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West Bengal's Information Technology Department is Planning to Revive Banglar Mukh

By sachiv1, Section News
Posted on Thu Jan 04, 2007 at 12:03:11 AM EST

West Bengal's information technology department is planning to revive Banglar Mukh, the official e-governance portal, from near-oblivion as an e-commerce site to a meaningful interactive virtual platform.

Within the next month, the government will take a call on whether Tata Consultancy Service (TCS), the country's largest software company, would continue to manage the portal, and how much money it should spend on the project.

"The issue is that TCS, being a private player, would bill us at industry rates for added features as well as total overhauling of the system. The costs, in the process, may go beyond the government's budget," said a senior official of Webel, the nodal IT agency.

The cash-strapped government is looking for a moderate cost structure to make the site the hub of all future e-governance activities.

At present, TCS charges the state Rs 19 lakh a month to manage it, while the state spends Rs 5 lakh a year to run the website.

The task is manifold. First, the Bengali fonts would have to be based on Unicode so that viewers can read the text on their Windows or Linux-based PCs without downloading any specific language software.

Then, it plans to create various value-added services for future common service centres to come up across the state.

The IT department has formed a committee comprising of academicians and industry people and is waiting for their recommendation before it takes the final call.

Sources said the government could rope in National Informatics Centre, the Union government agency, or replace TCS and host the content on its server.

NIC will not have any problems. Subir Roy, the state informatics officer, said NIC is already hosting most of the departmental websites of the government. "We can do this for Banglar Mukh as well," said Roy.

Debesh Das, the IT minister, said that the committee would soon submit its recommendation and the state government would decide the vendor's name after going through the committee's suggestions. "We have not decided anything on the vendor who would manage the portal," Das said.

Banglar Mukh, hosted in January 2003 with fanfare, was hamstrung since its inception by its faulty business model as well as apathy of the government officials to provide information to the web site.

(Source-Indian Express,04/01/07)

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