Imphal, July 01 2009: The implementation of the National e-Governance Action Plan (NeGAP) in Manipur likely faced delay owing to the tardy progress in the utilization of funds earmarked for the development of infrastructures.

Expressing concern over the tardy fund utilization state chief secretary underscored the need for early completion of all programmes in view of the citizen centric nature of the project in a meeting held recently with officials concerning with the implementation of the project which is targeted to complete by 2010, official source said today.

Manipur is developing the State Data Centre as per international standard under the National e-Governance Action Plan (NeGAP) and targeting commissioning the same by March 2010, set target put down by the Union ministry of information and technology.

The installation of SDC under the NeGAP has started taken up in the state at an estimated cost of Rs.39.04 crore to be utilized over a period of five years with the break up of Rs 9.84 crores as capital expenditure and Rs 29.20 crores as operational expenditure.

Against the total funds of Rs 39.04 crores, authority has released Rs 6.39 crores for the project including Rs 3.14 crores released in 2007-08 and Rs 3.25 crores during 2008-09 .

State Data Centre (SDC) which is to house at the 4th floor of the western wing of the New Secretariat would serve as a Central Repository of Manipur state will have secure data storage as per international standard.

It will meet the need for reliability, scalability, security and serviceability, official said Wednesday.

The works of setting up and operation of the SDC is to be done by selected IT firm as per DIT (Department of Information Technology) guidelines in coordination with the National Information Centre (NIC).

The same will be ready by this month July, it said.

The SDC will be equipped to host such as Web servers, Application Server, Database Servers, SAN (Storage Area Network), etc.

SDC will be integrated with the other two core infrastructure component, State Wide Area Network and Common Service Centres for enabling the services to government agencies, citizens and business.

Out of the total 42 locations across the nine districts of the state for installation of State Wide Area Network (SWAN), site preparations in 28 locations are in progress with the funds released for 30 sites.

The works of site preparations are being taken up by the DCs of respective districts.

The total estimated cost of the project is Rs 20.55 crores which would be spend over a period of five years.

Preparation of sites in two locations in Imphal east districts, Keirao Bitra and Swambung could not be taken up as SDO offices here are not functioning at the respective locations which also resulted in the utilization of the released funds.

Against Rs 4.68 crores released so far only Rs 2.57 crores utilized, the source said.

For developing Common Service Centre (CSC) which mean for providing G2C (Government-to-Citizen) service to the citizens and implementation PPP (Point to Point Protocol) mode through a private firm, the funds released is yet to utilized.

A sum of Rs 1.58 crores was released for taking up the work but no fund has so far been utilized, the source said.

Out of the total fund of Rs 2.90 crore for another component of the project, Capacity Building Scheme only Rs 0.18 crore utilized so far.

The component related with preparation of e-Governance road map (e-GRM) and capacity building roadmap of Manipur.

Observing that it was important to implement the project with greater speed and precision, state chief secretary suggested drawing timelines for all the activities for better monitoring of the progress of the various components under implementation in the recent meeting, the source said.

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