Oracle announces e-governance awards

MUMBAI: Oracle today announced the 22 winners of the “Oracle Excellence in e-Governance Awards” at the Oracle Open World event.

The winners were Indian e-government projects, implemented by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Department of Information Technology and the Government of India.

The projects were assessed by Skoch Consultancy Services and judged by a panel of judges including Dr. D. B. Phatak, Indian Institutes of Technology, Mumbai and Dr. Gulshan Rai, Executive Director, ERNET India.

Indian e-governance market value stood at nearly $500 million in the year 2004, accounting for nearly 6.2% of the total domestic IT industry. NIC is also the biggest solution provider controlling over 22% market directly and another 40% of the market will use NIC applications of services (CY-2005), according to Skoch Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd.

A few of the winning projects were: Rural e-Seva project (Andhra Pradesh), Computer-Aided Administration of Registration Department (Andhra Pradesh), IT in judiciary, Customs Department, Vahan & Sarathi, etc. All these projects were based on Oracle systems.

Dr. N Vijayaditya, director general, National Informatics Centre, said, “Consumption of Information Technology has unique challenges in the Government domain. Our challenge is to make a change, embedding our applications in the user community.”

NIC has been working closely with Oracle-HP Centre of Excellence, and the government agency has also helping other countries in their e-governance initiatives, countries like Mongolia, Laos, Afghanistan, Srilanka and other African countries. Speaking on the different kinds of projects, Dr. Vijayaditya highlighted the fact that numerous state governments were implementing e-governance projects even states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were keenly taking up these projects.

Derek Williams, executive vice president, Oracle (Asia Pacific), said, “Oracle is an active participant, concept leader and catalyst in helping drive India's e-governance resolution. India has become a net exporter of ideas and concepts and has become a reference point for other e-governance projects in the region.”

Oracle has worked on over 100 e-governance projects in India and has been active in various other countries as well. S P S Grover, senior director, Oracle (India) said, “With the new Right to Information act in place, information over the e-governance channels will become very important.”