India’s e-Governance Services To Get A Single Payment Gateway By March 2012

India’s Department of Information Technology has announced that it will be teaming up with National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to launch a single payment gateway for its e-governance services by March 2012.

Explaining that this gateway will facilitate collection of license fees and other premium services over the Internet, thereby allowing citizens to skip a tedious trip to the government offices, Department of Information Technology Additional Secretary, Shankar Aggarwal said:

We are done with proof of concept with Maharashtra and are ready with standard guidelines to replicate the whole process throughout the country.

He further explained that this gateway will be linked to around 20 services over the next couple of months, including those offered by State and Central Government and it will be rolled out to 11 states across India by next year.

Although he didn’t divulge information on which 11 of the 28 Indian states will be offering this gateway, he said that the service will be kick-started in Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Goa followed by eight other states which are in currently at various levels of discussion with the government.

Regarding the deal with NSDL, Aggarwal said that the government has signed a revenue gap funding agreement with it, according to which NSDL will be paid per transaction, provided that one crore (ten million) successful transactions are carried out every year. If the number falls below one crore (ten million), then the government will compensate the depository based on the commission promised by them.

This move follows the government’s bid to adopt Open Source software for all its e-Governance projects.

(via Economic Times|Image Source)