Govt sets up command and control centre to manage IT infra, services

The government has put in place a command and control centre to manage and monitor its infrastructure and services hosted with the National Informatics Centre.

The control centre, inaugurated by law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in the national capital, will track availability of service and faults in the IT system of government departments and will help in rectifying it in short time so that digital services are available to people for most of the time.

Prasad also inaugurated the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed by the NIC to help government departments improve efficiency in their service technically like photo verification of beneficiaries for grant of services in large-scale projects, distribution of subsidies etc.

"Our Prime Minister for last 7-8 months has been very keen that all government must develop their system to harness benefit of AI," Prasad said while inaugurating the new facilities.

The AI centre will provide government departments with video analytics, neural networks, speech recognition, etc, and working machine learning, deep learning, chat bots etc.

NIC has been offering data centre and cloud services to the government. Currently, it has 4 national data centres and 30 mini-data centres across the country hosting over 10,000 e-Governance applications.

Majority of critical applications of the government are hosted at these locations and the volume and nature of these critical online services have evolved and grown considerably.

"Even in neighbouring countries, NIC services have been requisitioned. Most of CIS countries want to use NIC system," Prasad said.

NIC Director General Neeta Verma said a need was felt to set up a specialised facility with a nationwide view of ICT infrastructure for effective monitoring and management of the performance and availability of all these critical services and there command and control centre has been set up.