| Naidu's Vision of the Future: |
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Sri N. Chandrababu Naidu, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh is
convinced that the extensive use of Information Technology (IT) in
every endeavor of individuals enterprises, companies, institutions and
government could enhance their productivity, effectiveness and bring in
competitive advantage. He is further of the opinion that for far too long
the people of India had been led into adversarial politics and
destructive discourse about failures, corruption, inefficiency and so on. He believes
that the agenda for India should be only development and not the
destructive and political strife that we are witnessing. He therefore came
up with the idea of placing before the people of Andhra Pradesh a
vision of human and economic development by the year 2020.
Examples of Singapore and Malaysia which he visited had greatly
strengthened his belief that given a vision and shown the road to realise
that vision, people would actualize it. Government should not be the
main doer but should only direct the striving and exertions of its people
on the road to the realisation of the Vision of plenty and prosperity.
Government should concentrate on the development of infrastructure. Prime
importance should be given to IT as an enabler. He constituted
several Task Forces to prepare the components of the total vision. These
are being integrated and would then be placed before people for
discussion and consultation and official adoption. It would be most
rewarding to know of the IT Vision of which the Chief Minister is the
incessant expenent being a user of IT' personally to monitor his
government's performance.
The State capital, the 23 District Headquarters and 1100 Mandal
(Tahsil) Towns would be inter-connected over a 2 MBPS broad-band,
Optical Fibre (OF) cable system. This would be further extended to
cover all the villages either through UHF/Microwave radio and or OF
cables. The government would be an electronic government i.e., all
information will be electronified and carried through and exchanged IT
devices Pcs, servers routers switches etc. Work in all government
offices from Mandal to the State headquarters would be electronified.There
will be an INTRANET for the entire State government and the enterprises
it owns/influences. There would be school-nets, college-nets. medical-nets, state electricity, road transport, treasury, commercial
taxes and so on nets. They would all have different servers. Different
degrees of inter-changes will be allowed between them. The
Collect orate becomes the hub for all the Nets to share the State’s
information infrastructure which would eventually be interconnected to
the national information infrastructure.
In the last two years the work in several departments has been
computerized with the assistance of the National Informatics Center
(NIC) and the State government's Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Ltd. (APTSL). The government has also wisely out-soursed
many of the systems. The tremendous amount of information from the
Mandal level onwards for various departments and undertakings like the
State Electricity board is being generated on-line, summed up at
different levels and presented to departmental heads and most importantly, to the Chief Minister himself everyday in the morning. All
these activities would be flowing on the broad-band OF-based
infrastructure. As a special measure, the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) has made available the 2 MBPS links from
the state capital to all the collectorates in all the districts at no charge for
two years. Audio and Video-Conferencing as well as high speed data
inter change are being demonstrated and would be fully implemented by
about January, 1998.
Until the OF network gets extended, Pcs anywhere in the towns and
villages would be able to gain access to the LAN servers in the District
town through dial-up lines over the DOT’s network. The Prime Minister
has ruled that dial-up calls to the District Headquarters from anywhere
in the District would be charged as local calls.
This special dispensation is on the promise that the electronic
government the AP is implementing will be replicated in all other States
of India.
The vision envisages provision of personal computers (PC) in every
college (800). in all high schools (8,000) all important hospitals (400), in
all villages (29,000), to be in the nature of tele-cottages like the
numerous STD/ISD booths that are set up by the DOT in cities, towns
and villages and in many places in cities. One of the functions of the
tele-cottages is to serve as information kiosks to citizens, who will be
assured of the right and access to information flow information of the
government which is in the public domain.
It is not sufficient that government alone uses IT in a big way. IT must
be used to improve or substitute every type of work like shopping,
banking, learning, teaching, trading, managing, designing, distribution
and so on. This involves development of numerous applications. These
will have to come not from government but private enterprises which
will be encouraged to develop these applications and market them,using the information high-ways being built by the Government of
Andhra Pradesh (GOAP) and public telephone operators like the DOT
& PTelcos. Some of the things that are envisaged are:
85% of knowledge workers in government and
other offices,businesses and institutions should have Pcs and work on them:
90% of bank transactions shall be done without people going to
banks;
50% of money transactions should be electronic:
every college shall have one PC for 5 students and every high
school shall have one PC for 10 students; and
that every village must have atleast one public PC (tele-cottage):
Andhra Pradesh should become the Vignana Kshetra i.e., the
state with the largest number of IT professionals and Hyderabad
should be transformed into Cyberabed in order to produce
world-class, readily employable IT professionals.
Because of his involvement and direction, AP seems to be poised to
lead the electronification of governments, the informatisation of society
and using IT for all round development. In order to facilitate this, AP
may become the laboratory or test bed for electronic government in all
other states and at the Union level. To supplement the DOT’s telecom
net-work, the State is even contemplating to utilise the State Electricity
Board’s rights of way, its transmission and distribution towers, pylons
and poles for stringing Optic Fibre Cables metal-free, self-supporting
and using them for the information infrastructure. That has a tremendous
potential because electricity lines go to every village and most
homes. As elsewhere in the world, this could become the
fiber to the home
(FTH) which IT professionals dream of.
The IT Vision 2020 as a component of the overall vision for Andhra
Pradesh is an exciting one and it would be most appropriate if all those
who see IT as a critical instrument for development offer their
suggestions, comments and criticisms to the GOPA. These could be
e-mailed to thc@ap.nic.in
By: T H Chowdary
Profile: Information Technology Advisor: Govt of Andhra Pradesh
Director : Centre for Telecom Management & Studies
Chairman: Pragna Bharati, Andhra Pradesh
Advisor: Satyam Computer Services
Fellow: Tata Consultancy Services
Former : Chairman & Managing Director, Videsh
Sanchar Nigam Ltd.
Address: Plot No. 8, P&T Colony, Karkhana (Secunderabad),
Hyderabad - 500 009.
Phone: +91 (40) 84-6137, 84-9966, 23-3977 Off & 84-3121
(Res)
Fax: +91 (40) 81-4520 & 84-0058 (Off)
E-mail: thc@ctms.globemail.com;
thc@satyam.com
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