Top IT firms in MP digital database plan

The MP government will develop a high-tech finance management system, with the help of companies like Wipro, Essel, Shyam Communication, Tritronics India, Fiona Infosystems, Red Hat India, Mithi Software Technologies, CMC Ltd, and L&T.

With the new IT solutions costing Rs 28.02 crore, the MP government will be able to enforce finance control, and maintain data on salaries of its 550,000 employees and pension data of 258,000 retired personnel. Moreover, all treasury payments will be made online.

The state government is also in talks with banks so that people can make treasury payments online (money transfer through bank accounts) or through credit cards.

Also, the state government will be able to daily check details relating to tax collection, interest payment, and overdrafts and salary bills.

"The project started in 1999, but there has been delay on the part CMC due to glitches in the company's information and preparedness on this task.

However, the project connecting our 53 treasuries, 159 sub-treasuries, seven divisional offices through the V-SAT network, will be over soon. It will work on the Linux platform," said Anil Shrivastava, commissioner, treasuries and accounts.

The application software, which will run on Oracle 9i release 2 (supplied by Fiona Infosystem), will have four sub-systems--treasury subsystem, divisional sub-system, directorate sub-system and finance department sub-system.

These sub-systems will enable treasuries to verify bill transit books, sanctions, and head of account, budget, online cheque generation and monthly reconciliation of receipts of payments.

While divisional offices will register pay fixation cases, maintain head wise allotment of expenditure electronically. Similarly budget data will be transmitted with a mouse click through a central server (Linux Advanced Server 2.1) installed by Red Hat India Pvt Ltd.

At one hand when an employee of a government department will be able to log in to his salary accounts to check bills, deductions and loan status, on the other pensioners will be able to check the status of approvals of their pensions and clearance of documents etc. Similarly the top finance officials will be able to monitor the monitory conditions of the state and progress in employees or pensioners cases.

"This will not only save time but also bring the commoner to the government's finance system closer. In fact this will be the backbone of entire finance system of the state," said Mr Shrivastava adding, "we have planned to make a data-base of all state government employees who are about to retire in two or three years so that we could deliver quick and prompt services to them."

The state government has already launched its treasury website www.mptresury.org and further updation is in progress.

At present, thousands of employees and pensioners have to run from pillar to post to tally their provident fund accounts (available with their own department) with Auditor General's office at Gwalior or filing litigations on financial frauds.

The new system will support them to know about the status of the deduction of their provident fund accounts too. "We are planning to implement the system in month of June or first week of July," Mr Shrivastava said.

This new system will catapult MP among those few states having this high-tech State Finance Monitoring System and Finance Management Information System.