Page 24 - Informatics, July 2020

IN FOCUS

COVID-19 e-Pass

A ServicePlus Success Story

he Covid-19 menace was spreading vig-
orously in the country. On 24th March
2020, honourable Prime Minister of In-
Tdia declared a nationwide lockdown for
three weeks. It was part of a preventive measure
to tackle the pandemic. Lockdown limited the
movement of the entire population of the coun-
try, but the fact is that no society can afford a
complete standstill. To run the system, to ensure
proper governance, a controlled movement was
essential.
Initially, the movement was limited to essen-
tial service providers as well as for those who
were in medical urgency. The expected volume of
application as well as the mandate of shorter re-
sponse time demanded an IT solution to handle
the movement pass. Responding to the need of
the hour, many agencies from many states start-
ed creating applications to handle the situation.
Within no time, the solution providers were load-
ed with multiple change requests as the scenar-
ios and approaches were undergoing frequent
changes. more than 1400 services are being Across states, the requirement was to have some
offered through ServicePlus by various variations in the data set. The native feature of
To handle the continually recurring change states. ServicePlus framework supports varying data set
requests and to comply with the functional and and different workflows across states and ser-
security requirements were the challenges faced During the lockdown period, this framework vices.
by these agencies. It was necessary to have a con- was extensively used by different stakeholders.
figurable framework to handle such a scenario. The e-Pass services offered by 18 states were con- Most of the e-Pass services were to be availed
Being a service delivery framework, ServicePlus figured using ServicePlus. All the services related by the public without logging on to the site. In
was designed and equipped to handle any such to COIVD-19 have undergone frequent version ServicePlus, to make a service accessible with or
scenarios. This was realised by many states and updates to accommodate the frequent policy without login is decided by a single check box
they decided to use ServicePlus to handle the changes of various governments. Over the years, selection. While configuring the service, answer
various services related to COVID-19 pandemic. ServicePlus has adopted many functionalities/ to the question “Whether the applicant needs to
features that are essential for e-service delivery. logon to the system to avail this service?” is the
Introduction The features are incorporated in ServicePlus in deciding factor which enables or disables this
such a manner that, it can be configured to suit functionality. Things are that simple in Service-
ServicePlus (https://serviceonline.gov.in) is the requirements of any client. Plus.
a meta-data based e-Service delivery frame-
work which is built on LowCode–NoCode (LCNC) Versatile Features provided in While describing the ePass system through
architecture. It offers a wizard-like interface for ServicePlus, we have to mention one underlying
defining the meta-data of the service and finally, e-Pass Service(s) application which provides entity codes to the
the newfangled rendering engine correlates the The versatility along with the inbuilt version system. It is the Local Government Directory (LGD)
metadata to generate an e-Service on the fly. It control mechanism made ServicePlus the most which accords a unique code for each entity. This
offers Multi-Tenancy, that enables each tenant suitable framework to deal with COVID-19 men- code is being used by all states in their various
to configure and manage their e-Governance ace. The base data set collected across the state applications. Thus the implementation of LGD
services as per their requirement. As on date, was more or less same in all e-pass services. codes ensures interoperability.

24 informatics.nic.in Covid-19 Special Issue