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eSeva is Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu’s initiative to deliver government information and services online to the state’s citizens. The project will provide real-time utility bill payments for water, electricity, telephone, municipal taxes, birth and death certificates, passport applications, permits and licenses, transport department services and B2C services. Citizens can log on to the eSeva website to avail of these services.

A pilot project for eSeva was kicked off in Hyderabad in December 1999. After successful testing, the first phase saw eSeva being rolled out across 19 centres in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad in August 2001. From that moment on real-time utility payments have been possible in the twin cities. eSeva has tied-up with four banks for online payment— HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Global Trust and UTI Bank.

In the first phase, the Government of Andhra Pradesh opted for an IP WAN backbone in Hyderabad and Secunderabad. The central data centre is located at Khairatabad. LANs at citizen services centres and government departments link to the WAN through 64 Kbps leased lines (which will be upgraded to 2 Mbps in coming months). To provide network redundancy, ISDN backup exists. The primary database server is present at the data centre and is used to store all information, facilitate transactions and update local department servers.

eSeva is based on three-tier network architecture. Transactions are conducted on a real-time basis. Departmental servers are connected to the data centre, which in turn is connected to the eSeva centres. Leased lines, with back-up ISDN lines, connect the departmental servers to the eSeva data centre. Transactions done at the eSeva centres are recorded directly on the server of the department concerned.

The Andhra Pradesh government first evaluated Nortel and Motorola solutions for their requirements. Finally it decided to go in for Cisco routing and switching products that have been used to connect nineteen citizen utility centres for this project.

Two Cisco 3640 Central Routers in a redundant mode are provided with E1 lines and ISDN backup for connecting all remote centres and state departments. Each remote eSeva location and 10 departmental utility offices have a 1720 router with one leased line and ISDN connection. The eSeva head office in Khairatabad has a Cisco 2924 Catalyst switch. Each of the nineteen eSeva centres is connected using a Catalyst 1924 switch.

Rajeev Chopra, the vice president for Cisco Systems, India & SAARC says, “To deploy multiple channels of communication (multimedia applications) and integrate various departments of the central and state governments was the key challenge before Cisco.” He adds that Cisco’s system integrator and implementation partner, CMC Computers deployed the solution for eSeva. CMC partnered with Ram Informatics (software provider) for this project.

In phase two, the state government is planning to connect 18 centres in the surrounding Ranga Reddy district. Eventually it plans to connect 141 centres across 21 districts of AP state by early 2003. This will happen in the third phase.