India Maharashtra Govt And TCS (NSE:TCS) Form Joint Venture for Online Citizen Service

The Maharashtra government has formed a joint venture with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to step up its efforts to provide online citizen services

The venture which is for 10 years would be responsible for an integrated approach to application development in all government departments and provide services through a single window TCS holds a 74 per cent stake in the venture whereas the state government owns the rest

Of the initial investment of Rs 25 crore TCS will contribute Rs 18 crore and the balance by the Maharashtra government Thereafter all investments will be made by TCS Ajay Bhushan Pandey the state principal secretary for information technology told Business Standard

The JV will help in providing citizen-centric services This will also lead to a faster implementation of IT projects in the state This will leverage the core expertise of TCS to provide online citizen services

The JV would mainly derive its revenue through user charges For the first 1 million files created at the state level per year the payment would be at Rs 25 per file with a ceiling of Rs 15 crore a year If more than a million files are created a year and the payment ceiling of Rs 15-crore per year is reached every new file created would be charged Rs 15 Moreover the venture would get Rs 5 for each file created in DigiGov through SETU (Integrated Citizen Facilitation Centre)CSC (Common Service Centre) These rates would be subject to revision and approval by the state government from time to time

TCS would be responsible for the initial deployment of the DigiGov suite of applications and the customisation of the venture as part of its equity contribution The software major would follow the train the trainer concept and provide training and handholding support module during the initial deployment of the DigiGov and GOM PORTAL

The portal would provide common web-based application software to all government-nominated agencies (CSCsSETUs) to provide citizen services from a central server including due customisation and provision for managing accounts and monitoring operations of each such agency on a regular basis

DigiGov Core Applications would be used for managing files correspondence and approvals at different government offices On the other hand the GOM PORTAL would provide web-based applications which include registrations licences certificates ration card-related and property-related ones

The state government on its part would facilitate data collection from various departments and issue instructions that all new G2C (government-to-citizen) and G2B (government-to-business) services of the government departments should use the online portal developed by the JV (Business Standard)