Indian government projects: How TCS cracked the code

TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam.

Process, program management and architecture- three seemingly mundane things, helped TCS, India's largest software firm, crack the one code that its rivals have struggled with- executing massive projects for the Indian government.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, the IT firm's COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam said large, mission-critical government projects continue to be a strong area of focus. Some of the critical e-governance projects that TCS runs include Passport Seva Kendra, India Post and IRCTC.

"Government projects not just in India but around the world are different. They are highly process-centric and there will also be a lot of exacting demands from them in terms of performance guarantees, liabilities," he said.

As Moneycontrol reported recently, a combination of factors -  undefined scope, inflexible milestones, delay in payment, and lack of ownership from the government on these projects, are some of the reasons why companies struggle to execute these, vis-a-vis projects that they execute with apparent ease for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

"The key thing is when you do a project for the government, you have got to be very solid in program management. Second is that you need to get the architecture right. Because there will be changes which keep on coming. You need to get the architecture right to make all these changes," he said.

Subramaniam added that the other thing to be careful about are payment terms in these contracts.

"Sometimes, they will say you need to roll out 173 locations. They will stop after 170 and give the next three after a few years. If there is a clause that you will not get paid unless you complete 173, you are stuck. So you have to be careful about agreeing to some of these payment terms and conditions," he said.

​"You ultimately have to work with them. And some of the projects, take passports for example, citizens are involved. So you have to be on top of it." he said.

While TCS' experience has been better in dealing with the government, it hasn't been the case for its rival Infosys, which now runs critical projects such as the GST and the Income Tax portal.

Its top management was summoned by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman this week, where she conveyed her "deep disappointment" about the continuing glitches in the new income tax portal. The company now has time till September 15 to fix this.

Infosys won the project in 2019 through a bidding process. The Income Tax portal was previously run by TCS.

To be sure, this is not the first time Infosys has been pulled up for a government project and neither is it the only company that has faced an issue.

While Infosys faced similar problems when it was working on the MCA21 (Ministry of Corporate Affairs) and the GSTN (Ministry of Finance) projects for the government, Wipro has had its fair share of troubles with projects such as Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) and the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) project. ​