Govt tracks connections with help from C-DAC

Sakal Times
December 02, 2012

The 'Transparency Portal' application developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to help check for illegal gas collections has been able to successfully operate, thanks to C-DAC's super computer

, which helped in assessing almost four lakh consumers' data within eight minutes.

"The Union petroleum ministry approached us to check duplicate gas connections. There are several million connections existing. The software for the portal was prepared by the NIC to track illegal connections was taking humongous amount of time. Then this software was run on C-DAC's PARAM super computer which helped in assessing four lakh consumers' data within eight minutes," Director General C-DAC Rajat Moona told reporters here.

The 'transparency portal' is expected to help the district administration to track fake consumers, consumers with multiple connections, consumption of domestic and commercial cylinders and stock of each agency that results in LPG black marketing.

It is aimed at providing the citizens of India information on the number of gas consumers (distributor wise) and the number of refills availed by them.

The government has restricted the supply of subsidised cooking gas to six cylinders per household a year to fetch an additional Rs 20,300 crore.

Each household will get six cylinders of 14.2-kg per annum at the subsidised rate of Rs 399 and any requirement beyond that would have to be procured at the market rate.

The portal can be accessed through www.petroleum.nic, the petroleum ministry's official site, as well as websites of the three oil marketing firms - Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum.

The portal also allows consumers to rate the services of their distributor.

"C-DAC is also looking at several other projects using high performance computing. We have signed an MoU with Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital Mumbai for collaborative research in cancer. We are also working on multilingual translation facilities using dedicated servers on mobile phones and village-level weather forecasting," he said.