Bihar ready with info super highway- TOI

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Patna --- Aspiring to join the league of developed states of the country, Bihar is ready to take a major leap in this direction at least on one front. It is ready with its information super highway, which will connect all the blocks, subdivisions and districts with the state headquarters.

Being implemented under the National e-governance programme (NEGP), this information highway has two components -- G2G (government to government) and G2C (government to citizen). While state wide area network (SWAN) has been developed for the G2G services, common service centre (CSC) will be developed under the G2C component.

SWAN will work as the backbone of this information super highway and 2 Mbps leased lines hired from the BSNL will allow communication between the state headquarters and the far-flung block offices in real time. This will also allow to have the facility of video conferencing. As SWAN will work through leased lines, high speed data transfer too would be possible once its functioning starts in full swing.

As the NEGP envisages developing only a vertical link with block offices being the last point of communication, the state government has added one horizontal component as well in its upcoming information super highway and there are plans to take this link down to the panchayat level on the one hand and to develop connectivity between various offices on the other. There are also plans to use widescale use of Wi-Fi and Wi Max technologies for glitch free net connectivity at this level.

A data centre has been created at the Technology Bhawan, Patna, and it will work as an information hub and a data repository for the whole state. This hub, in turn, has been connected with the main secretariat, new secretariat, Sinchai Bhawan, Visvesvaraya Bhawan, Soochna Bhawan and the CM's residential office through the secretariat local area network (SecLAN) so that relevant information are available at all important points and their connectivity with lowest level of administration offices are on line.

Being implemented under the supervision of the Bihar State Electronic Development Corporation, also known as BELTRON, the information super highway is at present under the test run and 10 districts of the state are likely to be connected with it from April 1 this year.

"Nalanda, Begusarai, Muzaffarpur and West Champaran are among the 10 districts which would be connected with this information highway from April this year, while connectivity of rest of the districts with this highway will be established by the end of this year," said P C Choudhary, technical secretary to Beltron managing director. He said that while SWAN has been developed from the Rs 256 crore fund provided by the Centre under the NEGP, the horizontal network is being developed by the fund provided by the state government.

Choudhary said that the objective behind developing this highway is to ensure effective governance and reduce time taken in communication between field offices and the state headquarters.