National e-Governance Service Delivery Gateway

NSDG (National e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway) is one of India’s Mission Mode Projects (MMP). The initiative taken by the Department of Information & Technology. CDAC Mumbai has been entrusted with building of NSDG and NSD(National Services Directory).

NSDG (National e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway) is a standard based messaging middleware for e-Governance services. This is classified under Integrated MMP (Mission Mode Projects) of Department of Information Technology, Govt. of India under NeGP(The National e-Governance Plan) and is the Second Mission Mode Project to enter operational phase starting from August 14, 2008.

Apart from many path breaking innovations that NSDG has undertaken itself and the ambitious objective it has embarked upon, NSDG is probably the only one which has won its first appreciation three months before its golive. NSDG bagged The World is Open Award 2008 in the e-Governance category at The World is Open Award 2008 function organized by Skoch Consultancy Services and Red Hat. The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Govt. of India aims to cooperate, collaborate and integrate information across different departments in the Centre, States and Local Government. Government systems are characterized by islands of legacy systems using heterogeneous platforms and technologies and spread across diverse geographical locations, in varying state of automation, make this task very challenging.

NSDG can simplify the above task by acting as a standards-based messaging switch and providing seamless interoperability and exchange of data across the departments. NSDG acting as a nerve centre, would handle large number of transactions and would help in tracking and time stamping all transactions of the Government.

Other Benefits

• Enable transaction logging and time stamping for tracking of transactions and centralized control
• Departments which do not have the complete automation or work flow at the back can still deliver e-Service to the citizens in a limited manner through the Gateway
• Help protect the legacy investments in software and hardware by easily integrating them with other technology platforms and software implementations
• Can act as the Shared services hub by supporting value added service interfaces like the Payment gateway and Authentication interface

Organizations Involved

Apart from the Department of IT, Government of India which is the owner of the project, other parties involved are:

• C-DAC, Mumbai
• STQC (Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification)
• NIC (National Informatics Centre)
• NISG (National Institute for Smart Government)

CDAC has shouldered responsibility of designing and implementing NSDG. CDAC will be coordinating Operations and Maintenance for a period of 5 years starting from date of go-live. STQC is the Testing and Certifying authority. NSDG solution infrastructure is hosted at NIC Data Centre and Data Recovery Centre. NISG has served as advisory and consulting agency to DIT.

DIT has also envisaged the Constellation of Gateways which will include NSDG at the center, various state gateways and the private gateways. Each gateway will have a service directory called Gateway Services Directory (GSD) which will keep all information regarding services which is available by that gateway. There will be a National Services Directory (NSD) which will serves as central registry for Gateway address resolution to facilitate inter Gateway communication.

Standards behind the whole Gateway Constellation

• Interoperability Interface Protocol (IIP)
• Interoperability Interface Specifications (IIS)
• Inter-Gateway Interconnect Specifications (IGIS)
• Gateway Common Services Specifications (GCSS)

How it will work?

This project is on J2EE platform and based on the Service Oriented Architecture. It uses web services extensively for publishing it services. Open Source Technologies have been given the highest priority while choosing the Operating System, Application Server, Database and other required tools. The gateway is completely secure. Security compliance of the NSDG as per ISO 17799:2005/BS7799-1:2005.

IIP defines the protocol to define a IIP message or simply a message. IIS defines the packaging of IIP messages. One IIS message can package more than one IIP message, but currently this is only restricted to one IIP message. IIS restricts to package only one type of message.

According to IIS, following type of Message element are possible in a IIS document:

• SubmitRequest
• SubmitPoll
• DeleteRequest
• SubmitResponse
• ListRequest
• SubmitRequestReturn
• SubmitPollReturn
• DeleteRequestReturn
• SubmitResponseReturn
• ListRequestReturn

All possible IIS Messages and its communications across SAP-G/W-SP.
(Fig : Click on the following picture for larger view.)

According to IIP, following type of IIP messages can be defined on the basis of two element called Function and Qualifier of this protocol:

• Submit Request
• Submit Acknowledgement
• Submit Poll
• Submit Response
• List Request
• List Response
• Delete Request
• Delete Acknowledgement
• Delete Response
• Submit Error

All possible IIP Messages and its communications across SAP-G/W-SP.
(Fig 2: Click on the following picture for larger view.)

Features

• Standard Compliance to gateway standards and protocols
  • Interoperability Interface Protocol (IIP)
  • Interoperability Interface Specification (IIS)
  • Inter-Gateway Interconnect Specifications (IGIS)
  • Gateway Common Services Specifications (GCSS)
• Other standards and protocols
  • SOAP 1.2
  • HTTP 1.1
  • XML 1.0
• Reliability: NSDG framework has to demonstrate a robust message delivery and zero-data loss.
• Availability: NSDG Solution has to demonstrate 99.9 % availability.
• Security: The security compliance is as per ISO 17799:2005 / BS7799-1:2005.
• Scalability: NSDG Solution needs to demonstrate vertical as well as horizontal scalability. NSDG solution needs to meet throughput requirement of processing an initial volume of 250 messages per second on average with a max capacity of 1000 messages per second.
• Logging: NSDG solution shall provide with various types of log without impacting the solution performance beyond a certain level.
• Portability: NSDG solution is portable across various platform to ensure protection against vendor, platform and architecture lock-in.

Solution Developement

NSDG solution has been envisaged composed of lightweight components with conscious efforts of using POJO as the model for implementation. Apart from POJO, it is using Enterprise JavaBean™ components like stateless Session Beans and Message-Driven Beans. The entire solution runs on JBoss Application Server with webservice interfacing managed using Apache AXIS2 and website interfacing managed using Apache Tomcat. PostgreSQL is the database management system selected for Messaging and other MIS related information storage. Log4J is used for solution logging and is integrated with database for the purpose of audit trails and MIS reports where deemed necessary. HypericHQ and JBoss Operations Network is used for solution infrastructure management including application server and database server. JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite is utilized for the development of MIS report for consumption by SAP(Service Access Provider), SP(Service Provider), GSP(Gateway Services Provider) and Gateway Project Board. The solution uses JOSSO for enabling single sign-on over NSDG facilities built across heterogeneous implementations.

Awards

NSDG has own The World is Open Award.

Terminologies

SP: Service Provider. Government Departments who will provide the services.
SAP: Service Access Provider. Third party which will provide the access to the services to end citizen via Gateway(NSDG).

Related Blog Entries by me:

• NSDG @ DQ eGov 2008, Mumbai
• NSDG @ DQ eGov 2008, New Delhi
• The World is Open Award to NSDG
• All set for Solution Deployment of NSDG and NSD
• Solution Deployment @NIC Hyderabad I
• Solution Deployment @NIC Hyderabad II
• Solution Deployment @NIC Hyderabad III
• System Testing
• Bugs are bugging

Related Blog Entries by Peeyush Chomal:

• NSDG @ Elitex 2008
• “Your contributions to NSDG is trementous”
• Work sees no place, no time…
• Second Round started since 22nd
• Hyderabad Heroics
• Not so “Damn”ing post :p
• Close encounter with first award for NSDG
• Tere pass kya hain?
• Not all time can audience be lucky
• Did I? No, they did
• TMC @Delhi tomorrow

Other Blog Entries:
NSDG on Mutiny

Further Reading:

Official Website
NSDG on Wikipedia
NSDG on DIT Website
NSDG on Mutiny
National e-Governance is a mission
Presentations on NSDG
NSDG on C-DAC Mumbai Website

Trademarks:

NSDG and CDAC logos are trademarks of DIT, Govt. of India and CDAC, respectively.