Biggest Open Source ‘e-governance’ Application in The Country – Ready for Rollout in Chhattisgarh State

Biggest Open Source ‘e-governance’ Application in The Country

– Ready for Rollout in Chhattisgarh State

 

Chhattisgarh government through its nodal IT agency CHiPS (Chhattisgarh infotech and biotech Promotion Society) is ready to launch biggest open-source deployment on e-governance.

 

The project name CHOiCE (Acronym of CHhattisgarh Online information-system for Citizen Empowerment), is a citizen services portal of Government of Chhattisgarh in India is all set for rollout.

 

CHOiCE has an objective to deliver government services and information to the public / citizen, using electronic delivery channels.  CHOiCE business model is based on the equal participation of government officials and private players. It is a unique financially self sustaining model which has potential to generate more that ten thousand employments in urban and rural area of Chhattisgarh. 

 

CHOiCE agents appointed by concern district collector work as vertual notary or extension of government office as per rules framed under IT Act 2000. It is one of the unique project which is fully compliant with IT Act 2000. Entire work flow involving citizen interaction with government has been design to flow electronically so that 24X7 availability of government is ensured through these CHOiCE agents.

 

These entrepreneurs working as CHOiCE agents receive applications from citizen, payments (both in cash and draft/cheque) for government and upload it to state server. Once sender (agent) sends an application, forwarder (reader or concern clerk) scrutinizes the electronic content and forwards it to Approving Authority. The beauty of the system is there are no manual movement of papers entire work flow is electronic, all attachments are scanned, entire approvals are ‘digitally’ approved through digital signature as per IT Act. All system users have three level of authentication user name – password, biometric identification and digital signature on smart card.    

 

For payment services these CHOiCE agents maintain a minimum balance with designated banks, and are authorized to issue receipt for payments received from citizen. These acknowledgements are generated by system only if the agents has minimum balance at that point of time, which is authenticated through secured server of CHOiCE and payment gateway of the respective bank, once authenticated payments are credited to concerned utility account and debited to CHOiCE agent account.

 

System will also includes distribution of land records and maps of the land holding, mutation of land maps at remote location, remote printing of maps for rural areas. Entire vector, raster and non-vector data are presented and handled through open source tools developed under this project. Vector data related to maps are geo-referenced by high resolution satellite data which also include more than 39 layers of land-use, village boundries, geolmorphology, soil type, lithology, forest boundaries, road and rail network etc. which however is presently restricted to departmental use except for land parcel related data. These data have been prepared for all twenty thousand villages in the state for all the farmers in the state.  

 

Entire development of CHOiCE is on Open Source Technology   which is platform independent, based on n-tier architecture which supports the following:

 

1.      Runs in Linux environment;

2.      Localization (Unicode) support (Hindi);

3.      Authentication framework through Biometric (Fingerprint) devices;

4.      Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) along with smart card for Privacy, Authenticity, Integrity & Non-repudiation;

5.      It supports MVC (Module View Controller) architecture using Velocity Turbine framework. 

6.      Payment gateway Support for Payment Services. 

7.      IVRS implementation for Status Inquiry.

 

The application is portable enough on Thin Client on Linux environment along with biometrics, PKI & smart card.

 

Different technologies used for applications under CHOiCE are –

 

Application Architecture	MultiTier Application Architecture
Design Pattern	J2EE MVC Design Pattern
Model / Business Logic Layer	Java Beans, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) (Sun java  Technology)
View / Presentation layer	Velocity Markup Language (Apache Open Source Technology)  JSP 2.0, HTML, DHTML (Java Script, Style Sheet), Java Applet (Swing) (Sun java  Technology)
Controller Layer	Turbine Framework (Apache Open Source Technology)
Framework	Turbine Open Source Framework for Tomcat Web Server (Apache Open Source Technology)
Web Server (Middle/Web  Tier )	Tomcat Standalone Server 4.1.12, Connector (New Coyote Connector (HTTP/1.1, AJP 1.3 and JNI Support) (Apache Open Source Technology)
Application Server (Enterprise Tier )	JBoss (A division of Redhat )  for ENS (Event Notification System) (Nurturing professional open source Technology)
IVRS System	Intel DiaLogic Board Support using Java, JNI (C, C++) (Sun java  Technology)
Java APIs	JDBC with Connection Pooling, javax.security API, CMC Proprietary API for Biometric and Smart Card Devices, javax.comm API for SMS, JAXP and JDOM for XML Parser (Apache Open Source Technology &  Sun java  Technology)
Parser	Apache xerces Parser (Apache Open Source Technology)
Back-End	Oracle 8i Release 2 (Character Set – UTF), PL/SQL (Store Procedures and Functions)
Localization Support	l10n, i18n Support for Bilingual
Java Plug-in	Java Plug-in 1.4.2_03   (Sun java Technology)
JRE	jre 1.4.2_03 (Sun java Technology)
Desktop PC  Machine	Red hat Linux 9 (Red hat Open Source Technology)
Thin Client	Open Source Linux Terminal Server Project for Redhat Linux 9
Browser	Netscape 7.1 Mozilla Public License and Netscape Public License
DataBase	Oracle 8.1.7  Oracle Unlimited License

 

All panchyats will be covered under this project. Infrastructure for delivery is being taken up in a separate project covered under NeGP-SWAN. State has preferred newer technology such as WiMax for last mile connectivity.

 

This is to be inaugurated for rolled out in Raipur Municipal limits and then in phased manner in next one year will be expanded for the entire state. Once completely rollout, it is going to be biggest open source project in the country.

 

IIT Kanpur along with ISRO has taken up rigorous testing of entire application and electronic content (vector part by ISRO) during this rollout for security, load testing, work flow, scalability before statewide rollout. The application has been developed by CHiPS with help from TCS-CMC, IIT-Kanpur and ISRO. 

A.M.Parial

Raipur CG