| Home > Top Stories |
 |
Exclusive--Passport Seva Project Still to See Light of Day |
| The much awaited Passport Seva Project has been delayed for the third time due to the clear lack of planning required to realise a project of such scale and complexity |
| Priya Kekre |
| Monday, December 14, 2009 |
Promising a passport within three days,
it peddled a dream to Indians crowding understaffed and overburdened
regional passport centres. But the Passport
Seva Project, one of the
government's flagship e-governance programmes, is facing inordinate
delays.
The Passport Seva project began as one of the 27 Mission Mode Projects
listed in the national e-governance plan. In October 2008, the Ministry
of External Affairs (MEA) signed the agreement with Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS) to
implement the project, estimated to be worth Rs.1 billion. Passports
would be generated in 3 business days and under the
‘Tatkal’ plan, they would be generated on the same
day. Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon had then said the pilot
project will become functional in June 2009, with the rest of the
country to be serviced by 77 stations in 2010. But the project has been
delayed for the third time. The first deadline was in June, then
October, before the revised date of Nov 13 was arrived at, but this too
was not met.
The pilot project would have seen 'Passport Seva' centres in 7
locations, starting in Bangalore and later in Hubli and Mangalore, also
in Karnataka, followed by Chandigarh, Ludhiana in Punjab and Ambala in
Haryana. A mini centre will also be opened in Gulbarga (Karnataka) as
an addition in the pilot project. As per the project, front-end
activities of passport issuance, dispatch of passports, online linking
with police, Central Printing unit for centralized printing of
passports will be put in place. The sensitive activities such as police
verification, printing and dispatch of passports will be performed by
government staff. The new system is aimed at 'timely, transparent, more
accessible and reliable manner' for passport issuance. While this
spells good news for the citizens, the thousands of passport agents who
have been making a living through commissions will be thrown out of
business. No alternative arrangements or employments means have been
carved out for them by the MEA
so far. Certain industry sources are of the opinion that these agents
have come together to lobby against the Passport Seva project, unless
their interests are also kept in mind.
When contacted about the delays in the project, TCS directed all its
queries to the MEA. According to A Manickan, joint secretary, consular,
passport and visa, MEA, all the physical infrastructure is ready. This
includes a user-friendly building with swanky interiors, 25 counters
and electronic token boards. Also, the data centre based in Delhi is
now operational. However, the problem was with the back up data centre
which took time to set up. A senior TCS official was also quoted in the
media as saying that the delay was due to setting up of a 'disaster
recovery centre', which will have the back-up of all the passport
records. The state-run Software Technology Park of India (STPI) has now
finally set up the back-up data centre for TCS in Chennai and will be
running it at a cost of Rs.30 million (Rs.3 crore) over a period of
seven years. However, the networking to different stations may take
longer. Incidentally, the National Informatics Centre, which runs the
current passport software, PISON (passport information service system
on the net), has already given the data for transfer of nearly 80 lakh
passport records to the MEA recently. The data will be kept in a
specially constructed data centre as it awaits migration to the new
software program developed by TCS.
But officials within the DIT who are privy to the project say the main
delay is due to the fact that TCS had not got its software ready.
Apparently, there have been some key errors in the applications that
are being tested. Another major reason for the delay is the inordinate
time required to draft the software requirement specification (SRS)
document, which was completed only recently. The SRS, which details how
the software program will behave in diverse circumstances, had taken a
lot of brainstorming sessions between MEA and TCS engineers. The final
document comes to about 400 pages. The glitches do not end here. The
inordinate delays also have been caused by some highly inefficient
planning. When asked about the delays in the Passport Seva Project,
Manickan said, “The deadlines set for the project were
internal guidelines set by both parties based on discussions. While the
infrastructure is ready now, when we started off we found out that the
locations for the data centres were not suitable for setting up Level 3
data centres. Hence, we had to go back to scratch to achieve these
standards. That is the reason it got delayed to October.”
Post this, the infrastructure as well as the applications went through
4 cycles of testing by DIT’s Standarization Testing and
Quality Certification (STQC) in the month of October. According to
Manickan, the DIT auditors found several defects on the security,
strategic controls, and the entire passport application, submission,
and processing cycles which led to the delay even in the third deadline
set for November 13. After this, the Parliamentary Committee pulled up
the Ministry of External Affairs for the "repeated postponement" in the
launch of the Passport Seva Project.
The ministry still has to sign a non-disclosure agreement with TCS, as
the latter will have access to information of millions of applicants.
Incidentally, MEA has insisted that all "sensitive activities" will be
carried out only by government agencies. A lot of confusion also
persists on whether the NIC's current PISON (passport information
service system on the net) will continue in parallel to the proposed
TCS software - and, if so, their mode of compatibility. The dilemma has
arisen as Indian missions abroad, which also issue passports and are
linked through the NIC program - are not part of the Passport Seva
Project. The MEA has still not issued a formal statement clarifying
these details not has it detailed a timeline by when the project will
go live. "We will have another round or the fifth cycle of STQC testing
in the first week of January 2010, before we decide on the future
course." Manickan said. According to him, the DIT has identified the
key loopholes and based on the next round of tests will be able to
tackle them faster. He also went on to say that the DIT has brought in
a lot of senior officials to evaluate the project and placed a larger
dedicated team to solve the teething issues.
Once the tests and audits are completed in January, the pilot phase of
the project will be implemented in 7 locations. The pilot project will
go through another round of thorough testing before being rolled out
across 77 locations in the country, where initial scrutiny of
application forms, acceptance of fee, scanning of documents, among
others, will be performed by selected service providers. "It is a very
complicated process. We want to make sure that all redundancies are in
place and that all the software glitches are solved before we go live
and operational. Once the project starts, we cannot leave any scope for
commotion or chaos. The delays are simply because we are trying to get
everything right and do not wish to compromise on any aspect," said
Manickam.
All we can hope now is that, the MEA, TCS, NIC and DIT all work
together and make up for the lack of foresight and planning showed so
far to realise this much sought after e-governance project.
Page(s) 1
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
