IT firms vie for CBEC project

The project is set to cost Rs 160 crore.

Leading players in the IT and telecom sector including Reliance Infocomm, a consortium of Bharti Tele Ventures and IBM, and another consortium of BSNL, VSNL and HP are in the fray for the IT infrastructure project of the Central Board of Excise and Customs.

The project, with an estimated cost of Rs 160 crore, includes setting up of an integrated national data centre for customs, excise and service tax and setting up a wide-area network linking 510 office centres located in 245 cities across the country.

The CBEC has selected Wipro as the external vendor for its automation of central excise and service tax project.

The project will provide facilities like automatic refunds sent directly to an exporter's bank account, allow on-line checking of the status of documents and even SMS facility. A user acceptance test of the automation project will begin in July this year at four locations "" Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.

The CBEC has already invited tenders for the IT infrastructure project and technical evaluations of the bids are on. Officials said the company or consortium selected for the project would have to provide the infrastructure for setting up of the national data centre. The project is expected to be completed before the end of the year.

At present, only customs offices at 34 locations, mainly ports, have an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) facility. Officials pointed out that with the completion of the project, all ports, air cargo and inland container depots would be connected electronically.

In addition to the national data centre, the CBEC is setting up a national data warehousing facility in New Delhi.

"The warehouse will store old data which can be used by the revenue department for research, analysing revenue trends and preparing reports. This burden will not fall on the field offices which can focus on revenue collection," an official said.

Officials said a separate tender for the warehousing facility would be issued by the CBEC soon.