Mumbai techies show America the `easy way’ to White House

November 29: As America watches the Bush-Gore slugfest go into `sudden death' in Florida, a small team Indian software programmers in Mumb...

November 29: As America watches the Bush-Gore slugfest go into `sudden death’ in Florida, a small team Indian software programmers in Mumbai are quietly working on a computer software package that will help White House simplify the cumbersome process of new presidential appointments in January next year.

The Boston Education and Software Technologies Limited, located at Vile Parle (east), had recently bagged the prestigious contract to make the form-filling process of 6000 new appointees at White House a lot more easier under the Nomination Forms Online (NFO) programme of `White House 2001 Project’.

A dedicated team of 15 young software programmers at Boston are actively in touch with their US `contact point’, Professor Terry Sullivan, of North Carolina University and will dispatch the package to the US within next three weeks. Prof Sullivan is head of the NFO programme development team, under the Presidential Research Group.

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The Director-Technology at Boston, J P Nag, told Mumbai Newsline that they had applied for the contract earlier this year and it came as a pleasant surprise to bag the assignment. “The Twentieth Century Fund’s Task Force on Presidential Appointments described the nomination process faced by the new appointees to White House as a `maelstrom of complexity’. That’s because there are far too many forms to be filled by the appointees and very often they have to answer the same question in five different forms,” informed Nag, also the project manager of the NFO programming team.

He added that the task of automation of application forms had become all the more challenging for the Bostonians as the Presidential Research Group had demanded that the software package had to be IBM PC and Macintosh compatible and at the same time no proprietary and costly software, like Oracle or Microsoft, could be used.

“Americans do have a high regard for the Indian software developers; at the same time we also charge less, when compared to the Europeans and American software engineers,” reasoned Nag.

“We decided to use Java software program and Hypersonic SQL as the data base. But considering that we had a vast domain of 6000 new White House officials, a lot of time was spent on blackboard and detailed analysis,” said Nag, who has been working on the assignment for three months now.

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A total amount of US $ 40,000 has been paid to Boston for this, and nearly 85 per cent of the work is complete.

“It is very interesting to be working on a White House assignment. I’m handling the Finance and Armed Services personnel section,” said Boston programmer Anup Deshmukh. His colleague Priya Mandavgane has been given Judiciary and Energy-Natural Resources department of White House.

However, the programmers themselves do not know who will fill up the posts in January 2001. “My job is to ensure that the entire application runs on Macintosh system, it does not matter who will take on which post,” added another programmer Vikram Mahanta and further informed that very soon they may also make it possible to make the whole application Web based.

So Bush, Gore or whoever takes on the Oval Office now, the new White House appointees will only have the Indians to thank for cutting short the official rigmarole to a large extent.