Kapil's project PIOUS, a waste of Rs 43 lakh!

Kapil Sibal, Minister of HRD, Communications and IT, might have basked in the limelight when he launched the ‘world’s cheapest android tablet’ (costing $35), Aakash, earlier this week, but he came under attack for initiating an equally ambitious project in creating a database of Indian professionals settled in the US. The Comptroller of Auditor General (CAG), in its recent report, has accused Kapil Sibal of wasting over Rs 43 lakh in a database project launched in 2006, when he was the Minister of Science and Technology. In his zeal to establish a digital connect with 20,000 Indian professionals in the US, it was then decided to execute a project titled “Development of Database and Networking of Professionals of Indian Origin in US (PIOUS)”. [caption id=“attachment_101758” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Kapil Sibal with Aakash, world’s cheapest tablet. AFP”]  [/caption]On the face of it, the project was quite promising. The Science and Technology wing of the Embassy of India, Washington DC, with the technical support of a Columbia-based company Phoenix Rose began the implementation of the project in February 2007. The first phase of the project was to be completed in six months. Phoenix finished it in November 2007 and the second phase of the project took one year – from May 2008 to May 2009. A total of US $1,05,000 (Rs 43.17 lakh) was given to Phoenix for the entire project. Today the project is lying abandoned. The CAG says that the Ministry, then under Kapil Sibal, violated government’s financial rules and the decision in favour of the implementation of the project was ad hoc. The CAG report alleges that Embassy of India had already selected Phoenix for the project while forwarding it to Sibal in September 2006. The Indian Government had sanctioned the project in October 2006! There were no tenders or evaluation of bids for the project. To top it all, Phoenix was given money in advance even before the Ministry could verify or assess the utility of software developed by Phoenix for the project. The Ministry released full payment of $ 90,000 to Phoenix even when the number of registered members fell short of 10,000 during the first phase and without verification of the correctness of the database. “The copy of the code of the software developed for hosting the database was handed over only on 30 August 2010. Analysis of the database by a third party indicated that 4000 records were unusable and more than 3000 were duplicate,” says the CAG report. Worse was to follow. Phoenix stopped hosting the PIOUS database from December 2009 onwards. The reason: the Ministry had not worked out a business model for sustenance of the website. The Ministry paid over Rs 43 lakh for building the PIOUS portal, but it ran out of money to fund Phoenix for running the portal on a day-to-day basis.