Project Asha is designed to provide agri-business services through CICs so that farmers can get real time information quickly. To achieve this task, Oracle collaborated with NIC Assam to create a reliable and secured single-source architecture of e-governance services.

India has always been an agricultural country. No wonder then that the government is doing its best to equip this sector, especially the farmers, with technology that will increase their productivity and also educate them about the latest methods on farming.

This is how Project Asha was born. It is designed to provide agri-business services through Community Information Centers (CIC) so that farmers can get real time information quickly. To achieve this task, Oracle collaborated with NIC Assam to create a reliable and secured single-source architecture of e-governance services.

"With the implementation of Asha; farmers, functionaries, scientists, bankers and other stakeholders of the farm sector can now access relevant information through one source. Farmers no longer need to rely on traders for information as they can avail the same from Asha. And this is not just restricted to the organized markets as details on the unorganized markets can also be availed through the CICs under this project," informed SPS Grover, Senior Director, Oracle India.

The CM of Assam inaugurated the Asha portal and interacted with the team that was instrumental in its creation
Farmers browse the Asha portal from a CIC	Dr Saurabh Gupta, State Informatics Officer (right) receiving the Oracle Excellence Award from an Oracle representative

The Asha services portal is unique in its own way as it offers services on five different sectors of farming. These include agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, fisheries and sericulture; all under one umbrella. This project with the help of portal http://assamagribusiness.nic.in/ offers modern cultivation and management practices of a number of crops besides providing information useful to corporates, thereby facilitating agri-business.

CICs as knowledge centers
"With Asha, CICs are fast developing as knowledge information centers thereby enabling the community to become self-sustainable in the long term," he added. The project utilizes a central Oracle database, which houses all agribusiness information, useful for the audience. The portal has been made accessible through CICs and the web. Protected sensitive information is MD5 encrypted to ensure only authorized users access the service.

"Our partners play an important role in the entire implementation process. India has got a significant expert resource base on Oracle technologies and it acts as a cost effective mechanism to deliver the benefits of Oracle technology to the common man," Grover noted.

It is interesting to note that the government has already realized the importance of these common service centers towards taking rural India a notch forward in the e-governance era. Keeping this in mind, the government has committed itself towards increasing the number of common service centers in the Indian region to 1,00,000 by August 2007.

According to R Chandrashekar, Joint Secretary, E-Gov, DIT, Government of India, once these centers are up and running, rural India can have a lot of services right at their doorsteps. "We have 6,00,000 villages to cover. In order to reach out to all of them on a sustainable basis, we need to look at ways by which we can connect these villages in an efficient and cost effective manner. This is the best way that we can achieve this. We know how important it is for the country and that is why we want to increase the number of these common service centers to 1,00,000 by August 2007," he added.

Role of NIC
The Asha portal offers a wide range of ICT services including nationwide communication network for decentralized planning, improvement in government services and wider transparency of national and local governments.

The Assam State Center was the implementer of the project. The National Informatics Center (NIC) and the Department of Information Technology are providing the network backbone and e-governance support to the central and state governments, union territory administrations, districts and other government bodies.

There is direct cost involvement in Asha as all the stakeholders are contributing to it. Presently, the existing infrastructure of all stakeholders has been used for implementation of Asha.

The key to success in the e-governance space is effective localization, taking into account the unique requirements from each project. Oracle is working closely with its set of partners in order to help them develop and design localized applications in the e-governance sector.

"Today, Oracle is offering integrated information architecture comprising both database and applications, which is based on open standards. Our strategy is to capitalize on this integrated offering across industries and verticals," Grover explained.

Zia Askari

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