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| Wipro-ESIC Rs 1,812-cr deal may hit hurdle |
| Press Trust Of India / New Delhi Jul 18, 2011, 00:52 IST |
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Wipro’s Rs 1,182-crore contract with Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) for IT services may be in troubled waters on account of technical problems with the government health insurer’s internet portals that have caused inconvenience to users.
ESIC, a health insurer under the ministry of labour and employment, has said its portals are facing technical problems, causing inconvenience to users.
Addressing employers registered under the ESI Act, 1948, ESIC said it had rolled out its IT project Panchdeep to empower users. “You may have been facing serious issues in using the portals due to technical problems... We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to you. We hope to restore the facility or provide alternative to you very shortly,” a public announcement by ESIC said.
Project Panchdeep is aimed at improving the healthcare services provided to ESIC’s customers by providing online facilities to employers and insured people for registration, payment of premiums and disbursement of cash benefits. When contacted, Wipro Senior VP and Business Head (India, Middle East and Africa) Anand Sankaran confirmed. “We have been working with ESIC for the past two years to turn this vision into a reality. While the system has been in operation from the past six months, we have come across an unexpected technical problem which has affected the functioning of the insurance portal,” he said.
“We have multiple teams comprising the best of our resources working on resolving the issue and are confident about resolving it at the earliest,” Sankaran added.
Wipro Infotech, the India and Middle East business of Wipro, had bagged the six-and-a-half year project in March, 2009, under a competitive bidding tender that witnessed participation from peers TCS and Infosys.
ESIC is the implementing agency of a social security scheme that provides cover to over one crore industrial workers and their family members in India.
The project involved networking of 144 hospitals, 1,388 dispensaries, 620 branch offices, 40 regional offices and 27 state directorates.
Wipro was also mandated with setting up a centralised data centre and disaster recovery and computing infrastructure, besides providing services related to IT support and medical information system for all ESIC hospitals and dispensaries. Under the contract, Wipro was to also provide IT solutions for HR, finance and general administration to increase organisational efficiency.
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