TCS PASSPORT PROJECT

By CROW -
Source : Times of India
 
The Indian government's ambitious 'Passport Seva' project, which seeks to give out passports in three days, has missed another deadline Friday 13th Nov 2009
 
 
This will be the third time the external affairs ministry's project -- a major e-governance initiative -- will not meet its launch date. Officials are blaming software glitches for the delay.

The first deadline was in June, then October, before the revised date of November 13 was arrived at. The pilot project was to take off in Bangalore.

Minister of State of External Affairs Shashi Tharoor had said in a tweet dated October 30 that the project "should be rolled out next month after some technological snags delayed it".

According to officials, the physical infrastructure is ready. This includes a user-friendly building with swanky interiors, 25 counters and electronic token boards.

"The software which will be the basis for the new system is still having too much problem," said an official.

Information Technology major Tata Consultancy Services is in charge of implementing the project after it signed the contract in October 2008. The project is reportedly worth over Rs 1,000 crore.

The pilot project would have seen 'Passport Seva' centres 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. The project is to run for two months and software is giving basic problems like flawed printing of passports. "There was a problem in audit trail," said an official.

In all the passport offices in the country and missions abroad, the ministry looks after the process of passport services, while the software is provided by the state-run National Informatics Centre.

"As far as software goes, we did not have any problem over the years," said a senior foreign ministry official. But one key problem with the TCS has been lack of domain knowledge.

The Department of Information Technology's Standarization Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) has done three rounds of testing on the software. But all of them have found hundreds of bugs which are being slowly rooted out.

"We will have another round of STQC testing before we decide on the future course," he said. The ministry has issued a letter to TCS invoking the penalty clause in the master services agreement -- after failing to start the pilot project in October.

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