NIC, under the Department of Information Technology of the Government of India, is a premier Science and Technology organization, at the forefront of the active promotion and implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions in the government. NIC has spearheaded the e-Governance drive in the country for the last three decades building a strong foundation for better and more transparent governance and assisting the governments endeavor to reach the unreached.

Background

The mid-1970s, in India, were watershed years, heralding a revolutionary transformation in governance. In the year 1975, the Government of India envisioned that the strategic use of Information Technology (IT) in government would lead to more transparent and efficacious governance which could give a fillip to all-round development. In 1976, in the wake of this recognition of the potency of IT, the Government visualized a project of enduring importance viz. the "National Informatics Centre (NIC)". Subsequently, with the financial assistance of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) amounting to US $4.4 million, NIC was set up.

Achievements

NIC has leveraged ICT to provide a robust communication backbone and effective support for e-Governance to the Central Government, State Governments, UT Administrations, Districts and other Government bodies. It offers a wide range of ICT services. This includes NICNET, a Nationwide Communication Network with gateway nodes at about 53 departments of the Government of India, 35 State/UT Secretariats and 603 District collectorates to service ICT applications. NICNET has played a pivotal role in decentralized planning, improvement in Government services, wider transparency of national and local Governments and improving their accountability to the people. NIC assists in implementing ICT projects, in close collaboration with Central and State Governments and endeavors to ensure that state-of the-art technology is available to its users in all areas of ICT.

Works:

NIC provides e-Governance services to the Government at different levels such as Central Government, State Government and District/Sub-District Administration. NIC provides spectrum of services in the domain of e-Governance including consultancy/business process reengineering, software development and roll out of applications at National level. As a part of its support to the Government, NIC has established extensive ICT infrastructure having satellite based network at more than 3,000 locations across the country, Video Conferencing facilities in 490 districts and Nationwide network including 1,00,000 (approximately) Local Area Network (LAN) nodes in different offices of central/state governments. This infrastructure referred to as NICNET provides extensive IT services including national/state level Data Centres, e-mail, web hosting, etc. Wide range of technologies in the area of Networking, database management, application development tools such as JAVA, .NET etc. are being used by NIC professionals to build e-Governance solutions in different domains. NIC, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to IT professionals to get extensive exposure to the state of the art, as well as futuristic technologies and also provide real life large scale implementation platform for e- Governance solution for Government at different levels in the country.