Cloud Computing Model for National e-Governance Plan(NeGP)

Deka Ganesh Chandra DGE&T, MoLE, New Delhi-1, India E-mail: ganeshdeka2000@gmail.com

Robin Singh Bhadoria IITM, Gwalior, India

E-mail: ssr_robin@yahoo.co.in

Abstract—Advances in e-Government oriented technologies and services are taking place with a considerable speed around the world. ICT requirement of Executives, Legislative and Judicial branches of Government are different at different levels with varying privacy and security requirement for Government transactions and applications used. Recent advancement in application of computing in Governance has shifted away from the traditional e-Government services to a new initiative called the Cloud Government incorporating cloud computing mainly aimed at communicating directly with citizens and implementing cost effective IT service delivery mechanism. In this paper we will make a study on role of cloud computing in the effective implementation of NeGP of Government of India.

Keywords—e-Governance;Government Cloud;Census Data;NeGP.

I. Introduction There is significant development in Information

Communication Technology (ICT) which is reshaping societies and Governments around the world. ICT has revolutionized the mode of communication among the peoples around the Globe. These revolutions in Communication technology have a great impact on the Government machinery globally as well.

The following are the 6 dimensions of Governance: i. Voice & Accountability ii. Political Stability and Nonexistence of Terrorism/

Social Unrest iii. Government Effectiveness iv. Regulatory Quality v. Rule of Law vi. Control over Corruption

There are varying requirements of ICT applications for Executives, Legislative and Judicial branches of Government. Furthermore, the levels of privacy and security requirement for Government transactions and applications used at different levels also vary to a great extent.

The challenges of e-Governances are Enormous Inventory, Diversity of Technology Environment and Abundance of contractual arrangement. In this paper we will make a study on role of Cloud computing in the effective implementation of “National e-Governance Plan (NeGP)” of Government of India.

Remaining part of the paper is organized in to 7 Sections. Section-2 is about benefits of cloud computing while

section-3 is about Government Cloud. In Section-4, we have mentioned about NeGP while Section-5 about the online e-Government services under NeGP. Section-6 is about the proposed cloud computing model for NeGP. Section-7 is about the International Cloud computing scenario and finally in Section-8 concludes the paper.

II. Benefits of Cloud Computing

There are 8 fundamental elements that are vital in enabling the cloud concept i.e. [15].

i. Universal connectivity ii. Open Access iii. Reliability iv. Interoperability and User choice v. Security vi. Privacy vii. Economic value and Sustainability

Key Benefits of Cloud Computing [10]: • Lower costs: All resources, including expensive

networking equipment, servers, IT personnel etc [19][20]. are shared in cloud resulting in reduced costs particularly for small to mid-sized applications.

• Shifting Capital Expenditure to Operating Expenditure: By move shifting their IT applications to Cloud computing enables to an organization to convert capital expenses (CapEx) to operating expenses (OpEx) enabling an organization to focus on their areas of core activities such as business and process insight, instead of building and maintaining IT infrastructure. In short, cloud computing allows user to focus their money and resources on innovating.

• Agility: Provisioning-on-demand enables faster set-up and break-down of resources on an as-needed basis. When a project is funded the services are initiated, and then if the project is killed simply the cloud contract terminated.

• Dynamic scalability: Most IT infrastructure designed for pick load is hardly used 20% cases as a result in 80% cases they remain utilized. Instead of developing IT infrastructure and purchasing IT equipment to accommodate these spikes cloud services can be efficiently scale to handle these spikes with a cost-effective pay-per-use model.

• Simplified maintenance: Patches and upgrades are automatically deployed in cloud by Cloud Service Provider which relieves the users from the Virus, backups and other routine software updates.

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• Cloud computing makes large scale prototyping and load testing simpler. User can easily spawn 1,000 servers in the cloud to load test the application and then release them as soon as it is done, try doing that with owned or corporate servers.

• Numerous cloud computing services providers has so far put forward built-in support for a rich collection of client platforms such as browsers, Mobile Cloud Computing services etc. These diverse platform supports enables applications to reach a broader base of users.

• Faster management approval: As cloud computing has low upfront costs, the management approval process is very much accelerated, causing faster deployment. As costs are low, individuals can easily fund the expenditure personally to show the benefits of their solution, while avoiding organizational sluggishness.

• Cloud computing present many of the core services under traditional development models which were normally is built in house. These services as well as other tools can appreciably accelerate the development cycle.

III. Government Cloud As Governments around the World continue grapple with

slow-moving economies, cloud computing is emerging as a possible answer to demands for reducing public sector spending.

Recent attention has shifted away from the traditional e-Government to a new initiative called Cloud Government (G-Cloud) incorporating cloud computing into e-Government services [2].

G-Cloud is basically an Internet based ICT service delivery channel enabling public bodies to host, select and use ICT services from secure, resilient and cost effective manner [3]. G-Cloud will provide a variety of online, on demand services for the public sector.

The G-Cloud Program’s core benefits are cost reduction, improved services, faster delivery and progressive sustainability agenda. The Government applications store will provide a “portal” to purchase G-Cloud services. The ambition of the journey from traditional IT infrastructures towards cloud computing and IaaS is a trusted Cloud with the network as the logical platform to bring the existing assets in the Datacentre and new Cloud computing approaches with Virtualization, Governance, Security, Information & Application[4].

The latest trend on Government cloud seems to be following the agency-by-agency scenario. While the British Government’s top-level Government Cloud (G-Cloud) initiative seems to have stalled out in a change of government. The underdeveloped as well as developing countries can gain the benefit of cloud computing by deploying it for cost effective Governance. Amazon considers the official approval of their services as an opportunity to help the U.S. government to reduce costs and

deliver Internet-based services quicker than traditional in-house solutions [5]. More than 100 government organizations including Recovery.gov, Department of Treasury’s Treasury.gov, Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA etc uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) to scale their computing needs by using the Amazon Cloud services so far in USA.

In USA more than 100 government organizations including Recovery.gov, Department of Treasury’s Treasury.gov, Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA etc uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) to scale their computing needs by using the Amazon Cloud services.

In India, around 24 million people, out of them, government employees uses Gmail service, from which users can now make phone calls. Orkut, Google’s social networking service which has not enjoyed much success outside of South Asia, now has 19.9 million users in India. Skype, which also has a large user base in the country, was on the receiving end of a crackdown by the Indian government in 2006. Local businesses were advised not to use the internet telephony service, the government citing security risks and a loss of tax revenue. Nokia, which counts India as its second largest market after China, has bowed to the government’s demands to install a server in India to handle communications for its messaging service by November[3]. In USA more than 100 government organizations including Recovery.gov, Department of Treasury’s Treasury.gov, Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA etc uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) to scale their computing needs by using the Amazon Cloud services.

Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India is planning to release India’s first Government cloud policy by 2012. This will not only modernize and restructure government services but also initiate lots of Administrative reforms. In developing and underdeveloped countries the implementation of ICT for public services has its own challenges such as limited to non-availability of IT infrastructure in most regions and dearth of technical experts within the government. Adoption of cloud computing is both a viable and revolutionary approach [6] for these countries for their Soci-Economic developments. India’s Telecom Commission proposal to create a US$4.5 billion National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) has been approved by the Department of Telecom (DoT). This NOFN will extend the country’s existing fibre optic network from the district level to the village level, giving the country of 1.2 billion people services like e-education, e-health, e-banking and also reduce migration of rural population to urban areas[7].

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IV. National e-Governance Plan The first step of e-Governance in India was the

Computerization of Government Departments. Present e-Governance initiatives will be encapsulating the finer points of Governance for instance Citizen Centricity, Service Orientation & Transparency.

For speeding up the e-Governance implementation across the various arms of Government at National, State and Local levels due cognizance has been taken to adopted common vision and strategy having the potential of huge costs savings in presenting a seamless view of Government to Citizens (G2C) by:

• Sharing of core and support infrastructure • Enabling interoperability through standards On 18th May 2006 Government of India approved NeGP

which consists of 20 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) of State Governments & Central Government and 7 Integrated MMPs. The theme of the NeGP is to “Make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality through common service delivery outlets, and ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man"[8][9]. The cornerstones of NeGP are citizen centricity, identification of services & service levels, centralized planning & decentralized implementation and Public Private Partnership (PPP) [18]. New Telecom Policy 2011 expected by August 2012 is likely to bring set of new policies for the India telecom industry. The policy stresses on 6 hot areas i.e. Broadband, Manufacturing, Spectrum, Licensing, Grievances and Cloud computing. For the effective implementation of NeGP the cloud computing will play a big role. The community cloud may be used to deliver plethora of e-Government services at the doorstep of the rural community. The G-Cloud Program’s core benefits are cost reduction, improved services, faster progressing delivery and the sustainability agenda. The G-Cloud policy of India is likely to be unveiled by Department of Information Technology (DIT), by 2012.

V. Online Services under NeGP Following are some of the online services provided under

various Mission Mode Projects (MMP) of the NeGP [11]

A. Income Tax • E-Filing of Income Tax Returns • Online Registration of E-Return Intermediary • Online Application for Permanent Account Number

(PAN) • Check Status of PAN Application Online • Online Application for Tax Deduction Account

Number (TAN)

B. Passport/VISA • Online Status Enquiry of Passport Application

C. Company Affairs • Online Company Directory • Lodge Investor Complaint Online

D. Central Excise • Registration for Service Tax Payers • Registration for Central Excise Assesses • Knowing personal Service Tax Tariff • Knowing personal Service Tax Location Code • e-filing of Central Excise Returns • e-filing of Service Tax Returns

E. Pensions • Online Pension Payment Order (PPO) Status

Enquiry

F. Land Records • Check your Land Registration Records

G. Road Transport • Obtain Driving Licence • Vehicle Regsitration

H. Property Registration • Land/Property Registration

I. Agriculture • Check Agricultural Market Prices Online

J. Municipalities • Obtain Birth Certificate • Obtain Death Certificate

K. Gram Panchayats (Rural) • Online Collection and Sale of Handicrafts by Rural

Artisans

L. Police • Online Status of Stolen Vehicles

M. Employment Exchange • Register with State Employment Exchanges as a

candidate • Register with State Employment Exchanges as an

Employer

N. e-Courts • Case list of Indian Courts • Court Judgements (JUDIS) • Daily Court Orders/Case Status

VI. Propsed model of NeGP cloud Cloud computing can play a big role in the

implementation of NeGP. The population Database which is very huge and grows rapidly needs a robust, dynamic & scalable computing environment. The national database can be built using the cloud computing model. The followings

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can be the source for data for the proposed national Database:

1) If the registration of Birth & Death are made compulsory and done online in a single central Database it will led to generation of a unique National Database.

2) Aadhaar: UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) issues the unique Identification number which is likely to fresh the National Databse which is presently full of duplicates. If these issued Unique numbers are feed into a National Cloud database then it could be served as the base for execution of NeGP of India.

3) Census Data: The Indian Census is the biggest single supply of a diversity of statistical information of the people of India. The duty of conducting the decennial Census rests with the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India under Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. This information can be entered in the cloud for valuable use by different users. On the other hand if the record of Death & Birth are streamlined the decennial census, which is a mammoth exercise can be eliminated.

In India around 26 million births and 9 million deaths takes place every year. Around 6.6 million children went unregistered at birth in 2007 according to the Registrar General of India. Around 2.8 million deaths did not get registered. Only 11 states of India go for 100% record of births and only 5 states records all deaths.

Figure 1. Building blocks of National Database

For effective implementation of NeGP the cloud computing will play a big role. The community cloud may be used to deliver plethora of e-Government services at the doorstep of the rural community.

Figure 2. Proposed cloud computing model of NeGP

VII. G-Cloud: International Scenario The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication

(MIC) adopted the Digital Japan Creation Project (ICT Hatoyama Plan) to create a nationwide Cloud computing infrastructure called the Kasumigaseki Cloud (tentative name) in stages by 2015.The plan also having an ambition of creating a new market of ICT industries of 100 trillion yen by 2015-2020.

The Govt. of USA makes public 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management on December 9th, 2010. This plan announced a Cloud First policy where each agency had identify three “must move” services within three months, and move one of those services to the cloud within 12 months and the remaining two within 18 months.

In UK high-level execution of roadmap, for year 2010-2014, has been urbanized. In the year 2011 to 2014, it is predictable that there will be growing data centre consolidation. The G-Cloud authority will be planned and build in 2011. Some public sector utilization of G-Cloud services starts in 2011 and concept for public cloud was beginning in 2011. G-Cloud standards will also be implemented in 2011. New public sector organizations, like central departments, local and regional governments and the wider public sector, would start to use the G-Cloud in the year 2012-2014 [12].

The European Union has published the report titled “The Future of Cloud Computing: Opportunities for European Cloud computing beyond 2010” to motivate Research & Technological development in the field of Cloud computing and establishes right for regulatory framework to make easy uptake of Cloud computing [13].

A report, for year 2010-2025, published by Australian Government Information Management Office(AGIMO) in which first five years, Government will combined the whole of Government Datacentre require and create a panel for

Aadhar

Census Data

Death &

Birth registration

National Database

National Database on

Cloud

MMP [State]

MMP [Integrated] MMP [Central]

State Datacenter

Community Cloud 1 Community Cloud 2 Community Cloud n

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providing Government Datacenter facilities and services, assist early adopters to move to shared resource solutions, explains the principles to be used in Datacentre equipments and operations so that greatest efficiencies can be obtained and work with minor 50 percent of agencies to combine their necessities into common Datacentre facilities and ICT solutions where suitable. In the second 5 years, agencies will share solutions and technologies to drive further cost avoidance and in the final 5 years agencies will adopt new opportunities for cost avoidance that arise from changes in technology, process or policy.

South Korea is using seventeen significant applications to the G-Cloud. They have aspirations to offer these as a service to other Governments.

In Denmark, previously 20 Servers were used before Cloud implementation and after Cloud implementation only 1 Server is used.

UK and USA alone have a G-Cloud Computing strategy that accounts for over US $100 billion in combined annual IT spending, which clearly indicates that the G-Cloud sector is having huge opportunity [9]. In US General Service Administration (GSA), before Cloud implementation, IT maintenance expenses were 2.35 Million (USD). GSA reported US $ 1.7 Million in savings [72%] due to using G-Cloud. Many countries like Singapore, China etc has already implemented G-Cloud.

In Indian State, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), government is the first to take up Cloud computing for its e-Governance facilities. J&K Government has established the State Data-Centers base at Madhya Pradesh, is providing e-Governance facilities such as providing certificates for death and birth and buying and selling of licenses using Cloud.

The Government of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are also in planning with Microsoft to roll out e-Government services based on the Cloud platform.

Government e-Payment Gateway (GePG) will make easy direct credit of toll from Govt. to the beneficiaries account by digitally signed electronic advice (e-advice) [14]. System with using Cloud, comprises all central and government departments including ministries, reduces the burden of almost 20 million cheques. With fully functional operational, it is predictable to wrap a total payment of over 122 billion USD. However, it will take some time to move e-Payment gateways to cloud.

Public and private sector partnership are considered indispensable to address the digital divide in Asia’s emerging economies [16].

VIII. Conclusion Progress in e-Government service delivery technologies

are taking place with a significant pace around the Globe. Recent attention has shifted away from the traditional e-Government to a new initiative called G-Cloud. There is a need for Standardization of e-Governance services which will lead to Simplification of e-Governance service delivery

mechanism as well as Synchronization of activities of various wings of the Government machinery as well as various Ministries. In standardizing activities for effective implementation of ICT in e-Governance 3 stakeholders i.e. Government, Business & Citizens must walk together in collaboration.

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payment-gateway/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FutureGov +Updates+162&utmcontent=FutureGov+Updates+162+CID8d58ea5 61a7e1a4ccdad9115384cb30c&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=India+launches+e-payment+gateway

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