Control room for Y2K
GEB will come in for special attention

With barely a day left for the new millennium to set in, the Gujarat Government is all geared up to counter any havoc caused by the Y2K bug. The State Unit of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is helping in this effort.

A State-level control room has been set up at the NIC office in Gandhinagar which will function round-the-clock from December 3l evening to January 3 evening and monitor the Y2K crisis, if any, in any part of Gujarat. The NIC has also set up a control room in each of the district collectorates which will keep the State-level control room abreast of any Y2K problem in the districts.

The State as well as the district level control rooms will be jointly manned by NIC personnel and government officials. Each of the district control rooms has been directed to send in "good or bad" reports every half-an-hour from 11 p.m. onwards on December 31.

A senior official of the NIC said here on Thursday that the centre would, in turn, send reports to the national control room set up in Delhi under the Union Information Technology Ministry, keeping it posted with the various measures being taken to overcome the possible Y2K problem in Gujarat. The reports from the State control room will be posted on a special website at www.nic.in/y2kactionforce created by the Centre in Delhi.

For Y2K monitoring, the NIC has identified as many as 11 "critical sectors", including power, telecom, railways, aviation, petroleum, ports, banks, hospitals, atomic energy, space and defense. However, as far as Gujarat is concerned, the authorities’ main concern is the power and health sectors.

"Though the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) has become completely Y2K compliant, we are not taking any chance, and we are prepared to help out the GEB in case the Y2K bug strikes causing a breakdown in its power sub-station in any parts of the State", explained the NIC officer. He said the NIC’s video-conferencing centre located on Ashram Road in Ahmedabad would also function round-the-clock from December 31 morning and the videoconferencing facility would be available on request from the government or any of the public sector undertakings in the State.

When contacted, J S Rana, ACS in the State Information and Technology Department, said, "Though we have already obtained the Y2K compliance certificates from the NIC for almost all the government departments in the Secretariat and elsewhere in the State, one of the main sectors of our prime concern is power/energy"

Besides the energy sector, the government is also closely monitoring the possible Y2K problem in computers installed at the government hospitals in different parts of the State.

"Although vendors have already certified the hospital computers, they will carry out a re-test in certain critical equipment immediately after the midnight of December 31 to ensure that the Y2K bug doesn’t strike the machines".

The government has set up a five-member committee headed by ACS Home V V Ramsubbarao, the senior lAS officer known for his expertise in the computer technology, to examine the Y2K problem and suggest its solution to those using computers in the various government departments:

Recently, the committee had directed the departments to replace the hackneyed 286 and 386 computers either with 486 or Pentium ones so that old programmes could be changed and the much-publicised Y2K bug problem removed.

Compiled from local news media