in western India, is now in the process of setting up an IP based Gujarat State Wide Area Network (GS-WAN). Like the network in West Bengal, the GS-WAN will connect the state secretariat to Gujarat's 25 district headquarters, 225 talukas (counties) and more that 50 million citizens.

GS-WAN is now in a state of rapid development as connectivity has been extended to the state's universities, police departments and other administrative offices in addition to the district and talukas headquarters. Again, this is what is known as vertical integration of state functions using technology.

The GS-WAN also has lateral uses; for example, it works across state departments to track payables and receivable for each government department each day. In addition, there are websites where citizens can log-on and access a relevant government department on issues such as land, water, and taxes. Initially, voice on the network was deployed using traditional PBXs (private branch exchanges) connected to routers but there are now plans to implement IP telephony and to make voice another IP application on the network.

Looking across to the southeastern tip of the country, the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd (Elcot), the IT-enabling company of the Tamil Nadu state government, recently unveiled plans to establish a virtual private network (VPN) linking all the government departments to provide, voice, data and video connectivity. The network will improve the delivery of services, response time and transparency of major government functions such as registration, revenue, education etc.

The state government through Elcot is also planning to streamline data-sharing by creating and maintaining a central data warehouse, which would provide far easier data access to different departments. Elcot is also expanding its successful Simplified and Transparent Administration of Registration (project STAR) to all sub-registrar offices in the state. This will again make it easier for the state's more than 62 million residents to access and interact with state departments.

All of these state initiatives are being implemented in parallel with a central initiative to bring the efficiency of e-government application to the federal government as well. Currently under discussion in the capital, New Delhi, is the "National e-Governance Initiative," which aims to bring greater efficiency and transparency to public services and improve the access a billion people have to their federal government.

Ron Piovesan is a communications consultant who was based in Delhi, India for a year. He is now back in North America.