C-DAC: Press Kit - In the News

The switching on was carried out by Shri Jainder Singh, IAS, Secretary, DIT, Govt. of India. The function held in the e-Governance hall in Electronics Niketan, DIT, New Delhi saw the presence of many dignitaries like Additional Secretary (e-Governance), DIT, Director General, C-DAC, Director General, NIC, Director General, STQC and a number of senior officers/ executives from collaborative institutions. The C-DAC, Mumbai team which is responsible for this project was led by Shri Zia Saquib, Executive Director, C-DAC, Mumbai.

The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Govt. of India aims to cooperate, collaborate and integrate information across different departments in the Centre, States and Local Government. NeGP is focused on delivering of services to the common man in his locality. The processes have been initiated by various MMPS and slowly are moving towards the eServices.

NSDG is one of the best options for providing eServices and joined up services in spite of the fact that the back-ends are still not e-Enabled. The messaging middleware for integration and interoperability is executed by C-DAC Mumbai with support from the e-Governance division of the Department of Information Technology of the Government of India. Also NSDG has a great role in complying to the standards nationally and in turn provide wider proliferation of services. NSDG will also be taken through its operation and maintenance phase by C-DAC for five years.

Government systems are characterized by islands of legacy systems using heterogeneous platforms and technologies and spread across diverse geographical locations, in varying state of automation, make this task very challenging. The emergence of many e-governance applications for different departments to provide online services to citizens, businesses and government would require increasing interactions amongst departments and with external agencies at various levels in Government. Departments would need to develop connectors/adaptors for point to point connections between departments creating a mesh and also tight coupling between applications. This would lead to applications difficult to maintain and upgrade in case of version change and change in government policies and business rules.

NSDG is an attempt to reduce such point to point connections between departments and provide a standardized interfacing, messaging and routing switch through which various players such as departments, front-end service access providers and back-end service providers can make their applications and data inter-operable using the framework of e-Governance Standards. Application of methodologies like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for development and loose coupling of interoperable services made accessible over a network is one of the important facets of NSDG.

A government department deals with a considerable amount of information that may be critical to several other government departments concerned as well as external parties and citizens. Security becomes a key issue that needs to be addressed. The key to securing information, however, does not lie in infrastructure security but the data and information security that are shared over various systems. C-DAC will put in practice ISO 27001 standards for NSDG which is required to cover end-to-end system security. This will help in delivering a common language communicating security on a global basis to Government departments at various levels. The key areas of risks will be identified, the solutions to counter those risks will be taken into consideration, and necessary technology controls will be applied and will abide by policies and procedures to be followed.

NSDG will also implement Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which will allow the exchange of data between various government departments in secured manner ensuring the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of data and support for non-repudiation.

C-DAC has also successfully implemented National Services Directory (NSD) which needs to be utilized by all the gateways across the country. NSD provides a registry, which acts as a service resolution point for all the services in the Gateway constellation. All the Gateways that need to resolve services, which are not in their domain, need to resolve it at the NSD. The services offered by the back-end government departments (Service Providers) will need to be uniquely identified and registered under the administrative domain of the concerned Gateway. The Gateway in reality becomes an aggregator of service information within its jurisdiction.