A.P. to expand 'e-consumer facility'

By S. Nagesh Kumar

HYDERABAD, OCT. 17. In six months, 25 cities and towns across Andhra Pradesh will become privileged partners in the eSeva project, a key initiative launched by the Government to bring electronic governance to the citizen's doorstep.

A small but impressive beginning was made in Hyderabad in August by starting ten centres for G2C services like collection of water, payment of electricity bills, small savings, property tax, sale of non-judicial stamps, bus tickets and filling applications for birth and death certificates.

Till date, 550 filled-in passport applications have been accepted and despatched to the Regional Passport Officer.

The eSeva project received a value addition when the Chief Minister, Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu, inaugurated a service for the electronic payment of power and water bills.

To enable this, eSeva established connectivity with four banks having data centre facility - the ICICI, the Global Trust, UTI and the HDFC.

The process is done online from the banks' servers to those of eSeva and finally to the utility organisations, with the back-up of ISDN lines.

The Secretary, Information Technology, Mr. J. Satyanarayana, told The Hindu that the e- payment facility uses the secure socket layer (SSL) system and transmits and receives data in an encrypted form, making it as safe as internet banking.

This `one-stop non-stop' interface between the Government and citizens is the result of two years' hard work when the user departments and utilities had to develop database and networking facilities.

Since its launch on August 25, the eSeva centres have effected about 50,000 transactions and collected nearly Rs. 5 crores on behalf of their client departments where these payments are updated.

Much to Mr. Naidu's chagrin, the response of utility services to the eSeva in the Central sectors like the telephones, the Railways and airlines has been cool.

He expressed his displeasure when he mocked the BSNL's reluctance to pay a service charge of Rs. 5 to eSeva when it was paying Rs. 6 towards the collection of each telephone bill to the banks.

Mr. Satyanarayana said 50 more eSeva centres would be opened by January 15 and the range of services expanded from 19 to around 50, including the B2C services like payment for cellular phones and ATM withdrawals.

The next step in Mr. Naidu's scheme of e-governance is computerisation of the Secretariat and making it paperless to a large extent by March next, and bandwidth connectivity throughout the State by December 2002.

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