The Indian Navy will have a faceless bill processing and payment gateway by next year that would be an improved version of the existing contact-less income tax assessment system to offer a complete acquisition management solution, weeding out redtapism, procedural delays, opaqueness and other stumbling issues.
Adding to this step, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is working to compile voluminous 6-lakh thousand crore defence data to extract economics out of them by way of Artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning, said Principal Integrated Financial Advisor (Navy) Dr Mayank Sharma at a session on defence acquisition policy issues at Swavlamban Seminar on Wednesday.
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“Such efforts on defence finance and economics is going on abroad, especially in the United States of America , and we want to analyse the military expenditure’s contribution to our national economy which would help quell the popular perception that it’s non productive,” he explained.
Through faceless bill processing and payment platform, the procurement process would be wholly automated allowing ease of doing business to the stakeholders, said the Principal IFA (Navy). The senior finance officer said the product would be ready in one year.
The idea to have have a faceless and paperless process, elaborated Dr Mayank Sharma, came from a suggestion Defence Minister Rajnath Singh made last October, and by December our team rolled out ‘Randomisation of bill’ which, means that no one would get to know who is handling the payment invoice.
The product
Giving an insight into how the product would improve the much needed ecosystem, Sharma stated that the main focus are ‘zero document’ as the first and the last word would be fed online, the system would be such that it would not allow any user of the platform to make any mistake like it won’t accept data mismatch or incorrect papers.
Similarly, a portal will be dedicated to completely make the acquisition procedures virtual. Everything, from Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) to Request for Procurement (RFP) and relevant data will be just a click away for the service providers and users of products, he pointed out.