TCS passport project delayed
SOURCE: Times of India
Date: June 24th, 2009
Promising a passport within three days, it peddled a dream to Indians crowding understaffed and overburdened regional passport centres. But the Passport Seva Project — one of the government’s flagship e-governance programmes — is running behind schedule.
In October 2008, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) signed the agreement with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to implement the project, estimated to be worth Rs.1 billion. Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon had then said the pilot project — with centres in Chandigarh and Bangalore — will become functional in June 2009, with the rest of the country to be serviced by 77 stations in 2010.
But it seems increasingly unlikely that the schedule will be adhered to. A major reason for the delay is the inordinate time required to draft the software requirement specification (SRS) document, which was completed only recently.
