Maximum Social Impact: Food Corporation of India

Thursday, June 08, 2006

IISFM (Integrated Information System for Foodgrains Management) is an MIS solution implemented by the NIC for the FCI. It captures the entry and exit information of food-grain stocks as it enters each FCI godown along with the exact means how it came there. Italso generates drill-down reports for everyone from top management to the operations executives on the exact positions of stocks in any godown in the country in a couple of clicks. Coupled together, this project can help ensure India 's food security for a long time to come. Also, it brings in transparency and help curb mismanagement of food stocks.

Business problem  Tracking the national food stocks kept at widely dispersed FCI godowns
IT solution Comprehensive stores and inventory mgmt solution that tracks movement of food grains
Implemented by NIC team headed by Dr Ranjana Nagpal, Senior Technical Director
Technology platform  ASP.NET, MS SQL Server 2005, MS SQL Reporting Services 2005
	Dr Ranjana Nagpal, Senior Technical Director, Natinal Informatics Center

When a consignment of food grains enters the FCI system, it is weighed on entry along with the wagon or truck it came in and stored. Later, the bags maybe shipped to other FCI godowns or sent to state godowns or sold to traders or the PDS and other food-scheme retailers. Bags that are passing between FCI centers are not weighed again for exact measurement, but rated weights along with moisture parameters are treated as sufficient. This leads to different quantization for the same bag of food grain from the time it entered the FCI system to the time it finally left, along with losses due to leakage and so forth. Collecting all the and analyzing the information at nearly 1,200 depots, 166 district offices, 23 regional offices, 5 zonal offices and the central HQ at Delhi is a mammoth task and the case just cries out for computerization.

NIC's solution uses a set of data capture screens, customized per role of the FCI user: the unloader, the quality inspector, the receiver, the dispatcher and so on. The actual data entered goes into the same database along with details of the wagon or truck it came in. Consignments that arrived or left on different days in parts are all connected with each other using index numbers. All reports are accessible to the FCI staff over the Internet at a specially created portal, hosted and maintained by the NIC. That is, a report on the status of a particular godown in a remote village in Kerala can be seen by another user in Assam -thus, bringing greater transparency to the system. It helps reduce old stocks at different locations and dispose them off early since crop-year wise reports tell you which godown in which location has which year's stocks. The system uses Microsoft SQL Server

Reporting Services 2005 for generating the reports with different user-configurable pivots and filters. This also lets users export and save reports in various formats.

The benefits of this implementation have impressed the FCI and the Indian government to the extent that it is now planned to be extended to the State Warehousing Corporation's godowns as well as those of other stocking agencies.

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