A central agency for effective implementation of Capacity Building Scheme for State Governments and Union Territories, the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) has been tasked to provide training and Capacity Building programmes on continual basis and to interact with States and Union Territories for promoting knowledge transfer and sharing best practices.
The State eGovernance Mission Team (SeMT) has been established by Government of India though NeGD as a part of the Capacity Building (CB) Scheme. When the CB Scheme was formulated in 2006, most States were inadequately equipped in terms of personnel and the skill-sets needed to handle the challenges that were likely to be faced in the implementation of NeGP (National eGovernance Plan). Through the setting up of the SeMTs and training initiatives undertaken under the scheme for a large number of officials, there has been a considerable improvement in building of internal capacities in the State and Union Territory Governments.
The SeMTs function as full-time internal advisory body in undertaking eGovernance projects and advising high level committees on IT/eGovernance projects. The teams are responsible for providing an overall direction, standardisation, consistency through programme management of the eGovernance initiatives in the State and alignment with the overall objectives of NeGP. The SeMTs have expertise in the areas/functions of Programme Management, Financial Management, Technology Management and Change Management.
Capacity Building Programme
An evaluation of Capacity Building Scheme and its implementation was conducted and many of the States have reported that SeMTs have added immense value to the state? IT endeavours. It has also been reported that they are involved in most of the key eGovernance projects in the state, contributing to the best practices from the industry and sharing the vision of the Central Government for the NeGP. NeGD is in process of developing an ICT based system for effective coordination and monitoring of the working of SeMTs.
For achieving the objective of the Capacity Building of officials of state and central government and SeMT members and in the implementation of NeGP, sharing of best practices and to creation of a platform for cross-learning, NeGD has been conducting domain specific thematic workshops. Four successful workshops have been conducted so far Capacity Building & Change Management, Technology Management, RFP Toolkit and Detailed Project Report (DPR) preparation & evaluation. All four workshops were well appreciated for their coverage, content, depth and methodology.
Under the national roll out of training programme for Chief Information Officers, eight training programmes were approved by Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY). These programmes are of three categories: eGovernance Leadership Programme (eGLP)- a two week programme for officers at the senior management level; eGovernance Champions Programme (eGCP) a four week programme for officers at the middle management level; and eGovernance Executive Programme (eGEP) a six week programme for officers at the operational level. NeGD designed the CIOsTraining Programme with the help of NISG and the implementation of these programmes is now complete.
Guidelines for eGovernance
NeGD has worked for the formation of core policies on a number of issues including cyber security and cloud hosting. A set of standard operating procedures for ensuring the security of eGovernance information systems have been published by NeGD. The organisation has been responsible for designing the Integration Architectural framework to harmonise the various ICT initiatives such as National and State Portal, National/State Service Delivery Gateway, National Payment Gateway, UID, Mobile Service Delivery Gateway under taken by DeitY. This framework has enabled delivery of services of different departments under the e-district project.
NeGD has also published guidelines for preparation of Detailed Project Report for eGovernance applications. Guidelines for maintaining strategic control over the forms, business processes, data, security, ICT infrastructure and manpower have been published and shared with line ministries and state departments. It is an important safeguard that all departments should adhere to, especially in the cases where the departments have outsourced their eGovernance projects, for sake of maintaining their overall control.
NeGD evaluates the various R&D project proposals received in DeitY for funding. NeGD monitors and provides guidance to the sanctioned R&D proposals. NeGD also identifies areas where potential for carrying out R&D exists. Benchmarks for designing product line based applications which can be replicated and reused rapidly have been defined to enable faster delivery of services to citizens. NeGD conducts regular workshops to provide hands on training and awareness for DPR preparation and training on implementation of cyber security standard operating procedures. NeGD is also in process of finalising the Open API policy for government departments.
Technical Appraisal of NeGP projects
NeGD has created an appraisal framework wherein an evaluation is done to ensure that the critical components such as services and service level agreements, assessment of cost and benefits to be accrued by the project implementation, soundness of solution architecture by evaluating the functional architecture including use cases, deployment architecture, training needs and change management, testing including auditing and certifications, post implementation assessment for measuring that the envisaged benefits have been realised, are included.
The proposals are evaluated to ensure that the effort estimation for software development are done using the standard effort estimation techniques, hardware sizing is done using the internationally accepted benchmarks such as TPM-C for database and number of concurrent users for web servers. NeGD also highlights the need for hosting the infrastructure in cloud environment as it results in lowering the overall TCO of the infrastructure. In order to provide guidance regarding secure application development practices, NeGD has developed a cyber security policy and standard operating procedures for secure coding, securing by hardening the ICT infrastructure. We advise departments to adhere to these policies and also include them in their RFP? while engaging software developers.
NeGD has developed architectural design principles to assist the departments in ensuring that their applications are capable of scaling in and scaling out, provide open API? in the form of web service interfaces or dll? to provide horizontal scalability to the application. To ensure standards based development and vendor neutrality, technical, data and metadata standards for eGovernance projects have been notified. As part of appraisal departments are advised to adhere to these principles.
Anoop Kumar Agrawal, President & CEO, NEGD, Departments of Electronics & IT