The Punjab government will shortly migrate to phase III of its ICT Education project.
This project would cover about 2085 government schools in rural and urban areas across the state.
It has chosen Gemini Communication Ltd. for the project. The deal valued at Rs.576 million involves turnkey hardware and service provider for supply, installation and maintenance of IT Infrastructure (hardware, networking and system software etc.) for the project.
The project would be on a lease, maintain and transfer (LMT) model for 5 years.
Gemini would be responsible to set up the entire networking in the school, install workstations and servers with software and maintain infrastructure for five years.
The Punjab government will hire teachers to impart computer education to students.
With this project, the company will now deploy more resources in North India and can strengthen its base to service clients in Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
It plans to open a sales & support office in Chandigarh to provide support for the project and at the same time, expand its client base in that region.
SreeKrishna director and COO of the company said, "We worked very hard for this project and put in our best possible bid. Our bid was declared as the lowest during the financial bid opening. We are very confident that Gemini will play a major role in addressing the issue of digital divide in non-urban India."
This would be the company's second project to be implemented in the rural and semi-urban terrain this year. It had bagged an order from Tamil Nadu Electricity Board for about Rs.75 crores for computerization and connectivity of collection centers in rural and semi-urban areas. These areas had to be integrated with TNEB's network operations center in Chennai. Gemini implemented the first phase of the TNEB project successfully last year and this year, they have been awarded the second phase also.
The company's current order book position is Rs.175 crore and all this will have to be executed in the first two quarters of this financial year. With the Punjab Schools project being a BOOT model, Gemini will execute orders worth about Rs.175 crore in the first two quarters while recognizing revenues for about Rs.125 crore.
