Abbreviation NIC Headquarters New Delhi Director General Neeta Verma | Formation 1976 Region served India | |
Location In all States and Districts of India | ||
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) (Hindi: राष्ट्रीय सूचना विज्ञान केंद्र Rashtriya Suchna Vigyan Kendra) is the premier science & technology organisation of India's Union Government in informatics services and information and communication technology (ICT) applications. The NIC is a part of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's Department of Electronics & Information Technology.
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It has played a pivotal role in steering e-governance applications in the governmental departments at national, state and district levels, enabling the improvement in, and a wider transparency of, government services. Almost all Indian-government websites are developed and managed by NIC.
Field of work
NIC offers telecommunications-networking services including Ku band (TDMA, FDMA, SCPC & satellite broadband) VSATs, wireless metropolitan-area networks (MANs) and local-area networks (LANs) with gateways for Internet- and Intranet-resource sharing.
It is the network infrastructure and e-governance support to India's central government and state governments, union-territory administrations, administrative divisions and other government bodies. The NIC assists in implementing information-technology projects, in collaboration with central and state governments, in the areas of: Communication & Information Technology.
Organisation
NIC is a part of the Indian Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology's Department of Electronics & Information Technology and is headquartered in New Delhi. It has offices in all 29 state capitals and 7 union-territory headquarters and almost all districts. At New Delhi Headquarters, Mean Head a large number of Application Divisions exist which provide total Informatics Support to the Ministries and Departments of the Central Government. To cater to the ICT needs at the grassroots level, the NIC has also opened offices in almost all district collectorates. NIC Extends Technical Coordianation and IT support to District Administration.
NIC computer cells are located in almost all Ministry bhawans (buildings) of the central government and Apex offices including the Indian Prime Minister’s office, the Indian Presidential Palace (Rashtrapati Bhavan) and India's Parliament House (Sansad Bhavan). It also provide support to grass root level administration.
Services
The NIC offers a host of services including:
Publications
NIC publishes an E-Governance quarterly entitled "Informatics" in both print and PDF format. The current Chief Editor is Neeta Verma, Director General of NIC. The publication is made available at Informatics Website.
Controversy
On 2 July 2014, the Google Security team became aware of fake Google certificates issued by the National Informatics Centre of India. Google immediately notified the Indian NIC and Indian Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) as well as Microsoft. Microsoft revoked the NIC's certificate and published Security Advisory 2982792.
A 9 July 2014 update to the Google Online Security Blog stated that misissued certificates included Yahoo, and the full scope of the breach was unknown:
They [CCA] reported that NIC’s issuance process was compromised and that only four certificates were misissued; the first on June 25. The four certificates provided included three for Google domains (one of which we were previously aware of) and one for Yahoo domains. However, we are also aware of misissued certificates not included in that set of four and can only conclude that the scope of the breach is unknown.