eGov-Sept-2010-[8-11]-News-Projects People Policy Events Products

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projects people policy events products

Bihar Water Resources Dept launches e-tendering Bihar’s Water Resources Department (WRD) has introduced e-tendering facility to maintain transparency in award of contracts.

The WRD also released a list of 250 offices across the state where e-tendering will be introduced.

Further to the communication, a letter had been sent to the 11 chief

engineers in the department where they were asked to complete digital certification requirements at the superintending engineer and executive engineer levels in their respective areas.

The communication also mandates use of digital signatures as a key component of the e-tendering process.

security

Delhi Police to sport hi-tech surveillance during CWG HCL Security, a subsidiary of HCL Infosystems, has chosen Barco to be the visualisation partner for setting up a new C4i—command, control, communication, computing and intelligence—center in Delhi.

The project, due to be completed shortly, is to provide a highly sophisticated surveillance system for communication with Delhi patrol officers during the Commonwealth Games 2010.

“We selected Barco for its state-of-the-art solution,

advanced technology and local service and support,” said Rothin Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Security.

The C4i centre will have Barco’s latest LED-based technology, consisting of sixteen 50 inch display cubes along with two 46 inch Narrow-bezel LCD monitors and the stateof-the-art control room management suite.

Nearly 1,000 police control room vans, 12 police video monitoring vehicles and 700 other monitoring vehicles are to be linked to the centre.

This move is aimed at bringing transparency in award of contracts and also minimise chances of violence and resistance at the time of tender submission of tender papers.

Earlier complaints of irregularities in the allotment of tenders were received by the Department, as the tendering process was manual. geo data

India to launch forestry satellite in 2013 A satellite for monitoring the country’s forest cover will be launched in 2013, as informed by Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh to the Rajya Sabha in August this year.

Replying to supplementary questions, the minister informed the House that the country has gained over

three million hectares of forest in the last 10 years.

“India is one of the few countries where green cover is increasing. In Brazil, three million hectares of forest is cleared every year but in India we have gained three million hectares of forest in the last 10 years,” Ramesh said.

public grievance

Mumbai to pilot e-complaint system Lodging a complaint against any offence would be a click away for Mumbai citizens.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has announced the e-complaint system, which will enable an online registration of any offence.

A person can register a complaint on the website of the police with his name and mobile number for identification. While the complaint will be registered within 24 hours and the person will get receipt of it, the Police Commissioner’s office will oversee if the complaints have been addressed by the concerned police station or not.

Maharashtra is the first state to provide such a facility.

Uttarakhand GPF status on SMS

Gujarat farmers to get soil health cards

The Uttarakhand government employees can now track the status of their General Provident Fund (GPF) accounts via SMS. This makes Uttarakhand the only northern state to have the service, which has

By the end of December 2010, the Gujarat government will be issuing 42 lakh soil health cards (SHCs) to farmers to help them boost their agricultural yield. Of these, about 20 lakh SHCs

been jointly launched by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General and National Informatics Centre (NIC).

Government employees can now get details of the monthly deposit, monthly withdrawal, yearly status and

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opening and closing balance through this new facility. To avail it, the employees will have to register for the SMS service. The SMS GPF facility will benefit around one lakh state government employees of Uttarakhand.

have already been given, according to the state Agriculture Minister Dilip Sanghani.

Under the SHC project, the soil is tested scientifically for various properties

india

urban development

Supreme court to adopt e-mail services The Supreme Court of India has decided to use e-mail services to avoid delay in dispersing cases.

The new procedure will entail the advocate to file the entire petition as a soft copy, and send both petitions and notices electronically to the respondent’s e-mail address.

Statistical data indicates that on account of delay in process serving, arrears keep on mounting. In

Government notifies UMTA for million-plus cities

Delhi itself, 50 percent of the arrears in courts, particularly in commercial cases, are due to delay in process serving.

The facility is being extended in addition to the modes of service mentioned in the existing Supreme Court rules. For the time being, the facility is extended to commercial litigation and to those cases where advocates on-record seek urgent interim reliefs.

policy

rural development

The Government of Punjab has finalised a blueprint for reforms in various departments including revenue, local government and police. In a related move, the state government also decided to put all the land records online by March, enabling land owners to access their account details at any place.

Taking about the state initiatives, Romilla Dubey, Financial Commissioner—Revenue, said that simplification of archaic revenue laws including those relating to partition inheritance and tenancy was going side by side.

She further informed that these amendments would decrease litigation besides empowering citizens by making the whole system transparent.

According to sources, the state government is also looking at setting up a network of e-Sewa kendras in all tehsils by March next year to enable citizens services like payment of water and electricity bills and property tax, and filing of various applications.

In a fresh impetus to grassroots democracy, the state has decided to provide every gram panchayat with a permanent secretariat building, equipped with computers and Internet connectivity.

According to sources, out of 4,564 gram panchayats in Jharkhand, the secretariats will come up for 1,610 panchayats by the end of this financial year.

The buildings will come up under the Bharat Nirman Rajiv Gandhi Seva Kendra programme, a scheme initiated by the centre this year.

The secretariats will also ensure 100 days of work and timely wages under MGNREGS by involving citizens to monitor the scheme, he added.

With state panchayat polls on the anvil, the secretariats will be the hub all poll-related activities.

Apart from these buildings at the panchayat level, the state will also construct block-level buildings at Rs 25 lakh each.

Out of 221 blocks, 170 will get their buildings this year.

like productivity, mineral composition, water retaining capacity and others. Subsequently, the cards are issued under the Soil Health Programme of the Agriculture department.

The SHCs also contain information on what kind of pesticides, fertilisers, seeds

year, compared to an income of Rs 44,000 crore in 2009.

Since the launch of the SHC scheme, which outlines the manner of cropping based on nature of soil, farmers in the state have even sown crops that were previously unknown to them.

Punjab finalises blueprint for reforms

and water should be used to get better productivity from the land.

With the introduction of SHCs, it has become easy for farmers to understand properties of the soil they are ploughing.

The state is aiming to achieve agricultural income of Rs 55,000 crore this

news

Jharkhand panchayats to have secretariat buildings

Notifications have been issued for creation of Unified Metropolitan Transport Agency (UMTA) for the cities of Chennai, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Mysore, Ranchi, Dhanbad, Jamshedpur, Puri, Bhubaneshwar and Kohima by the concerned state governments. This information was given by India’s Minister of State for Urban Development Saugata Roy in written reply to a question in Lok Sabha.

Setting up of UMTA for million plus cities is one of the reforms conditions of sanction of buses for urban transport under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Mission (JNNURM) to be implemented by states and UTs. The minister also informed that no city or state has asked for any funding for setting up of UMTA. Government has formulated the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP) 2006, which envisages setting up of UMTA in all million-plus cities.

Rupee gets Unicode identity California-based Unicode Consortium, which sets language standards for the computing industry, has voted to accept the rupee symbol as part of its global standards. The department

of information technology (DIT), under the ministry of communications and IT, had on August 5 submitted an application to the consortium to adopt the new symbol.

September 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

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news

industry

Agro info can help farmers save Rs 600 cr Getting information quickly on best prices and cultivation practises, with special focus on areas like plant protection from diseases and weather-related damage, can help farmers take fast decisions, saving them about Rs 600 crore by 2015.

According to the recent report ‘Mobile Broadband—Outlook 2015 by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), the lack of information on

low in rural India.

PwC said that better rollout economics of mobile broadband can enable the government to reach out to many more villages with common service centres (CSC) It further indicated that the roll-out of 3G cellular services and Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technologies, with better rollout economics, can enable the government to reach all 600,000 villages with CSCs.

effective practises is leading to huge losses in the agriculture sector.

Reports suggest that between 1991 and 2009, the share of agriculture in India’s GDP declined by around 14 percent, whereas that of services rose by over 20 percent.

The PwC report also pointed out that mobile telephony would be a more convenient means of communication, as penetration of wireline infrastructure remains

finance management

education

TCS bags MP e-Government contract

Canon, Netspider join hands for Rajasthan’s Sarva Shiksha rollout

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest IT services company, has bagged a Rs 150-crore e-Governance contract from the Madhya Pradesh government.

The Madhya Pradesh government is introducing an ‘Integrated Financial Management Information System’ to monitor the state’s financial transactions on a real time basis.

The software platform to be implemented by TCS will help the state revenue department develop an integrated solution to automate Public Provident Fund management, human resources and payroll management, and pension management.

Canon India, along with its channel partner Netspider India, will be working in partnership with the Government of Rajasthan, Education Council in the rollout of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan CTS 2010.

The initiative aims to create a database of the demographic attributes, education status, out-ofschool children status and

many such minute details on every child in Rajasthan.

Canon India will be providing the automated document feeder scanners for the Rajasthan Sarva Shikhsa Abhiyan CTS2010 project.

Netspider will utilise Canon’s high-speed document scanning solution integrated with Netspider’s DIMS and forms processing solution to transform

paper documents into database for effective information sharing and report generation of various types as required by the government.

This project involves scanning around 3 crore forms in just a month’s time.

Netspider India will be the end-to-end solution provider for Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan implemented by Government of Rajasthan.

management APIs. Innovation in the Deltacloud project has been instrumental in the progress of Red Hat Cloud Foundations, announced in June 2010.

“As cloud computing continues to expand into today’s enterprises, interoperability and portability become

increasingly important,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. “We’re excited to submit the Deltacloud API to DMTF to help bring this level of interoperability to all clouds.

Red Hat is continuing to help enterprises build real cloud today.”

cloud computing

Red Hat submits Deltacloud platform to standards group Open source solutions provider Red Hat has submitted the API specification for Apache Deltacloud to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as part of its participation in the DMTF Cloud Management Work Group. Red Hat’s submission to DMTF is a step forward

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in the company’s effort to offer users of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds the benefits of portability across cloud computing deployments.

The Apache Deltacloud project is an open source implementation of a

egov / www.egovonline.net / September 2010

RESTful web service API abstracting common proprietary IaaS cloud

industry

my take

news

micro finance INTEL PRESIDENT AND CEO ON THE DECISION TO ACQUIRE MCAFEE

PAUL OTELLINI

“In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand...”

IBM announces POWER7 systems for data-intensive applications

SBI signs up Oxigen for kiosk banking Oxigen Services and Sahyog Microfinance Foundation have announced a tie-up with State Bank of India to offer banking services by connecting directly to SBI’s core banking system through Oxigen Web retailers.

According to the company, its existing web-enabled retailers will be appointed as Customer Service Points (CSPs) of Sahyog Micro Finance Foundation, to carry out banking transactions on behalf of the bank.

Talking about the initiative, Sunil Pant, CGM Delhi, State Bank of India, said, “The Web-enabled retailers will have SBI Kiosk Banking Customer Service Centre signs enabling them to do banking services for masses.”

He further said that in the first phase, the activity will be rolled out in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. flash memory

Intel, Micron sample 3bpc NAND flash on 25 nm silicon

IBM has announced its new POWER7 servers designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system that offers markedly better energy efficiency.

The new 256-core IBM Power 795 offers better energy efficiency. It uses IBM’s leading-edge EnergyScale technology that varies frequencies depending upon workloads. This new system supports up to eight terabytes of memory and provides over four times the performance in

the same energy envelope as the fastest Power 595 IBM POWER6 processorbased high-end system.

The new POWER7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses the latest PowerVM virtualisation software to allow customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system.

For the customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centres, consolidating older systems to the new highend Power 795 could result in more headroom – with

energy reductions of up to 75 percent for equivalent performance capacity.

IBM also announced Power Flex, a new environment composed of two or more Power 795 systems, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility and a Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand option. This solution enables clients to shift running applications from one system to another to perform system maintenance without downtime, helping to balance workloads and more easily handle peaks in demand.

Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. have announced the delivery of 3-bit-per-cell (3bpc) NAND flash memory on 25-nanometer (nm) process technology, producing the industry’s highest capacity, smallest NAND device.

The companies have sent initial product samples to select customers. Intel and Micron expect to be in full production by the end of the year.

This 25nm lithography stores three bits of information per cell, rather than the traditional one bit or two bits. The device is more than 20 percent smaller than the same capacity of Intel and Micron’s 25nm multi-level cell.

Small form-factor flash memory is especially important for consumer end-product flash cards

given their intrinsic compact design.

The new 64-gigabit 3bpc on 25nm memory device offers improved cost efficiencies and higher storage capacity for the competitive USB, SD flash card markets.

Flash memory is primarily used to store data, photos and other multimedia for capturing and transferring data between computing and digital devices such as digital cameras, portable media players, digital camcorders and all personal computers.

These markets are under constant pressure to provide higher capacities at low prices.

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