Nandita Singh

HYDERABAD: Hyderabad is ready for Afro Asian Games 2003. With the first contingent of 200 athletes from Abuja, Nigeria due to arrive on October 15, the biggest hurdle of accreditation of athletes has been tackled effectively for the games scheduled to begin on October 24. The information and communications department has learnt its lesson from National Games 2002 rather well. "We have decentralized the accreditation procedure," said Andhra Pradesh Information and Communications Department additional secretary P Raghuveer.

In National Games, the accreditation was centralized and the technical bottlenecks such as batch processing and in-built print command logic which did not allow simultaneous use of many printers from one PC threw the schedules haywire resulting in a backlog of three-days’ work at a given point of time.
Expecting accreditation to be smooth sailing this time Raghuveer said, "We have a mix of batch processing, spot processing and online accreditation." In fact the first contingent of 200 athletes from Abuja has got their accreditation in Abuja itself. "A delegation has been sent to Abuja to provide accreditation to participants. This was necessary because the participants in AAG are to be decided on the basis of results of All African Games to be concluded on October 18 in Abuja. Given the fact that 1,200 of 5,000 sportspersons will be coming from Abuja it made sense to put up an accreditation facility there as well along with six centers in the city," said Raghuveer.
Besides the biggest issue of accreditation which involves collating data from all sources and putting it in a central server this time all the stadiums are networked as are the accreditation centers. "With about 300 desktops, 20 servers and a disaster backup system in place we are ready," said project leader at CMC GSN Prabhu. CMC is taking care of networking, hardware and the games management software and has been provided with optic fiber connectivity of 2mbps by BSNL for the purpose.
"We have a backup connectivity by Miaset (Malaysian satellite) too just in case something goes wrong," informed Prabhu.
However, that is not all. "A 15-seat contact center with a toll free number 23002300 goes operational on October 15," added Prabhu. Set up with an objective of giving all kind of games and city related information, the IVRS at the center is in four languages -- French, English, Telugu and Hindi.
Co-located with the media center in the IIIT Guest House the contact center will be operational 24 hours a day. Ditto the wi-fi enabled media center, which is fully equipped with scanners, PCs and laptop points. "Some of the stadiums are also wi-fi enabled and each stadium is equipped with its own media center," said Prabhu.
"As far the CMC games management system is concerned it is a time-tested software and will compile data from multiple venues to generate reports for television, web and the scoreboard," added Prabhu. CMC is also providing the interface to the AAG website done by Zezan while the results on SMS will be made available through Indiatimes.

(CNS)

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