The Missed Opportunity

face="Times New Roman, serif">There
are significant business opportunities that lie with the government,
and the tendering process should be rationalized, so that local
solution providers can fit the bill. Joint ventures with large
system integrators like Wipro and HCL is desirable, and
sub-contracting should be allowed. These are some of the key points
that have been raised during the sixth DQ Channels href="http://www.dqweek.com/SP-Summit-salutes-solution-provider-excellence-at-Kuala-Lumpur">SP
Summit, 2011
held at Kuala Lumpur. With a multitude of initiative around National
e-Governance Plan (NeGP), the Union Government has taken a serious
Internet approach in the ICT domain. 10 percent of tele-density
contributes to one percent growth in overall GDP of the country. As
the government is apparently bullish about e-Governance programs,
that will cover 6,30,000 villages and 2,50,000 local elected
government bodies, the role of regional solution providers and local
technology integrators have increased manifold. The government has
already come up with a commitment of Rs 14,000 crore for the optical
fiber cable (OFC) deployment and 18 lakh kilometers of route is to be
covered throughout the nation. e-Government project implementation is
broadly based on outcome-based framework, process-based activities,
business process reengineering, change management, capacity building,
identification of short-term quick-strike projects, and long-term
scaled-up roll out. e-District pilot projects have been carried out
in more than 40 districts that include private end-to-end solution
providers in 22 districts covering nine states Ashis Sanyal, Former
Senior Director-Department of Information Technology, Ministry of
IT and Communications said that, the National e-Governance Plan
(NeGP) implementation is opening up significant opportunities for the
solution providers in India, and there is a larger scope for
providing end-to-end solution and service the government-driven
programs. “For sustainable inclusive growth, we see ICT as an
effective enabler for inclusive growth, deployment of ICT in all
walks of government business, massive application of electronic
governance, and there is a need to bring in citizen-centricity in
government activities,” he said.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Presenting a rosy
picture, Sanyal
said that, government is focusing on a multitude of application
features, that include standard-based, inter-operable, secured,
authenticated, vendor neutral and platform independent, as well as
amenable to tracking, monitoring and auditing. All projects
using ICT hardware and software abundantly, will give rise to
significant business opportunity for the next three to five years.
Sanyal is optimistic about the potential business opportunities under
NeGP for Sps, as it has massive core infrastructure services like
SWANs, SDCs, and CSCs amongst others. "NeGP's vision is to make
all government services accessible to the common man in his locality
through common services. It ensures efficiency and transparency and
features centralized initiative but decentralized implementation,"
he said. Sanyal suggested that, the technology integrators and
solution partners should not forget the mobile environment, as it
provides an extremely conducive ecosystem for them to grow
exponentially. “With rural mobile penetration and infrastructure
soaring, SPs have still a long way to go. NeGP involves
public-private partnerships as the preferred financial and
operational model; centralized program management; state-wise project
level management; and PMU created in almost all projects, wherein
external consultancy is used.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Furthermore, government
is moving from
product procurement to service, as it believes that asset creation is
not the solution. Today, most of the NeGP projects are deploying the
PPP model, as government is seeing value in PPP model for ICT
infrastructure deployments,” Sanyal said. With abundant
opportunities that lies with the Union Government's ambitious
e-Governance project, the role of regional technology implementers is
not well defined, and a big chunk of such solution providers are
apparently loosing the business opportunities. During the summit,
that hosted close to 100 noted SPs of India, the need of
policy-related reforms and participation of SPs in the
government-driven projects have been deeply pondered, and the need to
revamp the tendering process has been stressed upon by the eminent
SPs and SI partners. Sanyal is also expected to submit the key
recommendations
to the Government of India so that the participation of SPs in NeGP
can be increased, and their role could be defined. Anil Gupta of
Artek Enterprises said that, there should be an opportunity for
solution providers, as government is collecting funds through taxes
with a focus on e-learning projects. "Such projects are within
the scope of small SPs, and it ranges from Rs 1 crore to 10 crore,
and there is an apparent opportunity for all SPs, that should be
tapped with the government facilitation," added Gupta. Saket
Kapur of Green Vision believes that, the tendering
process is age-old, and needs to be reworked. "95 percent of SPs
are not being able enroll for government-driven projects. However,
according to CVC guidelines, three times turnover of the total cost
of the tender is required. Tendering process should be rationalized,"
said Kapur.