Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Thursday inaugurated a Rs. 229- crore e-office project for the Border Security Force (BSF) aimed at providing easy online access to personnel and administrative works.
The Intranet Prahari Project (IPP) has been extended up to 237 locations of the BSF and will benefit about 1.98 lakh personnel of the force.
‘Useful tool’
“I congratulate the BSF on completing and commissioning what will be an extraordinarily useful tool for administration of fast service [for the force] spread out in all the borders of the country and in some places, even in internal security duties. I sincerely hope this will improve the quality of administration in the BSF,” Mr. Chidambaram said.
The project will connect all the sector headquarters, frontiers headquarters and all the battalions of the force.
“It has many applications and one of the greatest interest for the 1.98 lakh personnel is all their personal information will be available [on the system]. Salary allowances, tax deductions, leave position and all that. On the administration side, it will computerise the whole accounts system, the movement and deployment of forces,” the Home Minister said.
“I think this will bring them closer so that decision making is a participative and cooperative effort. The idea is to move towards a paperless office,” he added.
However, he said the introduction of a computer-based system should not mean that papers will continue to be generated. “Once records are available in the digital form, that must mean the end of the paper form,” he said.
The project is executed by NIIT Technologies Ltd.
Mr. Chidambaram said another para-military force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), had a similar proposal for its personnel.
Training for personnel
The BSF, which guards the country’s frontiers with Pakistan and Bangladesh, has provided advanced training to around 150 of its officers and subordinate staff. About 20,000 personnel were also trained on the fundamentals of computers and on the software applications developed under the project.
–Agencies