In a bid to lower the procurement costs and bring more transparency in tenders, the Kerala State IT Mission (KSITM) leverages its existing IT infrastructure and integrates e-Procurement with e-Payments.
Over the past decade or more, e-Governance initiatives and projects in India have certainly gained momentum across central and state governments.
IT has penetrated in the government sector across all levels, be it the centre, state, district or taluka (block), and has even reached the last level of governance that is the municipalities or gram panchayats.
Despite the fact that there’s low availability of good telecommunication infrastructure, networks, internet connectivity and power supply in semi-urban areas there’s been a lot of progress made so far.
Interestingly, today e-Governance in India has reached a stage from where it could be easily taken to the next level, so all the efforts and hard work made in the past can actually be translated into huge benefits for both the citizens and various stake holders in government departments and authorities.
One such example, where the existing e-Governance projects have been well-enhanced and smartly integrated to scale up for the benefit of public and businesses through a ‘single window’ model is the Kerala State IT Mission (KSITM) an autonomous nodal IT implementation agency for the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala established in 1999.
Kerala has been very active in the area of e-Governance and the use of IT for transparent functioning and administration. Given the tech-savvy vision, the state government has extensively carried out numerous IT based administrative programmes such as e-Government Procurement (e-GP), e-Tenders, e-District, e-Payment and others.
Given the fair number of successful e-Governance projects running across the state and its departments, the authorities were keen to look at new ways to leverage its existing IT infrastructure and initiatives.
And one of the ways they found was integrating some of the existing e-Governance initiatives and coupling them on a single web based platform.
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Integration of e-Payment and e-Procurement systems
e-Procurement and e-Payment were among the set of successful e-Governance projects which KSITM had implemented in recent years. In April 2013, both of these key initiatives were integrated into a single portal with the aim of easy accessibility and functioning in the areas of tender biddings, online payments and refund mechanism.
While the e-Procurement initiative brought in transparency, it also offered bidders 24×7 access to tender documents and bidding processes through anytime-anywhere bid submission facility. But without the e-Payment facility, the e-Procurement system was unable to meet its sole objective in the true sense.
Purpose of integration
The e-Payment program was integrated with e-Procurement last year largely to ensure full confidentiality and anonymity in the tender processing, which is a very crucial aspect of any bidding. It was also done to reduce the human interference to avoid any kind of discrimination against the vendors and businesses.
“Broadly, the integration is aimed at bringing in transparency in the process and also to increase the competitiveness. In traditional paper system, there’s always a doubt in the mind of the vendor regarding the process integrity itself and also there are allegations around prices, which lowers the competition,” says K Mohammed Y Safirulla, Director Kerala State IT Mission, Government of Kerala.
“As a result, the competition goes down and the process price goes up, leading to loss to the government. But with the robust e-Procurement platform, there’s increase in transparency, which creates a level platform for all the players resulting in a win-win situation, where those respective departments will have to spend less due increase in the competition as it lowers the prices,” adds Safirulla.
“Till March 2014 end, more than 11,000 e-tenders have been processed and this is close to Rs 10,000 crore only for the tenders published and so bids have been increasing now. This is a major advantage that the state government has realised,” says Safirulla.
Challenges during integration
Given the fact that Kerala government had already invested in building IT infrastructure and e-Governance projects, KSITM had to deal with fewer challenges for the new initiatives. According to Safirulla, there were broadly two kinds of challenges technical and those related to the human element. “On the technical side, initially for two-three months there were lot of complaints about refunds for L1 (low end) bidders, but now we have resolved them,” says Safirulla.
“Secondly on the human element side, departments were initially not forthcoming for the e-Procurement projects. However, with Kerala government’s vision on transparency, a government order was issued for all departments, stating that for any procurements above Rs 25 lakh, the e-tender route will be taken. And gradually, all departments came forth and followed it,” adds Safirulla.
Reaping the benefits
It’s been a year since KSITM carried out the integration, and following that over 11,000 tenders have been processed across various departments.
“However, since we don’t have a previous years’ benchmark or reference point, we are unable to estimate the cost savings; but we can definitely say that the competition has increased in terms of number of bidders coming forward for e-tenders across n-number of departments,” points out Safirulla.
Future road map
While KSITM has successfully integrated the e-Procurement and e-Payment systems, it is all set to explore new possibilities and opportunities to further enhance e-Governance objectives of the state.
“To keep pace with technology initiatives in e-Governance, KSITM is also giving high importance to staff training and upgrading their skill sets. There’s a vast requirement of localised training and hence we are planning to have two training centres one in Ernakulam and the other in Kannur, to be operationalised later this year,” adds Safirulla.
Besides the technology initiatives and training for staff, KSITM is continuously looking to improve its IT infrastructure and platforms, to make it more robust and effective in a broader way. In fact, for the e-Payment initiative, initially the State Bank of Travancore was selected for payment gateway; however, now the state authorities are looking at bringing in more banks to expand the e-Payment platform.
“We are looking at fine tuning our existing requirements. We have listed close to some 10-15 requirements which we have given to the NIC team like bringing in more banks into the picture to increase the competition; close to 25-30 banks would be integrated with this system before this year ends,” explains Safirulla.
“Also, we are creating an MIS module to build a vendor database, so any department that wants to go with the tender can directly contact the respective vendors and, automatically, the information is disseminated and the publicity cost is reduced,” adds Safirulla.
Moreover, for FY 2014-15, KSITM is looking to add more services online and is implementing office automation across government departments.
“Here, we have two key targets – first is to bring at least 100 services online, and second is to go for office automation using e-Office software developed by NIC ideally looking at some sort of paperless transactions. At present we are implementing it at the secretariat and will also deploy the software at districts,” concludes Safirulla.
