Networking the Gurudwaras

When the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC) found itself struggling to manage all its myriad activities, it looked for a solution. And found it in networking.
As one drives towards Connaught Place from South Delhi, what meets the eye on the way are two beautiful structures standing tall amidst many government and commercial high rises that line this part of the city. The Gurudwara Rakab Ganj and Gurudwara Bangla Sahib are no doubt among the holiest shrines of Sikhism in the country. These, along with Gurudwara Sheesh Ganj and Gurudwara Nanak Piyao, form the pillars and centres of Sikhism in Delhi and the surrounding areas.

These Gurudwaras are managed by a democratically-elected body called the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC) with Jathedar as the head of the committee. This body manages a labyrinth of activity almost akin to a large business enterprise, of four widely-located Gurudwaras with immensely busy schedules. And an approximate wealth of Rs 100 crore to handle-receipt and disbursement to be accounted-in a year. Activities include receiving the visit of 12,050 devotees on a normal day and as many as 26,300 on a holy day, accounting of donations in both cash and kind, administration of the prasad preparation and distribution process, and administration of the langar distribution, apart from the holier jobs like management of the sanctum sanctorum and the various practices associated with the prayers.

The DSGMC also has the additional responsibility of managing twenty eight educational institutions that the Sikh community has built under the aegis of the Gurudwaras. And overseeing several community projects.

The Gurudwaras' Requirement
Over the years, the DSGMC has accumulated a lot of wealth-and because of manual recording, it was becoming difficult to efficiently quantify this wealth. Unofficial claims are that as many as Rs 20 crore are pilfered every year. Then there was an ever-burgeoning traffic of devotees visiting the shrine and with it the logistics that go in providing access to them, receiving donations from them, providing prasads and langars to them, etc. It was getting too complex to be handled on a manual basis alone.

The present Jathedar of the DSGMC, Avtar Singh Hit, looked for a solution. And found it in networking. The most important thing that the Gurudwara committee wanted was to bring order and efficiency into the management and administration of the holy places, and their associated places of learning.

The Solution
Multiple Zones India Pvt Ltd was selected as the network and systems integrator for the provisioning of the solution. The solution that was offered and is in now in its final implementation stage, is based on open platforms and involves both LAN and WAN, apart from the IT hardware and software installed. Reliability, affordability and simplicity are the essence of the solutions provided. The complete system was to be reliable enough both to improve the information availability and logistics and not delay the daily processes. The cost of ownership of the infrastructure was to be optimum-neither too costly nor inadequate. And importantly, the entire IT/network infrastructure was to be simple enough to be run and maintained by a team that was relatively new to technology.

The project involved setting up LANs at each of the Gurudwaras and a WAN connecting these LANs as well as the local servers in the educational institutions. Gurudwara Rakab Ganj which houses the DSGMC's central office was to be the central site of the WAN, housing two separate central servers which would maintain the centralized repositories-one central server for the Gurudwaras and the other for the educational institutions.

The LANs in the Gurudwaras were built using the passive structured cabling systems of Avaya, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet/Fast Ethernet switches of Allied Telesyn, and racks of HCL. The IT hardware installed was from IBM and was based on the Windows 2000 platform. The back end included SQL database systems and the front-end was designed on Visual Basic. The reporting system was from Crystal. The LAN at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib has a provision for accepting credit card and cheques for donations as well. The central servers at Rakab Ganj have been put behind a Linux-based firewall. The LANs deployed at the Gurudwaras have a total number of five servers and sixty PC nodes apart from printers and scanners. These LANs deployed at the Gurudwaras are unique in the sense that they are horizontal by nature with widely dispersed nodes-located at distances as much as 400 meters and beyond.
To the credit of the networking team from Multiple Zones, it provisioned a unique solution that would work out best considering both cost and the LAN complexity. It proposed and implemented Ethernet 2 wire modem links to these remotely located nodes within the campuses-thus saving on the costs. Patton modems were used for this purpose.

The local servers at all the Gurudwaras and the educational institutions connect to the two central servers at Gurudwara Rakab Ganj through dedicated ISDN dial-in links. There is a 3Com ISDN RAS installed at the central site to dial-in from the various remote servers. The information that is captured at the time of the transactions every day, accumulates at the local server which is uploaded on the central servers through dial-up ISDN links using 3Com modems, at the end of the day. The Multiple Zones team decided on ISDN as the WAN link as it met the requirement from the DSGMC for a latency period of one day between the local servers and the repositories.

Future Plans
As the final stages of the networking of these Delhi-based Gurudwaras continue, the people who are actually going to run the network tomorrow, are being educated and trained by Multiple Zones. The entire project is slated for completion by June. Today, the DSGMC has to its credit implemented India's first online networked religious organization. Tomorrow, one may even see it pioneering to establish cutting-edge technologies like video streaming and IP radio station, to spread the Gurubani across the oceans.