TCS passport project gets delayed

Major reason for delay is the inordinate time required in drafting the SRS document

 

Promising a passport within three days, it peddled a dream to Indians crowding understaffed and overburdened regional passport centres. But the Passport Seva Project -- one of the government's flagship e-governance programmes -- is running behind schedule.

 

In October 2008, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) signed the agreement with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to implement the project, estimated to be worth Rs.1 billion. Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon had then said the pilot project -- with centres in Chandigarh and Bangalore -- would become functional in June 2009, with the rest of the country to be serviced by 77 stations in 2010. But it seems increasingly unlikely that the schedule will be adhered to. A major reason for the delay is the inordinate time required to draft the software requirement specification (SRS) document, which was completed only recently.

 

"We didn't realise how much time it would take to draw up this document," a senior official closely involved in the process said. The SRS, which details how the software programme will behave in diverse circumstances, had taken a lot of brainstorming sessions between MEA and TCS engineers. The final document comes to about 400 pages. Also, the state-run National Informatics Centre (NIC), which had so far managed the back-end of the passport system, handed over the data for 80 million records to MEA earlier this month. The data will be kept in a specially constructed data centre as it awaits 'migration' to the new software programme developed by TCS. But there's more to be done before the pilot project gets off the ground.

 

Source: The Economic Times