Innovative Approach for Design of Info Portal and Standards for e-Gov Apps

Research @ IIT Roorkee

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Using information technology (IT) for the benefit of common man has been a desired objective since long. E-Governance was a step towards this objective only. It has been tried out in a number of states within our country and successfully deployed abroad. However, in majority of cases the impact that it should have made in the society has not been felt. It is important that, the advantages of the IT revolution are availed by all, especially the marginalized ones. The failure was mainly because of the lack of an innovative approach and common standards for designing these e-governance portals.

Thinking on similar lines a group of professors from IIT Roorkee started the pilot project 'Pro-Poor IT Initiatives in Uttaranchal' in Jan 2003. Funded by UNDP(United Nations Development Programme) this project aimed at providing information and government services to common citizens of Uttaranchal (that was later renamed as Uttarakhand), especially the under-privileged people living in remote areas at their door-steps through electronic medium. While working on the project it was ensured that the project is demand driven rather than being supply driven. For this several needs of people were ascertained through the scientific process of Participatory Rural Appraisal.

Prof. H.K. Verma

Prof. Vinod Kumar

Prof. H. Sinvhal

The most important outcome of technical significance of the above project was:
(a) The design and development 'Uttara' (www.uttara.in), which is three-tier architecture based portal developed on open-source platform J2EE.

(b) Creation of 'Standards for e-Governance Applications on Uttaranchal Portal' through participation of government, academia and industry. The other outcome was the computerization of some government departments, setting up information kiosks in rural areas of Nainital in PPP mode and extension of data connectivity to these areas.

Impressed by the outcome, the state Government gave two more projects for
(a) Operation and maintenance of Uttara portal, Uttara data centre and data connectivity

(b) Strengthening the portal and connectivity

(c) Expanding the reach of e-governance initiative to some more districts of the state, and

(d) Developing some more models for service outlets to suit different locations, and department specific requirements.

Portal Objectives
The portal was conceived and designed to serve the dual need of providing information and delivering services to the common man. The high-priority information related to the development and welfare schemes of the government, including budget, expenditure and lists of beneficiaries, even information about working of various departments, their citizen's charter, and application forms etc is available on the portal. To provide services and information easily to the user irrespective of their geographical location thin-client based software desig -ns were chosen. The citizen being the
focal point of this initiative the data base was citizen-centric rather than department specific.

Portal Architecture
For Uttara, three-tier architecture was designed. It comprised of front-end for citizen access, middle tier for transaction management, authentication and data protection, and back-end as database. With a view to make the portal citizen centric, all applications were developed around the citizen database. Open source platform (J2EE) was used to make it vendor independent. To facilitate easy search a search engine was developed that can be accessed over a wide range of locations through various channels: VSAT, leased lines, telephone lines, Internet and kiosks. It is PKI enabled and can be interfaced with mobile devices and smart cards. For citizen-to-government interaction through portal, the main paradigm is the HTML form that is to be converted by the e-public service portal to XML and XSL-based interactions for e-filling, e-lookup, exception management etc. The static HTML pages provide introduction to various departments of the state by stating their objectives, giving complete details of the way these departments function, as well as the schemes/services these departments run for the citizen.

The diagram above represents the portal architecture for the 'Uttara' Portal

The end user (kiosk owner) can access the portal system via browser interface. The request first goes to the Edge server, which works as reverse proxy or load balancer for the Web server. It forwards the request to the active HTTP Web server, which is configured in active/ passive mode to ensure high availability of the solution. Initially the Edge server is configured to forward the request to the primary (active) Web server that forwards the request to the WebSphere portal server. In case the primary Web server is not available, the request from Edge server is forwarded to the secondary Web server, which then acts as the active Web server.

The information about the citizen or registered users is stored in LDAP based directory server that comes bundled with WebSphere Portal server and is used to store authentication as well as authorization information about the users hosted on to the WebSphere Portal server. The administrator of the centralized system define authorization rules such as providing access to different information, data or application based on the type (role) of user by using administrative module of the portal server. To ensure high availability of the LDAP server / user information the LDAP server is installed in master/slave configuration.

The WebSphere portal server is used to host centralized application. It is installed in the clone model, where exact replica of the application is running at multiple places so that if one instance of the application is not available then the other instance can be used to serve the request. Various applications that are hosted on the portal are developed using Java, JSPs, Servlets, EJBs and Web Services. Development is carried out in WebSphere Application Development Environment (WSAD). DB2 is used to hold the transactional data and other related data. To ensure high availability of the data, the DB2 database is installed in highly available cluster environment.

Domino messaging server is used as mail server. The access to the mail server is via Portal framework by using iNotes portlet. The iNotes portlet comes bundled with the WebSphere portal server and is used to give access to the mail via browser-based interface. The portlet API is an extension of the servlet API, except that it restricts certain functions to a subset that makes sense for portlets running in the context of a portal. For example, unlike servlets, portlets may not send errors or redirects as a response. This is to be done by the portal itself, which controls the overall response. Usually, many portlets are invoked in the course of handling a single request, each one appending its content onto the overall page. Some portlets can be rendered in parallel so that the portal server assembles all the markup fragments when all the portlets finish. Portlets that are not considered thread-safe will be rendered sequentially. The latter is in accordance with J2EE specifications.

In order to provide data security the possible security threats such as Buffer overflow, Cross-site scripting, Forceful browsing, Cookie tampering, Form-field manipulation, Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service were taken care of.

Standards for e-Governance Applications
Standards for e-Governance applications were developed for the 'Uttara' portal and adopted by the State Government to ensure quality, efficiency, reliability and interchangeability at an economical cost. Following were the driving forces:

(a) To ensure interoperability of various system/application being developed under e-Government initiatives.

(b) To ensure that solutions are flexible and portable enough to incorporate future requirements of the state without huge cost implications.

(c) To ensure that government services are available to every citizen of state irrespective of her/his level of literacy, disability etc.

(d) To ensure maximum utilization of existing investment in computational resources, e.g., training, hardware and software.

To develop these standards various international standards like SAGA: Standards and Architecture for e-Government Application, Usability Guidelines from Usability Gov, USA, BS7799 (ISO 17799) and Web publishing standards from Tasmania Government were seen and practices that were relevant to 'Uttara' Portal were chosen. Standards have been developed based on the following aspects of software solutions: Application Architecture, Content Management, Web Designing and Security. The complete standard documents is available on www.uttara.in

Connectivity
Initially the connectivity of the front end (kiosk) with the portal was provided by PSTN and ISDN lines. It was found that the PSTN lines had inadequate bandwidth and poor reliability; the ISDN lines in the hilly terrains were non-functional for long durations during rains. Hence, these are being replaced by VSAT. In future all kiosks where reliable broad-band connectivity is not available will be connected to the portal through VSATs only.

Based on the learnings of this project in Nainital District, the facilities and programmes have now been extended to Dehradun district, under another e-governance project being implemented by IIT Roorkee.

Government services like domicile, cast, character and other certificates are being issued on the basis of on-line applications filed by citizens. Other government services such as applications filing under RTI Act and court judgments are also being provided through Uttara Portal. Under yet another e-governance project, these IT-enabled government services are being extended to the five border districts of the State namely, Uttarkashi, Chamoli, Pithoragarh, Champawat and Udham Singh Nagar.

The project thus ushers a new era of e-Governance in the hilly state of Uttarakhand by providing government information and services to the common citizens at their doorsteps. It is hoped that the project will increase transparency and efficiency of the government offices, and minimize inconvenience and hassles for the citizens. Such initiatives in e-governance can bring about revolutionary benefits of IT to the society.

(The authors acknowledge the support of the sponsors Government of Uttarakhand and UNDP and the contributions of co-investigators of the project, Prof. J.D. Sharma, Prof. V.K. Nangia and Prof. A.K. Pant)

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