Maharashtra's SWAN Goes Live

During the last few years, state
governments in India have increased their focus on the NeGP plan and
put their IT-ising efforts in top gear. Last month, Maharashtra became
the eighth state in the country to formally make its state wide area
network (SWAN) operational. While DIT has earlier projected the
Maharashtra SWAN to go live in September-December 2009 timeframe, the
state succeeded in officially launching the project a month earlier.
The SWAN is jointly implemented by ITI-Spanco and the joint venture
will also maintain it for five years on a build, own, operate and
transfer (BOOT) model. CDAC, Price WaterHouse Cooper and IL&FS
were other third party consultants who played a key role in the design
of the network and technical evaluation of the tender. The technology
partners are Cisco for all data and voice networking, Polycom for video
conferencing, CA for network management system (NMS) and Symantec for
security software. The total outlay of the project is Rs 104 crore.



There are many perceived benefits of this SWAN implementation the key
among them being better delivery of citizen services. A total of 366
offices across the state would be connected under the network. Talking
about the details of the project, Kaustubh Dhavse, Head-Strategy,
Spanco Ltd said, “There was a need to connect every
government office and district at state level as well as National level
which would enable dissemination of information for efficient
governance.  The Project was aimed at connecting the State
Head quarters or SHQ (Mumbai – Mantralaya) with the District
Head quarters (DHQ), Divisional Head Quarters (DDHQ), Taluka Head
Quarters (THQ) and the various Horizontal Offices (HO).  This
vertical connectivity would facilitate seamless integration of all
government machinery in the state starting from the top to the taluka
level.”



According to senior DIT officials, the infrastructure is based on open
standards and has been designed to be interoperable, scalable providing
a ubiquitous communication backbone for the State’s
distributed information processing environment in addition to enabling
connectivity to various government departments. Currently, the Chief
Minister’s office and state ministers are connected directly
to the district collectors and talukas through secured network and can
communicate via videoconferencing and VoIP which will aid better
governance and help in saving costs. Mantralaya officials believe that
the most significant objective of the MSWAN will be to leverage IT for
greater transparency, accountability and easier access to information.
Kaustubh also opines that the launch of the MSWAN will help streamline
the information flow within the State and will enable the government to
take faster and more informed decisions by connecting with various
offices.



The key technology capabilities that will be made available through
this SWAN include inter-office connectivity with multiple levels of
redundancy; VoIP enabled offices to reduce telecommunication costs;
multi-party video conferencing facility at each PoP; state of the art
network operations centre to monitor, troubleshoot and upgrade the
network on real-time basis. A hybrid network model (a mix of Gigabit
ethernet, wireless, leased line, circuit connectivity) will be used to
connect the multiple horizontal offices. While there is yet no
confirmation from the Maharashtra government on the network speeds and
bandwidth, experts opine that the MSWAN will follow the example of
Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, where optical fiber has speeds of 2-4
Mbps at the district level, and 2 Mbps at the tehsil level. However,
experts feel that a connectivity of 2MBPs will be inadequate to network
all the villages in a district. They note that each district will
require a minimum of 16MBPS connectivity for smooth functioning.



With the MSWAN up and running, the Maharashtra Government has completed
one leg of its three pronged mechanism comprising SWAN, State Data
Centres (SDCs) and Citizen Service Centres (CSC) or Maha e-Seva Kendras
to serve citizens. Last year, the government launched the Common
Service Centre (CSC) scheme called as the 'Maha e –Seva
Kendra' in Mumbai. Currently, 10,483 rural and 1,336 urban Maha e-Seva
Kendras are expected to be set up by early 2010. The scheme envisages
setting up one Maha e-Seva Kendra for every four villages. Various
government-to-citizen services like land records, pension schemes,
ration cards and business-to-consumer services like railway tickets,
utility payments, banking and agriculture will be made available
through these kendras. These e-Seva Kendras will also be connected to
the SWAN in the months to come. Also, the initial project report on
SDCs is ready while the design process for the data centres is
currently on.