The government has again selected India's largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the next phase of the Passport Seva Programme.
TCS had bagged a Rs 1,000 crore deal for the first phase from the ministry of external affairs in 2008.
While TCS did not disclose the value of the renewed deal, the contract could be worth Rs 8,000 crore according to an industry analyst.
“In the next phase, TCS will refresh existing facilities and systems, and develop innovative new solutions to enable the issuance of e-passports and further enhance the citizen experience using technologies such as biometrics, artificial intelligence, advance data analytics, chatbots, auto-response, natural language processing, and the cloud,” the company said in a statement.
In the first phase, TCS digitised the processes and sped up the timeline to get passports, among others. Some of the critical e-governance projects that TCS runs include Passport Seva Kendra, India Post and IRCTC.
Tej Bhatla, business unit head, public sector, TCS, said in the statement, “Our partnership with the ministry over the last decade has become a benchmark in public-private partnership for citizen services."
Implementing government projects is a challenge for IT companies due to a host of factors such as undefined scope, inflexible milestones, and delay in payments.
On the TCS’s success in cracking government projects, operations chief N Ganapathy Subramaniam had said in an earlier interview with Moneycontrol: "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 and liabilities.”
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