To ensure transparency and efficiency in its infra development programmes, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highway has come up with different portals like ‘Infracon’ and ‘ePace’ to provide all necessary details regarding highway projects. The ministry now aims to integrate its different tech initiatives in coming year. In an interview with EC’s Mohd Ujaley, Sanjay Jaju, Director, National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation (NHIDCL), which is a fully owned company of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways says that “the future road map would be to integrate all tech-projects together.”
How the idea of launching INFRACON portal came and what is the objective of this portal?
In the ministry of road transport and highways, we do lot of project preparation work and project supervision work. A detailed and quality project report lies at the heart of any good project. This whole activity of preparing a detailed project report is outsourced to external consultancy firms and consultants. These consultants are primarily highway engineers, bridge engineers, safety engineers, quantity surveyor. So far, selection of these consultants were done on a qualitative basis in which 80% weightage was given to technical aspect and 20% marks was given to financial capability. Technical aspects includes qualifications, and number of years and kind of experience of an individual or firm. This aspect is very subjective and broadly it is based on individual’s curriculum vitae or firm work-profile. People exploited this method as they knew that evaluation process takes a lot of time and was highly subjective, and they were not done in a systematic manner.
There was lot of complaint that people were fudging their bio-data. Today you are a highway engineer, tomorrow you become a tunnel expert, and day after tomorrow you become a different type of expert. To address this challenge, we decided to build a national platform on which we could bring all consultancy firms and individual consultants. This is how Infracon was born. It is a portal that we have created wherein individual firms and consultants can upload their requirements and put information out in public domain.
How has been the response to the portal? Have you taken any special initiative to bring more people to this platform?
To attract people to this portal, we mulled over questions such as why a consultant would be interested to bring their information to this platform. And, the logical thing that came out was that we need to have projects being put out on this particular portal, that means the bidding should happen with this portal. So now we have updated this facility wherein organisations like ours – NHIDCL, or NHAI or Ministry of Road Transport and Highways bid out a consultancy project, supervision project, DPR preparation through this portal.
What is the procedure to apply for projects on INFRACON?
Basically, an individual or firm will have to register on this website by providing details about them and their firm. The government will put its projects on this portal. The individual and firm can bid for the projects. They can form a team by having an agreement before bidding for the projects.
Has the portal helped ministry in managing projects?
Absolutely, In fact, now we have taken this project to one step ahead. We have designed our database and back-end in such a manner that based on the fixed criterion, we are able to get online evaluation done for submitted CVs by a click of a button. Earlier, it used to take us months. And, this has not only improve efficiency, also brought a different level of transparency in the whole process of evaluation.
It has been possible because the information that we are collecting are completely objective type. It is like converting subjective paper into an objective paper. For example, when we asked a consultant or firm about how many years of experience they have, based on their reply, our back-end system through an algorithm calculate their marks automatically and in the end, we get the total marks. Technically, this has become the role model in terms of the consultancy reform that we wanted to bring in this sector.
How many consultants or firms have joined so far?
More than three thousand consultants and more than five hundred consultancy firms are already online on this portal. More than two hundred and fifty odd projects have been bidded out. In fact, we are the first one to start with the evaluation tools. We have completed evaluation of more than ten projects through the portal itself and over a period of time this would become competency national database for consultancy individuals and firms.
Also, it has opened up a huge window of opportunity for all those who would like to be recognised as a ‘key person’. For example, I have the talent but nobody knows me. I am a civil engineer in Dharbanga district but nobody knows me. But now, this is an opportunity for me to come out to this portal to put out information in public domain which people are doing and over a period of time this will also disallow the doctoring of data which is happening rampantly.
Are other departments or corporations of central government adopting it?
Right now, technically NHAI, NHIDCL and ministry of road transport and highways have adopted it. Possibly, all the projects in future with the ministry will get bid out through this particular portal.
Has it brought any tangible benefits to the ministry?
Yes, and this portal has huge potential. First of all, it will improve the evaluation. Good quality DPRs will come out and good quality DPRs means good projects and good projects means effectively cost saving and time saving and the second thing would be in terms of overall usage, once the whole database is available, it will open the whole window of opportunity for all those who want to work for the sector but were not able to get opportunities.
You have served as IT secretary of Andhra Pradesh, do you find any disparity in the adoption of e-governance between state and centre?
Obviously, use of technology is indispensable for any organisation, now be it the government or the private sector. So if you look at the requirement side or the necessity of using technology and e-governance, its huge. And especially in the ministry like road transport and highways and its corporation like NHIDCL, the role of e-governance is immense. That is why here at NHIDCL, we went with technology and today, NHIDCL is one of the fist Government of India’s company which is completely e-governed.
We make use of e-office for all our files from start to finish, except for some contract management file, nothing in this office gets done through a manual route. Only some contract management because there are some technical requirements. Rest of it is all done through e-office. Any order that we issue within the organisation is put out online. We have created e-pace which is for real time monitoring of all our projects. At the same time we make use of e-procurement portal for all our tenders that we invite. We have invited tenders worth more than Rs.15,000 crore, all these tenders have been put out online.
So, effectively, the necessity is all there. Even within the state governments there will be organisations which are at some degree of maturity and there are some organisations which will be at a lesser degree of maturity and obviously it all depends upon the principal stake holders to realise the importance of technology.
So, comparing the two would be slightly odd but the fact remains that the necessity for infusing e-governance or technology is very high and now there is an increasing extent given in government of India for use of technology. So, I think there is huge incentive for somebody to apply e-governance solution within the government and that is a very good sign.
In Andhra Pradesh, you have a successful e-governance project called Mee Seva. Do you think that sort of centralising services to a particular platform so that people can access easily is possible in central government system?
Central governments are not the local governments that is why they are central government. There are some subjects which are within the purview of the local municipal corporation. There are some subjects which are in the purview of the central government. So obviously for the central government services, one can make use of integrated portal like the way Mee Seva was designed. For example, for ease of doing business, central government has an online portal called e-biz, which basically integrates all the ministries.
I don’t work in that ministry so I wouldn’t know much of it but the fact remains that even at the central government level there are multiple domains or there are multiple departments and integrated portal would definitely help the common citizen, because he would like to transact all his business through a single entry portal. So the necessity of such a thing would definitely would be there but obviously the subjects are different here. So to an extent one would have to treat this whole idea to suit the requirements here in central government.
What are the top three initiatives that NHIDCL is working on?
As I told you, we have lot of initiatives and as a part of NHIDCL, we have developed Infracon but now it has become part and parcel of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highway. Something, similar also happened with the e-pace, we designed it for our needs but it was designed in so generic fashion that it became actually a tool for entire ministry. So these are the two main applications that we make use of. Our e-Access also is the very important initiative, of course company website is fairly a vibrant and dynamic website. If you look at our website I don’t think any other website can be comprehensive in terms of usage and in terms of the information that it gives out.
In terms of technology adoption in your organisation what would be the future road map?
The future road map could be to integrate all this together would always be a great idea. Right now, we have a lot of projects which are serving their own needs. Some of them are not integrable because they are all in their own home. They are bigger project like INAM-Pro portal which has established it positions in a market place for infrastructure providers and material suppliers. So obviously, it cannot become part of our system, it is platform for external world but some of our internal initiatives, can get integrated. But obviously right now whatever we have done, is good enough to take us to the next level.
Other than technology projects, at what level are some of the core projects handled by NHIDCL?
We now have more than 130 projects worth more than Rs.1,00,000 crores which have been assigned to the company at various stages of its life cycle. Some of them are at the DPR stage, some of them have come to land acquisition, and some of them are actually now at the project implementation stage with contractors on. So now we have more than 35 odd projects about a thousand kilometres of roads and national highways. Worth more than Rs.15,000 crore civil construction cost which are right now in the field and executed by the contractors so that is the task we have.
This year we have planned to add other five hundred kilometers to it. Besides it we are doing other projects also for the ministry of road transport and highways. In fact,we are building the automated car parking lot right across in the ministry of road transport and highways because there is huge parking problem on the parliament street that is one project that is being done right now. There are projects of bridges and two tunnel which has also been given out.
