State's e-gov network to be commissioned by June

TIRUCHI: The Tamil Nadu State Wide Area Network (TNSWAN), a major e-governance initiative to put in place the backbone connectivity network of the State, is likely to be commissioned by the end of June.

TNSWAN will link Government departments to provide voice, data and video connectivity towards improving service delivery, response-time and transparency in administration.The Internet Protocol (IP) based state-of-the-art and cost effective network will provide connectivity to the Secretariat, 30 district headquarters, including the official and camp offices of Collectors and District Rural Development Agency offices, over 70 revenue divisions, 206 taluk and 384 block offices.

The project is in the advanced stage of completion and district-wise testing is under way. All the required equipment have arrived for the taluk and block-level centres. Though the target date for completion of the project is May 31, there has been slight delay of three to four weeks, according to C. Umashankar, Managing Director, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT), the implementing agency.

The TNSWAN network would be of two-tier architecture -- Tier I would cover the Secretariat, five Government complexes and seven special offices in Chennai and 30 district Collectorates and Tier II would cover the districts, revenue divisions, taluks and blocks. While the tier II centres would have 2 Mbps connectivity, the tier I centres would enjoy 8 to 12 Mbps bandwidth. A State Data Centre has been established in Chennai and a disaster recovery centre, which would be a data backup centre in case of disasters, is being set up in Madurai.

The network would interconnect all the administrative establishments across the State and provide adequate bandwidth for various operations/applications. It would provide uninterrupted connectivity, video communication facility between Tier I centres and integrated data/intranet/internet and voice communication facilities for both the tiers.