TCS bags treasury automation project

Khajane-II is worth around Rs 94 cr

The Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest software exporter, on Tuesday signed a contract with the Karnataka government to automate its treasury and finance department functions. The six-year deal is valued at Rs 94 crore.

According to the contract, TCS will establish the Khajane-II system for the integrated financial management across all spending and resource mobilisation of the government.

Khajane-II project seeks to replace the existing Khajane-I system established in 2001. It will address the functional and technical constraints of the present system to enable a dynamic fiscal management and convenience for the public, suppliers and employees, L V Nagarajan, principal secretary, department of finance, government of Karnataka, said.

The main functional features of Khajane-II are a generation of daily accounts of the state government, online system for release of funds, salary payments of government officials and at least 90 per cent of payments made to contractors and suppliers to be through ECS, online tax and non-tax payment facility for citizens, real-time information regarding receipts, fund releases, scheme wise expenditure details to both finance and stakeholder departments, centralised pensioners’ database and integration with external agencies such as Accountant General and Banks.

A pilot project under the Khajane-II programme will be completed by next April and the final project will be rolled out by April, 2013, Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice president & head, government industry solutions unit, TCS said. When fully operational, Khajane-II will provide GIS-based MIS and dashboards for the decision makers, wherein implementation of government schemes and projects, in terms of funds utilised, could be monitored online on a real-time basis.

All transactions would be through an electronic clearing service (ECS) mechanism, obviating the need for the 8 million challans used presently for transactions.

A key feature of the project would be the new working culture proposed through this project. Although IT Act 2000 provided for the use of digital signatures as an instrument of authorising online documents, its use within the government has been sporadic. Khajane-II will extensively use digital signatures in its day-to-day operations. All employees of the government using Khajane-II will be mandated to use digital signatures.

The project is estimated to have a direct user base of around 50,000 users with a concurrency of 15,000 simultaneous users during peak hours most of who would be government employees. Khajane-II will utilise Karnataka State Wide Area Network (KSWAN) for connecting various government offices. The central data centre will be developed and deployed at the Treasury Network Monitoring Centre (TNMC), Khanija Bhavan on Race Course Road in Bangalore. The project will also have a business continuity site, which would be housed at the State Data Centre of the government located at Vikasa Soudha.