IT For The Masses

West Bengal is not only emerging as an attractive destination for IT
investment, but also as a premier state in ICT readiness. The proof of the point
lies in the fact that several e-government initiatives have been undertaken in
the recent years-some of which, like the Telemedicine project, have also
brought laurels to the state in terms of national level awards. Last few months
have witnessed further initiatives on certain areas, which, confirms Dr GD
Gautama, IT Secretary, would be the focus areas on e-governance for 2005.

Taking e-gov to Panchayats

The first and foremost amongst them is the plan to expand the West Bengal
State Wide Area Networking (WBSWAN). Launched in 2001, it currently connects 18
district headquarters over 2Mbps leased lines transmitting data, voice and video
to Writers Building in Kolkata, the seat of power in the state. In addition,
eight sub-divisions have also been connected to the respective district
headquarters over 2 Mbps leased lines transmitting data and voice, while one
block has been connected on data and voice.

As
part of Focus 2005, the WBSWAN networking backbone is being expanded to ensure
that connectivity is available up to 341 blocks in the state-up from the
current solitary block on the network. Necessary permission has been granted by
the Department of IT, Government of India to undertake this expansion at a
planned budgetary outlay of Rs 66.9 crore. However, the state Government refuses
to just stop here-as Manabendra Mukherjee, the IT Minister, had informed
Dataquest in an earlier meeting, the ambition is to extend the network up to the
panchayat level.

The first step on this dream looks set to be fulfilled during 2005. The
Ministry of IT, Govt of India has sanctioned a pilot project to extend WBSWAN up
to the gram panchayat level-Bardhaman has been identified as the pilot
district for this exercise. Incidentally, this is the first such e-governance
project in the country where connectivity is reached up to every panchayat in a
district. Gautama informs that this was a long-pending request from the state
having been made in Arun Shourie's tenure, and finally last month it received
the Central Government sanction. The District Head Quarter in Bardhaman is
already connected to the Sate Switching Center at Writers Building, but under
the pilot project it would be expanded to provide following additional
connectivity:

• 6 Sub Divisional Head Quarters: 4 Remote Sub Divisions to be connected via
  2 Mbps leased line to district head quarters (voice and data). Existing SDSC
  at Drapery and Asansol to be upgraded. Burdwan Sadar I & II because of
  their proximity to DSC will be connected by laying optic fiber cables.
• 31 blocks connected to district head quarters via Mbps leased line (voice
  and data)
• 277 gram panchayats connected via PSTN dial up to district head quarters
  (data only)

The overall capital expenditure on account of network,
system, peripherals, software, DRN system integration etc as part of this pilot
in Bardhaman is projected at Rs 4.96 crore. With the actual implementation still
a few days away, the government is currently debating on the public private
participation for kiosks in individual panchayats.

Criminals beware

Other than WBSWAN, the other e-gov project to come into the limelight in
2005 is the Finger Print Analysis and Criminal Tracing System (FACTS) project
launched by the West Bengal Police at the CID Headquarter at Bhawani Bhawan in
Kolkata. FACTS is an advanced automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS),
which is comprised of a server, three workstations and a mobile FACTS unit. The
existing database contains around 40,000 fingerprints, which is expandable up to
one lakh and beyond. Senior police functionaries believe that FACTS will play an
instrumental role in identifying criminals at the scene of the crime.

Designed, developed and implemented by CMC, FACTS has some
USPs that differentiates it from similar projects followed in a few states.
Starting from scratch, the project has been implemented in a record two and a
half months as against the scheduled time of six months. Apart from the central
system commissioned at Bhabani Bhavan, it has a laptop based complete mobile
unit to be carried to the scene of crime for instant matching of chance prints.
Old fingerprint slips on plain paper in the archive were very difficult to be
handled for manual matching. The present system digitizes the entire 40,000 odd
old slips, keeps on adding new slips to the database and brings out the matching
result in a few seconds (for rolled prints) and a few minutes (for scene of the
crime chance prints).

However, the biggest benefit of FACTS is that the central
system can be spread over to any remote police station all over the state. This
can now be done using the existing police infrastructure and without any
additional investment. The system can accept finger print images received
through e-mail attachments and match with the central server database, thereby
reducing the time for matching of remote location finger prints from few weeks
to few minutes only. Earlier, in such cases, by the time finger print analysis
would be carried out, the suspect/criminal would manage to get bail and slip out
in most cases.

Rajneesh De