P Chidambaram inaugurates project for BSF

Home Minister P Chidambaram today 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 upto 237 locations of the central police force and will benefit about 1.98 lakh BSF personnel.

"I congratulate the BSF for completing and commissioning what will be an extraordinarily useful tool for administration of fast service (for the force) spread 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," Chidambaram said.

The project will connect all the sector headquarters, frontiers headquarters and all the battalions of the force.

"It has many many applications and one of the greatest interest of the 1.98 lakh personnel is all their personal information will be available (on the system). Salary allowances, tax deductions, leaves and all that.

"On the administration side it will computerise the whole account system, the movement of forces, deployment of forces. It will help decision making. It will also bring the force commanders and the sector commanders in the close touch with the BSF senior officials at the headquarters," the Home Minister said.

"I think this will bring them closer so that decision making is participative and cooperative effort. The idea is to move towards paperless office," he said.

However, Chidambaram cautioned them "that introducing 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 end of paper form."

The project is executed by NIIT.

"Today they have already about 3-4 thousands people logging in (on the system). We expect that many more will begin to logging in. There are 5,000 computers which are being installed. As system stabilises, I expect, data, picture, videographs, voice, all will flow through the systems," he said.

Chidambaram said another para-military force, Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), has a similar proposal for its personnel.

BSF, which guards 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.