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ABOUT METNET

This Intra-IMD Portal, popularly called METNET was launched on 27th July 2008 by the IT Unit functioning under the Information Systems and Services Division, India Meteorological Department, as a first initiative to have a coordinated approach to standardize database and various in-house IT related activities. Our objectives is

  •    to create a suitable platform for sharing of administrative information in IMD,
  •    to coordinate the IT efforts of various sub-offices of the department,
  •    bring efficiency and transparency in office works,
  •    to reduce the delay in exchange information and making it available in proper format,
  •    create an organisational setup which is tuned to use IT to optimise administrative and scientific activities.

    • 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 398 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 50 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 398 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 :

  • Access to the transparent Personnel Information System
  • Real-time access of circulars and office orders (related to promotions, transfers, trainings, etc.)
  • Online Leave Application and records display
  • Telephone, Newspaper, Medical bills and other payments records maintenance
  • Access to Online departmental publications and journals
  • Events / Activity dispaly and knwoledge sharing with other officials
  • Entries in their personal e-Service Book Records
  • Monitoring of Projects / Work undertaken with in the group of officers
  • Facility to search official contact particulars of any official, any section of any office and any observatory of IMD
  • Monitoring the functionality of observatories
  • Dairy of the occupations of the Director General of Meteorology
  • Complete Information on retired IMD employees
  • Data of Budget, Accounts and Expenditures


    • The offices of IMD including HQ are also facilitated with the always-updated data at the convenience of the click of the mouse related to :

  • Management of the e-Service Book Records and facility to extract any information thereof
  • Data on staff position, deployments, trainings, CCS and Financial rules and Guideline
  • Access to complete directory of contacts, official e-mails of all employees
  • Facility to generate reports and statement immediately as required by the Ministry of Earth Sciences and other government agencies
  • Assess the performance of the officers and staff with ease
  • Assess to Implemetation of the Plan Schemes and Projects
  • Information on the Court Cases at different offices of IMD available at one place


    • Ministry of Earth Sciences and other government agencies also monitors the status of functionality of the observatories of IMD and access the publications, journals and the developments going on in the department.

    In addition, the retired personals also have the facility to access the portal, update themselves with the developments, so that the department in return, is also benefited by their expertise in the field.

    Scope of Services/ Activities Covered :
    The METNET Service is dedicated for G2E governance. The beneficiaries include each and every official of IMD, the various admin and technical units, Ministry of Earth Sciences, other government agencies and also the general public to limited area. With the participation of data input from the offices, given below is the list of online sub-projects designed, developed, implemented and maintained centrally meant for all the beneficiaries mentioned. The list of sub-projects has no foreseeable end. With every package initiated, the extent of utility expands, the user gets more responsible, connected and satisfied, the office system gets more accountable, at the end objectives are achieved.

    ON-GOING PROJECTS ON METNET

    AS ON 26-04-2024
    Sr. # Project Name Date of Commencement  Details
    1 Main Portal and Database 27-07-2008 Development of main platform and centralised database architecture for hosting various in-house developed applications.
    2 Personnel Information System 31-07-2008 For HR Management and sharing real-time basic information of all IMD employees and statistics thereof.
    3 Forms, Seniority Lists, IMD News, etc. 22-09-2008 These are the facilities to view different Forms, Seniority Lists, IMD News, etc. User can also take the printout of them as per their requirement
    4 Leave Management 01-02-2009 Leave Management System is the online application in which a user can apply and track the leave applied by him/her and the section can approve and monitoring the leave records of their employees.
    5 MAUSAM Catalog 24-02-2009 To facilitate Researchers in IMD with online access to the Papers, Arricles, Abstracts, etc. published in the journal MAUSAM of IMD. The documents are made available by the MAUSAM Publication Unit at IMD HQ.
    6 Salary and Payments Display 26-03-2009 It provides the online information about the salary and payments of particular employee after his/her login on METNET.
    7 IMD Directory Search 21-05-2009 IMD Directory Search is the online search engine. To locate a employees with his/her profile. Contact address of different sub-office under their main office, sections with their strength and observatories of IMD.
    8 Progress Report Display & Upload 01-07-2009 For Sharing the Progress Reports with the IMD Officials, made available by the RMCs, Offices at Pune, and those at HQ.
    9 Pensioner's Corner 05-02-2010 Pensioner's corner involves the details of registered retired users, their contact details, residential address, documents related to retirement and other useful links.
    10 METNET Instant Messenger 15-11-2010 An Intra-IMD facility for IMD Officials to communicate and exchange documents among themselves related to the office matters .
    11 IMD Centralized E-Administration Support System - IMD CEASS 27-01-2011 This is an online e-Service Book application for management of personal records of the officials, generation of reports of all sorts of admin matters.
    12 भारत मौसम विज्ञान विभाग
    राजभाषा पटल    		 01-07-2011 To provide all offices and employees, the information related to the celebration of IMD fourth Hindi Seminar on 1st July 2011. This is a single pont of access for the distribution of the media files of the event.
    13 IMDBAMS - IMD Budget & Accounts Management System, Version 1.0 04-07-2011 IMD Budget & Accounts Management System which gives details of Budget allocations and status of payments in IMD
    14 IMD Personnel Information System 27-07-2011 This system has been relauched with the inclusion of extra facilities about all IMD employees and statistics thereof.
    15 IMDBAMS - IMD Budget & Accounts Management System, Version 1.1 01-04-2013 IMD Budget & Accounts Management System which gives details of Budget allocations and status of payments in IMD with Display of Plan category for 1) Yearly Month-wise Expenditure Statement, 2)Scheme-wise Consolidated Expenditure Statement.
    16 IMDBAMS - IMD Budget & Accounts Management System, Version 1.2 01-07-2013 IMD Budget & Accounts Management System which gives details of Budget allocations and status of payments in IMD with facility of Reconciliation with PAO.
    17 IMD CCMS - Court Cases Monitoring System 15-10-2014 For online monitoring of all legal matters, court cases pending at District Court, CAT, High Court and Supreme Court so that timely and appropriate action may be taken at the earliest.
    18 Briefcase/Handbag claim bill reimbursement 23-08-2016 IMD Gazetted Officers can submit bill for Briefcase/Handbag claim reimbursement online and concerned Bill Section can process consolidated bill for approval.
    19 Weather Forecast Verification Centre 01-02-2017 This is a single-point access of precipitation forecast verification report , normals, etc. necessarily required by the forecasting officials working in operational units.
    20 IMD Stores 31-03-2017 An online management of IMD store which includes online submission of requisition for store, receive and issue of stocks and their monitoring
    21 IMD Work Flow Dashboard - IMD WFD 06-07-2021 An Online Officer Diary
    22 IMD Publication Dashboard 01-09-2021 A Dashboard of research papers published in MAUSAM and extra departmental Journals by IMD Scientists
    23 Display of Banner 05-11-2021 Facility to all Sections (under Login by Section) of DGM & CRS Pune Offices and Admin Section of all RMCs to display info-graphics of events.
    24 Facility of Calculation of Night-Weightage 29-11-2021 Calculation of Night-Weightage for the employees having Basic Pay up-to Rs.43,600/-. has been made available on METNET.
    25 IMD Welfare, Union & Association Portal 01-12-2021 An Online Portal for IMD Officials for selection of Union / Association annually. Representatives of the Union / Associations verifies the nominations. Admin Seat deduct subscription and update the amount on the Portal.
    26 DGM Secretariat Diary 10-02-2022 For online display of DGM's Bi-weekly Review Meetings and other Appointments, DGM Secretariat's dak/diary online entry and booking of DGM Conference Hall, etc. The data is updated exclusively by the DGM Secretariat
    27 IMD APSS - IMD Audit Para Status System, Version 1.0 17-08-2023 IMD Audit Para Status System (IMD APSS) is an online system on METNET for Monitoring the status and obtaining the reply from concerned office/section for the Audit Para received from the Internal and External Audit party. Version 1.0 is launched for DGM Office as a Pilot Project.
    28 IMD e-AWAS (Online Accommodation Application and Management) 01-07-2023 IMD e-AWAS, is a web-based application, which helps in the Online Accommodation Application of IMD Quarters. The Employee can request for accommodation online and the In-charge of Quarters can process his request and take further action for allotment.
    29 Facility for calculation of Over Time Allowance (OTA) 14-09-2023 A facility for calculation of Over Time Allowance (OTA) for the employees having Basic Pay up-to Rs.43,600/- has been made available on METNET.
    30 Online Applications Forms 17-01-2024 A facility for all IMD employees to apply their applications Online which were earlier applied on Paper.
    31 IMD Visitor Management System (IMD VMS) 20-02-2024 For issuing Gate Pass to the visitor visiting IMD office after capturing his/her photograph with other details.

    Distinctive Features / Accomplishments :

  • The Intra-IMD Portal (METNET) has become the single and central point of information on the administrative matters. The access log and statistics of the use of various applications confirms the expected improvement in the business process re-engineering, working methodology, timely delivery of service and transparency. The communications between employees and the system administrators reveals the extent to which this project is popular and its objectives are achieved.
  • The in-house system designing and development has addressed the complexity of the organisation structure where the human resource management itself is a big challenge in the department like India Meteorological Department.
  • Even though the portal is meant of administration, it also supports to the technical divisions to achieve the department's weather forecasting mandate.

    • Adaptability and Scalability :
    The METNET portal has the ability to leverage the power and analytical sophistication of the NeGP infrastructure through a single, popular web interface. This portal is the complex development project integrating several applications, and then development of custom functionality on top of those integrations. This complexity is especially evident as the offices and officials demands for ever more sophisticated functionality increase. There is a significant benefit in working on a single environment compatible across the entire stack of technology with their ability to harness the potential G2E portals offers.

    The system has the ability to leverage Google gadgets also such as Maps and Translate for geo-referenced display of metadata of observatories and hindi language support, respectively. The Unicode for hindi language and the external application of video media player, etc. are already applied.

    New Models of Service Delivery :
    Since the department has 8 pay-drawing offices in the country, the service book and the records of the personnel are distributed. These can come to the centralised location electronically only. The data records developed centrally has 8 access authorities for feeding the data and its maintenance. 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. They also provide support and training as required, as an office responsibility.

    Under the service called METNET, the initiatives are highly appreciated by the beneficiaries and in addition to the specific applications, the following resources and facilitates are available at the centralised locations:

  •    standardised bilingual forms for all almost all sorts of service,
  •    links to all the websites of IMD sub-offices,
  •    complete telephone, address and e-mail directory of entire IMD as One and links to the directories of Ministry of Earth Sciences, DOPT, Ministry of Finance, etc,
  •    links to GOI Websites, most relevant,
  •    pre-downloaded CCS Rules, Manuals of Office procedures, Order related to 7th CPC, etc., for ready-reference.

    • Efficiency Enhancement :
    The significant changes are noticed in a way the admin units are issuing the notifications and office orders. They used to reach the employees posted at the remote observatories after a significant delay or may not reach even if the regional and hierarchical authorities decide in-between. The efficiency of HQ as enhanced by the direct contact with the employee, doesn't matter where the official is posted.

    The copy of e-service book at the centralised and single location enabled the process of re-engineering in the admin units. Now the information on employees is not asked from the respective regional center, as it is available readily on the system. The printing and delivery of pay-slips every month is not being issued as it is available on the portal, if required, although the paper printing is discouraged. The individual employees are willingly keeping their contact details updated for the benefit of the employees. The daily appointment and occupations of the Director General of Meteorology which was known to only a few people is now easily accessible to all the employees at all locations from Srinagar to Port Blair and one can now plan the events and meetings at ease. Every unit used to keep the record of each and every file coming and going out of the office in separate register. This record is centralised, data entry significantly reduced and the transparency can be seen in the movements recorded in the File Tracking System.

    Similarly every sub-project implemented on METNET has brought a significant change in the work process and improvement in the efficiency in service delivery of the office.

    User Convenience :
    The notifications, circulars, office orders of trainings, transfers, promotion, etc., IMD publications, GOI rules and guidelines, and much more are now at the click of the mouse to the employees of the IMD. These documents are posted by the respective divisions and they are free from their hard-copy issuance.

    Every employee can view and monitor the service book entries. They are having the tools to follow the developments going on and important decisions going on in the department. The main constrains was the distance from the decision making authorities, which has no place in this portal.

    Sustainability :
    With the advantages of better integration management, flexibility, software license management, no vendor lock-in, etc., the open-source technology with server-side scripting on PHP and some java scripts have been combined for the development of the applications on this Intra-IMD Portal. The in-house development is best suited for the intranet sites. The tailor-made applications with the dedicated team and the routine maintenance of the METNET portal provide the excellent management and sustainability with respect to the technology, security and service.

    Cost Effectiveness :
    The complete development and implementation is in-house with the existing manpower and as such practically no expenditure involved.



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