Oracle nurtures e-gov initiatives

NEW DELHI: Database specialist Oracle will continue to have its focus towards development of different forms of e-government initiatives in association with various governments at the state as well as central level. Informing this, Oracle South Asia regional MD, Keith Budge added, "we have partnered with HP to set up a center of excellence in the area of e-governance at Gurgaon and work is going on in full swing over there. As we move forward, we see e-governance as one of the areas where we will have a focus". Budge was in Delhi to deliver a keynote at the ongoing International Conference on e-governance.

As India sharpens its focus towards development of viable e-governance models, even developed countries like UK are watching India quite keenly. "Recently, there was a visit by a delegation from the Prime Minister’s office of UK. They came here to get a feel of the kind of development that we are doing over here at the center of excellence in Gurgaon," he informed.

While even British Prime Minister Tony Blair wants to keep a tab on e-governance activities that are taking place in India. Local state governments are not to be left behind. Oracle is involved with quite a number of state governments in designing and developing different e-governance projects.

"We have developed a project to streamline various functions of state treasuries for the state of Madhya Pradesh and the system is likely to save them more than Rs10 crore on an yearly basis," he explained.

Measuring e-governance



Emphasizing the fact that, it is quite important to measure the worth of an application like e-governance, Budge said that measures such as feedback from the citizens, percentage of area covered by the running e-gov applications and number of users trained to use that service can be some of the ways to do the job.

"We have developed an application for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation that has increased their revenue collection by 125 percent and this speaks quite a lot about the participation from the users," Budge added.



Talking about the participation from the private sector in the e-governance projects he said that there are a number of ways for a private organization to find its way into an e-gov project. "They can do so with a financial participation as it has happened in the state of Andhra Pradesh with the e-seva initiative. Similarly different partnership models can be designed in the areas of hardware facilitation, software development, network and connectivity deployment," he explained.

At present, the company has more than 30 percent of its workforce coming from India on a global basis and it already has a big development center located at the Hitech city phase two in Hyderabad. The company has chalked out plans to invest heavily towards setting up its campus. The 600,000 sq.ft. office structure, which is expected to be ready in three years, will have a 1,000-car park, gymnasium, library, jogging track and sports and recreation facilities.

(CyberMedia News Service)