THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) has developed a system to integrate digital signatures into Free and Open Source Software-based operating systems used in most government offices. This comes in the wake of the government directing its offices to use digital signatures for preparing employee salaries and other benefits on the Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala (SPARK) portal.
At present, 27,797 government offices in the state use SPARK portal for salary disbursement for over seven lakh employees. The new mechanism devised by KITE comes in the backdrop of reports of some offices including some from General Education Department depending on proprietary software.
The prevailing government policy mandates use of only FOSS applications in all its offices.
The IT@School GNU/Linux 18.04 Operating System developed by KITE has in-built software required for running the Java based digital signature token device drivers. KITE would technically assist offices to install the trust key used for digital signature token devices in offices, along with ProxKey and ePass in addition to client software required for using them on SPARK.
KITE would also guide the offices in registering the above in the FOSS operating system and to register on the treasury’s Bill Information and Management System (BIMS) and SPARK websites. “The specific installation script, user guide and video tutorials would be made available on the KITE website from August 2.” said K Anvar Sadath, Vice Chairman and Executive Director, KITE.
KITE would also organise workshops, sessions and help desks at all its 14 district offices from August 2nd, to provide real-time support for the process. The officers who require the facility have to bring their laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu Operating system along with their digital signature token device to the KITE district offices. Details would be published on www.kite.kerala.gov.in