Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) bagged a five-year Rs 140 crore State Wide Area Network (SWAN) contract from the Andhra Pradesh government.

The project is based on a build, own, operate and transfer model and will be rolled out within 12 months.

“We are happy to partner with Tata Consultancy Services for this project. Andhra Pradesh has been in the forefront of implementing e-governance projects to take advantage of technology in improving government functioning. This ambitious APSWAN project is yet another initiative of the state government to take a wide array of government services to the common man in the remotest corner of the state,” Dr. Sameer Sharma, (IAS) IT Secretary & Chairman Andhra Pradesh Technology Services said.

“The project envisages connecting state headquarters with 1088 mandals (administrative units) and 23 district headquarters. Once the project is commissioned, the network will enable the AP Government to have video conferencing facility across government offices and enable the government offices to communicate and conference with each other over VoIP (Voice Over IP) phones which will reduce the government phone bills considerably. Various e-governance applications like RTO, healthcare, education, and municipality would also ride this network backbone,” said Sanjay Kumar, (IAS) Managing Director, Andhra Pradesh Technology Services.

“This win is yet another endorsement of TCS’ capabilities in the full services space. We are extremely happy to engage further with the Andhra Pradesh government. We have previously implemented innovative e-governance projects like NREGS, Arogyashri, APonline and Value added tax for Andhra Pradesh. For APSWAN, we will lay a statewide network of IT infrastructure and set up common service centers for citizens to take advantage of e-governance services delivered at their doorsteps. TCS will set up a state-of-the-art network operations centre (NOC) and helpdesk for round the clock monitoring of the facility and services. TCS will bring it’s world class IT integration capability to establish this information super highway for AP government,” said Tanmoy Chakrabarty Vice President and Head Government ISU.

TCS is already implementing similar projects in Chattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, and Bihar.