National Informatics Center (NIC) announced today it has partnered with IBM (NYSE:IBM) to power the national portal of India (india.gov.in) of India enabling anytime, anywhere delivery of government services to its citizens. The enhanced portal, based on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) from IBM, will provide a ‘single point entry’ to government information and services resulting in greater transparency and responsiveness.

IBM brings to the table its global experience and robust software to make the portal more user friendly, secure and scalable. The portal aims to add breakthrough features such as search, personalization and localization of content to suit the diverse requirements of the citizens of India. NIC & IBM will also work towards ensuring universal accessibility of the Portal for the physically challenged and those using handheld devices.

Announcing the partnership, Dr. Vijayaditya, Director General of NIC said, “The national portal is driven by the objective of bringing transparency and trust to aspects of good governance. The Portal will provide the global community a ’single sign-on‘ facility for Indian government services and information on India, while at the same time offering a single window access to over 5,000 websites. It also provides a base infrastructure that can also be utilized by other e-governance projects.”

He further added, “Scalability and technology innovation are critical to such a Mission Mode project under the National E-Governance Plan. We look to IBM to provide innovative solutions that enhance the capabilities of the portal on a continuous basis and thus realize our goal of making this portal the preferred homepage of every citizen.”

Contd on page 2...