The Hindu : New Delhi News : Filing I-T returns a click away soon

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 15, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

Filing I-T returns a click away soon

Staff Reporter

All the I-T offices across India to be linked

NEW DELHI: Moving a step closure towards implementing its ambitious e-governance scheme, the Income Tax Department has completed the first phase of an all-India Taxnet project aimed at networking 745 offices in 510 cities that will help all taxpayers file their returns through the Internet and get updates of their particular cases.

The Rs. 240-crore project for a five-year period is being implemented by Airtel Enterprise Services of the Bharti Group and IBM that will create the largest-ever "Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network" (IP-VPN) to connect all the Income Tax Department offices across India.

"The project will be completed by the end of March 2006 connecting all offices to the Department's National Data Centre on a common centralised database by June this year enabling us to roll out our IT services including e-delivery of tax services, filing of returns, PAN migration and status of all records," said Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) Member J.G. Pendse. Interestingly, the Taxnet project of the Union Finance Ministry is one of the largest IT projects undertaken by the Centre. In the first phase, 170 Income Tax department locations across the country have been connected. The network will help 13,000 IT officials access data from the centralised system. Centralised work force and document management solutions will be implemented in due course besides providing video-conferencing facilities.

According to Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited's Joint Managing Director Akhil Gupta, "The project has been implemented on a Build-Own-Operate basis that involves setting up a modern state-of-the-art MPLS IP VPN network. With an uptime of 99 per cent on end-on-end basis extending from PC node to the National Data Centre, the network will ensure secured encrypted data flow. We will also ensure complete technology and investment protection for a period of five years."

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