Govt aims to tap private players for IT support as personnel shortage hits NIC

National Informatics Centre is a body under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology tasked with maintaining the government's IT infrastructure

The shortage of personnel at the National Informatics Centre (NIC), a body tasked with maintaining the government's IT infrastructure, is compelling the Centre to look towards private players for taking over the entire operations and management of the IT infrastructure of various ministries and departments.

"Requirements of ICT have now grown to round-the-clock services; furthermore such needs are obstructed by the shortage of support manpower of NIC (sic)," said a tender floated by the National Informatics Centre for "empanelment of managed service provider(s) for operations and management of IT Infrastructure at departments, ministries and user locations". Moneycontrol has seen the tender.

The NIC, the government body under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, meets all levels of government's (central and state) information and communications technology (ICT) needs, designs and develops IT systems for the government, etc.

However, over the past few years, the government body has been reeling under a host of issues, including a dearth of personnel, with over 1,000 people expected to retire in the coming years; a budget crunch and officials have observed a change in its role from being the go-to-body for all things tech related for the government to "a dumping ground" for the industry-managed projects.

With these issues, the government has started to look for private players to take over many of the functions that currently fall under NIC. For instance, the government is also planning to migrate government's email services from NIC to a secure cloud solution and is also seeking help from start-ups to maintain 10,000 websites, apps, portals and APIs maintained by them.

Moneycontrol has reached out to NIC with further queries in this regard, and the article will be updated when a response is received.

Need for private players

"At present IT infrastructure at departments, ministries and user locations, is supported for day-to-day operations by NIC employees for most of the activities such as installation, testing, upgradation, planning, operations & maintenance of ICT infrastructure," the tender said.

"These activities are carried out for all the state & central government departments and offices by NIC personnel on a routine basis. However, over the period of time the dependencies and needs of ICT infrastructure are increasing, due to ease of use of technology and e-governance initiative in various domains," it said adding that NIC is facing a personnel crunch.

"The managed service provider is required for operation, management and monitoring of IT infrastructure/services at various user departments, ministries and user locations etc," it added.

What the service provider will do

As part of the work being envisioned for the managed service provider, the government wants it to take up day-to-day operations, network/vendor and IT infrastructure management at government departments.

It will manage networking devices, deploy a network management system, application support and hardware management, LAN management, asset and configuration management and so on.

The managed service provider will also be responsible for deploying personnel and capacity building. The tender added that the bidders will be empanelled for a period of three years and it can be extended later.