INTRODUCTION IT in Governance has been the key to enhancing the Kerala State's thrust on citizen access to government services. The State has also led the world in the Free and Open Source movement by being the first state in the world to openly declare its affinity to FOSS. NIC Kerala has played a significant role in the implementation of e-Governance in the State. Some of the significant e-Governance Projects developed and deployed in the State are as follows: E-District A project that has won the prestigious CSI-Nihilent award for e-Governance in 2012, it provides Government services to citizens through Common Service Centers (CSC). The project seamlessly delivers services to public by automation, integration and boldly making changes in processes through Business Process Re-engineering. Services currently covered are mainly public related like : Certificates issued from Taluk / Village Offices, local bodies, PDS services, RTI services, Grievance and complaints, Utility Payments, Payments to Motor Vehicle Dept and Revenue court cases. Certificate services from Revenue department have been implemented in two pilot districts. About 12 lakh services have been provided as on date. hsCAPnic This is for the Centralized Seat Allotment Process for Higher Secondary Courses. There are about 1500 higher secondary schools with about 40 different combinations. The eligible candidates need to give single application form for applying in any one of the schools in the district, with his options in the order of preferences. The sequence of activities includes preparation of rank list for each school and each course. Allotment process will be done based on the seat availability, community reservation, rank and the options filed by the applicants. Allotment memo can be printed by the applicants. e-Transport (http://www.keralamvd.gov.in) In Kerala, 100% computerization of the Department is achieved in all 65 RTOs and Sub RTOs SRTOs including RTO- National Sector, 19 Check-posts and Office of State Transport Authority. All RTOs/ SRTOs and STA are connected to the SDC (State Data Centre) through KSWAN. Building the State Register, National Register, citizen services through AKSHAYA centres, e-payment, Intelligent Enforcement Automation, and Dash Board etc are some key achievements in the Motor Vehicles Department. Realcraft It is a workflow-based online application for registration of the fishing vessels working along the Indian coast for better coastal security .It is presently operating in 164 locations and has brought details of around 3 lakhs fishing vessels and fishermen into one national database. Fishing vessel owners, coast guard, navy, coastal police; fisheries department , MPEDA, insurance agencies, state and union ministries are benefitted out of this. E-procurement GePNIC has been implemented in Kerala PWD, PMGSY, 60 PSUs and KSEB. Around 2000 tenders worth 1200 crores have been successfully submitted & processed. 1000 staff of various departments and PSUs and 1500 bidders have already been trained. e-Office e-Office has been launched in Kerala State Planning Board and Spices board Ernakulum . The first e-Office implementation in the State of Kerala was inaugurated by Hon. Chief Minister of Kerala Sri. Oommen Chandy in the Planning Board on 6th November 2012. FMPDS (Food grains movement Monitoring for effective Public Distribution System) Sh.Anoop Jacob, Minister for Food, Civil Supplies & Registration launched a Citizen centric M-Governance Project, at Alappuzha on 20th November 2012. It empowers the ration card holders by providing the lifting details of ration commodities as SMS when the Whole Sale Dealers lift the items from FCI godown and Ration Dealers lift the items from Whole Sale Dealers. The ration card holders can register their mobiles through www.civilsupplieskerala.gov.in. The lifting details entered by officials are automatically transmitted as messages to the registered mobile numbers. e-Hospital for Ayurveda Kottakkal Ayurveda College, the first ayurvedic hospital in the country which has implemented the e-Hospital project with the help of NIC Agarthala since August 2012. The key features of e-Hospital@NIC are provide an integrated solution for hospital and clinical needs. EMLI (Effective Management of Letter of Credit Issuance) A web based application for automating the Issuance of Letter of Credit (LoC) based on the bills submitted by the work executing departments. On an average, 30,000 bills are being submitted every year from 220 division offices of various departments. Letter of Credits for nearly 2000 Crores are being issued every year using the application. Examination Management Systems (EMS) It is a comprehensive Examination Management System developed for handling various examinations conducted by GOK. About 4 lakhs candidates appear every year in these examinations under various schemes. The system handles all activities like candidate registration, result processing, result publication and certificate generation. Examinations covered in EMS are SSLC, THSLC (Technical High School Class X), A-Level (Class X Equivalency Examination), DHSE (Plus 2 / Higher Secondary), Vocational Higher Secondary, TTC (Teachers Training Course), KGTE (Kerala Government Technical Examination). XLN implementation (eXtended Licensing Node) developed by NIC-Gujarat has been implemented for Drugs Controller Department, GOK. The software automates all activities related to retail drugs sales licenses, drug testing etc. The main benefits include SMS alerts to stop sales of non-standard quality drugs tested in lab, stopping sales of banned drugs and transparency. SAND It has bagged the CSI Nihilent award of appreciation under project category in 2011 . It is an application developed by NIC Thrissur that helps the district administration to control and distribute the quantity of river sand that can be lifted from various mining points in an organized and neutral manner. More than one lakh citizes are benefited with sand available to them at Government rates. Network Operations & Data Centre Network Operations & Data Centre (NODC), with 24 x 7 operations and support, has been established at NIC Kerala State Centre for strengthening the network and services to user departments. The network is connected to the MPLS enabled National Network Backbone with a 2.5-10 GBPS bandwidth and the 14 District Centres are connected with 34-100 MBPS. 2/8/34 MBPS leased line network with 200 WAN nodes has been established in Kerala which includes High Court, NITC, Lakshadweep, Post Offices, BOI, DGFT, PAO, PQS and LAN with VLANs of around 750 clients. NIC Kerala has a Data Centre with 40 high end servers including 10 co-located servers and SAN storage, hosting websites and applications of user departments. Mail services, Anti Virus Support, Update and security services are also being provided. Studio based Video Conferencing services with High Definition VC systems at State Centre and Training Centre, EVCS (Executive Video Conferencing System) facility at NIC District Centres, Chief Secretary’s office and CPMG office are being extensively used. 46 institutes, including 6 NMEICT links, are connected to National Knowledge Network (NKN) in Kerala. Web services NIC Kerala provides hosting support on Linux & Windows platform. Around 70 websites are hosted and maintained. The other activities are result publishing, VPN support for districts websites, Security auditing using Appscan, coordination of security auditing with CERT-IN empanelled auditors for the applications developed by NIC Kerala, development of CMS based websites. RA set up in NIC Kerala A Registration Authority office for NIC CA is functional in NIC Kerala State Centre, Thiruvananthapuram from July 2011 onwards. Around 2200 Digital Signature Certificates in SmartCards/USB tokens have been issued as on date, mainly for projects like e-District, e-Procurement and e-Office. Ten SSL certificates were also issued during the period. Approximately 240 renewal of Digital Signature Certificates were also done. The other significant e-Governance projects undertaken by NIC Kerala: l Blood Donors Online Directory (http://blooddonors.gov.in) at Kollam district l e-Disbursement of National Family Benefit Scheme at Kasaragod district l e-CampusSuite for the Kottakal ayurverda college, Malappuram district l Gazetted Entitlement Portal for Accountants General office Kerala l GAINPF (Government Aided Institutions Provident Fund System) l FREES -a “single window scheme” where citizens have the opportunity to pay all the taxes and other dues to Government l Guest House management system for Kerala House, New Delhi l RR ONLINE for the monitoring of Revenue recovery activities of the district administration l Service And Payroll Administrative Repository For Kerala (SPARK) l Professional College seat allotment system l Integrated Scholarship Management System l Treasury Information System l Assurance Implementation Desk (AID) for monitoring of assurances given by ministers on the floor of Legislative Assembly. l Implementation of Central Projects like MGNREGA, SECC, AGMARKNET, NADRS, WAKF, MCTS It gives me immense pleasure to know that Informatics in the forthcoming issue is focusing on the e-governance initiatives in the state of Kerala. The Government of Kerala could implement various e-governance projects like Professional College seat allotment system, Integrated Scholarship Management System, SPARK (Personnel and Payroll management System), Treasury Information System, DCSuite, e-procurement etc. with the technical support from NIC Kerala state centre. I take this opportunity to place on record the work done by NIC Kerala State unit officials in making the e-Governance initiatives in the state successful. I wish all readers a very Happy and Prosperous New Year.