Towards an E-Governance Grid for India (E-GGI)

Abstract

The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) proposes citizen service delivery up to the village level through various channels including village kiosks. The citizen services to be delivered are going to be web services (as against the present simply web enabled services) based on the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm. These Web Services expect adequate networking and computing resources for effective and efficient service delivery. Grid computing is the new computing paradigm. According to Gartner, computing (scientific, business and e-governance based) will be completely transformed in this decade by using grid enabled web services to integrate across the Internet to share not only information and application but also computing power. The latest grid computing standard OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) integrates the power of the grid with that of the web services – both stateless and stateful, based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Leveraging the power of grid computing for e-governance takes us towards an e-governance grid for India. Towards this objective, the existing computing networks such as NICNET with all its SAN Data Centres connected with each other and also the other state owned Data Centres and SWANs (State Wide Area Networks) are required to be connected with each other to ultimately form the e-Governance Grid of India (e-GGI). Once this is achieved, the web services which offer citizen services will be effectively supported by the powerful resources of this e-ggI, ensuring nonstop, fast and efficient delivery, with all the due backup, mirroring and recovery features in place. Then we can successfully operationalise Web Services Repositories at the District, State and National levels on the e-governance grid of India, thereby delivering citizen services across the country. An architectural framework for citizen services delivery is also proposed based on e-GGI.