ESIC Starts Old Cheque Payment of Employer Contribution for its Portal

The Employee State Insurance Corporation has devised an alternate offline mechanism for payment of employer contribution of over a crore employees registered with the scheme, in the event of technical bug in its portal ESIC.in . 

Till July 21st, about 3.2 lakh employers across India on behalf of over one crore employees have to submit their contribution. They are now allowed to pay via the old method of cheque payment. 

Wipro Infotech is the executing IT firm of government's single largest e-governance project - The 1,182 crore computerisation project of ESIC. The employers registered, with the web portal were not being able to pay dues online, in the event of a bug. The old method of cheque payment as an alternative, even though ESIC says that it has been fixed temporarily. 

"Website is encountering some intermittent issues, due to this some users may face disruptions while transacting, we are working on this issue, hope to sort out shortly," the portal application website, states on its homepage. 

The portal has been struggling to work since last two weeks, and Wipro set up new servers to cater to the problem, but the cause is still not known. 

"Till July 21st, we wont allow any major tinkering which may shut portal, to ensure, employers can submit their dues. Late payment may attract interest on employers. So we have devised an alternate offline mechanism to cater to the issue," says Dr CS Kedar, Director General at ESIC, at the new plush headquarters in the capital. Dr Kedar however adds that the website was looked into and fixed on Monday. About 3.2 lakh employers across India are registered with ESIC and the web portal experiences a traffic of about 12,000-16,000 users, everyday. 

"We still don't know the actual problem, if it's in software coding or a hardware problem," said an IT official at ESIC. "We will fix the technical bug by this weekend."



Economic Times, New Delhi, 19-07-2011