Mr. J. Sathyanarayana of NISG – Are you corrupt?

Mr. J. Sathyanarayana of NISG – Are you corrupt?

From: Umashankar C umashankarc@yahoo.com

Date: Tue Apr 26, 2005  8:39 pm

27-4-05

My dear esteemed colleague Mr.J.Sathyanarayana, You are heading an organisation (National Institute of Smart Government) which had been declared the single nodal agency to route all e-gov proposals of the country. The information we have received on you does not portray you an honest person. Your dealings with regard to B1 and e-biz do not impress true e-gov enthusiasts like me.  

For your information, a top executive of C1 India met me during the national e-gov conference during Feb this year at Bhubaneswar and offered me to a proposal whereby I should submit e-gov proposals and he would get it approved and implemented. He was talking as though he had the entire e-gov decision makers in his pockets. May be he is correct.

Now the very same corrupt C1 had bagged the e-biz contract through NISG, that is you.NISG does not have anyone who has any e-gov experience except you. So any decision from NISG means a decision by you only, even if you try to defend the other way. As a District Collector, I owned all the decisions on e-gov at Tiruvarur (1999-2001) because there was no one who could understand e-gov in Tiruvarur at that time. You have a team which matches my Tiruvarur bureaucracy of 1999.Mr.Sathyanarayna, you owe an explanation to the nation on these allegations. Because you are the single most important person who can make or mar e-governance in India. This is an unfortunate situation whereby the country had handed over the entire e-gov work to a single individual. We expect you to uphold the best values of the IAS coupled with honesty, transparency and integrity. In this case your honesty and integrity had come under a cloud. We would like to hear your side. I am sending this write up on behalf of all Indians living in India and abroad who wish to see
India a truly e-governed nation.

And kindly do reply so that we get the benefit of hearing your side. In case we do not hear from you within a reasonable time, say 7 days, it would be presumed that you had accepted all the allegations mentioned in the write up attached below.

From my experience I can share with you that when I served as District Collector at Tiruvarur an anonymous allegation petition was received against me. Within the same day I sat and prepared a reply and sent it to the Government though it was not expected on my part to reply to an anonymous petition. When you take strong action against criminals this happens. If one is too corrupt then also such petitions arise. In the case of Tiruvarur mostly the high class criminals who owned a house worth Rs.10 lakhs and above were booked under goondas act, illicit arrack distillation as well as sale was wiped out in the district with the help of the police and women Self Help Groups (SHGs), the women SHGs were empowered to recommend arrest of anti social elements and the anti social elements were paraded through the town centre with placards hanging under their neck. And so the allegation petition arose. I submitted my reply to the Government on the same day.

This is the typical reaction of an honest officer.

I am attaching the allegation write up which I had received from a highly reliable source. I request your feedback/comments:

"PwC & J. Satyanarayana – A sinister connection??

Mr.JS as Secretary (IT)- Government of Andhra Pradesh

One needs to look closely at the consultancy projects awarded by J Satyanarayana and you will see a pattern emerge The only company to win most of the contracts was PWC.

Mr. Satyanarayana was the Principal Secretary of Information Technology in Government of Andhra Pradesh for 4 years from 2000, has awarded consultancy jobs to PwC for 5 major Projects namely, OLTP, SBMS (Social Welfare), IFIS (Finance department), E Procurement and HRMS. PwC’s job was to prepare the RFP, call for tenders on behalf of Govt. of Andhra Pradesh evaluate the technical bids, qualify final bidders for commercial bid opening and finally recommending and leave the decision to the government to place orders on such party. It may also be interesting to note that in some evaluations, it was just left to PwC to sit through product demonstrations without any participation of the Government.

PwC also was assigned a consultancy job from GOAP to study each department and come out with a need analysis and an architecture /roadmap for each department. There was no process reengineering. The Output was the “Big picture” This architecture was completely faulty and was never used by any department. The OLTP Project was a disaster, however 2.10 crores was spent for the pilot other that the project consultancy fees to PwC

Mr. Satyanarayana has also recommended PwC’s name to the Commercial taxes department and the Department of Municipal administration of the Government of Andhra Pradesh as a consultant.

This was the time where Mr, Satyanarayana was transferred from the IT department to the Social Welfare department. Along with him PwC’s contract was also not extended further. All the above transactions looked normal. Mr.JS, as CEO - NISG.
The first project taken by NISG was EBIZ. As usual NISG wanted to appoint a consultant and architected a tender to enable the selection of PwC as a consultant. NISG has called for a closed tender and the tender documents were given to

1. Crimson Logic ( Singapore based firm).

2. Haselfre (a 4 month old company who would not qualify the criteria)

3. PwC.

Haselfre was disqualified in the prebid evaluation criteria while Crimson logic was disqualified on the technical grounds and the contract for consultancy for EBIZ Ministry of Commerce initiative) was issued to PwC. PwC was given a task for creating a pilot for Ebiz as an additional job. Pilot was based on multiple technologies where integration would become a major issue. Subsequently NISG has called for an RFP and currently the technical bids are under scrutiny. Not surprisingly, NISG has awarded the contract to PwC for evaluating the Ebiz bids.

There are several consulting companies like KPMG, TCS, Wipro, Satyam, Ernst & Young , Microsoft Consulting services etc. who can manage similar jobs and it is difficult to understand the reason NISG has floated limited enquiries to only Crimson logic, Haselfre and PwC.

NISG has awarded the e-govworld the Knowledge portal(Ministry of Information Technology – Government of India), Govt of Chattisgarh / Govt of Karnataka procurement RFP preparation consulting job to PwC. It is very evident that all these will lead to certain vendors winning these tenders.

It is very evident that J. Satyanatanaraya has an unholy nexus with Pwc and it warrants a closer look at the possibility of corruption in the process.

To add, NISG has a bunch of inexperienced youngsters who do not understand the working of the Government involved in creation of e-governance projects. This will ensure that all projects taken up by them will fail. Precious resources of the Government are being wasted by NISG by the CEO flying in business class in India and Abroad to attend seminars, which will add no value to the successful implementation of e-governance projects".

Hoping to hear from you soon.

Regards.

Umashankar

C.Umashankar IAS., (TamilNadu Cadre)
e-governance expert and Member (Special Invitee) - Working group for
implementation of National e-governance action plan, Government of India,
New Delhi.

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