KOCHI: Kerala may be India’s ‘first fully digital state’, and even recently topped the National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment in 2019, but a close look reveals that many of the state government’s IT projects are lagging behind, courtesy its inability to attract quality software programmers -- the key segment which implements these projects.
The biggest culprit is the state government which is staying away from direct hiring of the software engineers for its various projects, and instead, depending entirely on Delhi-based National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI), an arm of National Informatics Centre (NIC), for the staffing requirements, said sources.
The problem with NICSI is that while the state government provides the funds for paying salaries to the recruits, 25 per cent of the money paid to the staff goes directly to NICSI every month as its commission. This means a software engineer hired for a project on a contract basis for say Rs 26,000 per month will get only Rs 19,500 per month.
The officers in most departments, from Public Works to the Civil Supplies to Local Self-government, and the district collectorate are frustrated that the projects are lagging. Not surprisingly, the most efficient IT framework is run by the GST and e-Treasuries wing of the state government, where the software engineers are hired directly by the Finance Department.
“The problem we face is that NICSI supplies us some random youngsters from job websites such as Naukri.com, Monster.com, etc. More often than not, these youngsters are not skilled to be put on these projects. Recently, NICSI supplied us five persons but we found all of them mediocre. After rejecting all five, we called back one applicant and trained him from scratch to keep the project going,” said a senior officer in a government department.
“Another problem we face is that we can’t retain these engineers as there is no bond or agreement, and they jump the moment they get a better offer,” he said. “None is familiar with NICSI and it acts as a commission agent, without actually doing any work.” Principal Secretary (finance) Rajesh Kumar Singh felt most departments are not hiring directly because they do not want to land themselves in any controversy later.
“Nothing stops them from hiring directly. It’s just that they have to go through the tendering process while the NICSI route is safer. The only problem is that the time you gain by depending on NICSI will be lost as the quality of the staff you hire may not be good and you end up in a PSU-type structure,” he said. NICSI, Thiruvananthapuram, general manager Shaji Kuriakose admitted that those hired for the government IT projects do not stay on as the job profile is temporary in nature.
“The moment they get a good offer from leading IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS, etc, they move out. But, we don’t think the Kerala state IT projects implemented for various departments are dragging that much,” he told TNIE.
Regarding the NICSI cornering a huge chunk of the salaries, Kuriakose explained 18 per cent goes as GST and another seven per cent is paid as commission to manpower recruiting agency, empanelled under NICSI.
Mohana Dhas, scientist-G, state informatics officer, NIC-Kerala, said some odd projects may be running behind schedule, but broadly there have been no major issues. On the issue of difficulties in finding skilled engineers, he said NIC provides proper training to youngsters.
“There are also instances when we suggest names to the empanelled agencies for recruitment for NIC projects,” Dhas said. However, sources said the sheer unfamiliarity of NICSI in the Kerala market is resulting in dozens of deserving young IT graduates losing out on a great opportunity to join the government service, even though on contract.