Situation before the initiative :
The India Meteorological Department was one of the few organisations implementing the use of supercomputers in India. Since 1875, IMD has progressively expanded its ICT infrastructure for meteorological observations, communications and weather forecasting services.

However, the other side of the coin, the administrative and governance part of the department has realised the great potential of technology quite late. The department has 6 Regional Centers, 26 Meteorological Centers and about 404 observatories spread all over the country. The Human Resource management has been a challenge for the suitable deployment of the personnel in every district of every state and union territory.

Prior to 2008, the administrative units were using traditional methods of delivery of notifications, orders, guidelines, etc. It was difficult for them to get connected to the end-users of the system under the hierarchical procedures. These units were not equipped with the tools of technology to deliver the service in a effective, reliable, time-bound and limpid and logical manner. Moreover the department had no electronic database of employees, no query mechanisms at the click of the button, and no real-time administrative management system. It was more person-dependent, less transparent with the hurdles of senior-junior controls, resulting in the failure of transfer of information on rules regulations, admin procedures, vulnerable to the wrong willful activities in the system and many a times, harassment to the employees.

Strategy Adopted :
The need was felt to design a suitable platform applicable to all cadres, all offices and sub-offices, wherein all administrative information can be made available on real-time to all the beneficiaries of the project. The same can be used to assist the administrative authorities and HR managers in effective decision making process. The concept of Intra-IMD Portal was conceived and the project for its in-house development was taken up at the HQ level. An Intra-IMD Portal, popularly called 'METNET', was developed by the team of dedicated officer and staff of IMD.

The METNET Team had done pre-programming survey, study of rules regulations and procedures, software development, their implementation, imparting training, further maintenance and future up-gradation for more than 50 sub-projects and packages for the effective administrative reforms through METNET Service.

It was initialized with the preparation of the centralised database of the personals and as stated, the main challenge was to gather the information from the distributed service book records from all regional centers. For the personnel information system, some data is required to be collected from the beneficiaries also.

Information Availability :
The India Meteorological Department, with its headquarters as O/o Director General of Meteorology, New Delhi, has 7 other main offices, viz. one office in Pune and 6 Regional Centers located at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Guwahati and Nagpur. There are 48 Meteorological Centers / FMO / DWR / CWC and other sub-offices, where some are under the administrative control of Regional Centers and some are directly under HQ. The department's functionality dependents on about 404 observatories spread all over the country, where some are under the administrative control of Meteorological Center, some under Regional Centers and some are directly under HQ.

The maintenance of service book records is physically distributed among these 8 main offices. The administrative units at HQ update the information on the officials and their personal records in a conventional manner. With the beginning of this Government-to-Employee (G2E) type of IT project, the electronic maintenance of information is centralised and effectively managed. The METNET provides support to the office administration in delivering comprehensive reports and easy-to-use enquiry tools by direct secured access of information in an electronic format.

The METNET Coordinators are nominated at all the regional and sub-offices. Their responsibilities is to further coordinate with their respective admins and staff member to spread the importance and utilities of the IT sub-projects launched on the system.

For the convenience, the facility is available to search any employee, its basic information, official contacts, any observatory and persons posted thereof, and any circular / office order / notification. Since some particulars are updated by the employees themselves and also that they participate in the e-activities on METNET, a single contact point METNET MailDesk is created where issues related to METNET are resloved.

Result Achieved/ Value Delivered to beneficiary of the projects :
Being the direct beneficiary, the employees of the department now have the following facilities :