Thaindian News

Bangalore, July 19 (IANS) The Employees’ State Insurance Corporation’s (ESIC) portal, managed by Wipro Ltd, is operating and available for use by all stakeholders, the IT bellwether said Tuesday.

“The technical hitch has been resolved and the system (portal) is back to normal performance. The hitch occurred due to a technical issue with the application software,” Wipro Infotech vice-president Anand Sankaran said in a statement here.

The state-run insurance portal Panchdeep was set up in 2009 by Wipro for the ministry of labour and employment to provide automated healthcare services to about 50 million beneficiaries across the country under the social security scheme.

Admitting that the hitch had affected the functioning of the online portal over the last couple of weeks, Sankaran said the company had identified the problem and resolved it for resuming the service at the earliest.

The Rs.1,000-crore e-governance project comprises a range of services related to identification, authentification and verification of insured persons through biometric cards with support systems, including network, bandwidth, data centre, disaster recovery managed by the IT company.

“As the portal was down due to the hitch, employers had trouble accessing the application to generate their monthly contribution and register their employees. Wipro identified the problem and put in place a solution to resolve the issue. The application performance has since improved and the portal is up and running once again,” ESIC director-general C.S. Kedar said.

As one of the largest e-governance projects in the country, Panchdeep provides online facilities to employers and insured people for registration, payment of premium and disbursement of cash benefits.

It also automates medicare services to all insured people resulting in the creation of one of the largest medical records database in the world.

The project includes other modules like human resource, finance and general administration programmes aimed at increasing the operational efficiency of ESIC.

“With this implementation, all ESIC stakeholders can avail anytime, anywhere healthcare services from across 2000+ ESIC locations spread across the country which have been networked as part of the project,” the statement added.