Montek Singh Ahluwalia, chairman of the central Y2K action force set up by the government last year, said his panel had thoroughly reviewed seven of the 11 critical areas and the others were expected to be examined in the coming days.

"Very broadly, most of these departments have indicated to us that they will achieve Y2K compliance, by which I mean all those steps including a contingency plan, an external certification that the rectification is complete, somewhere between September and October end," said Ahluwalia. A high-level review meeting will be held on September 10 to evaluate the progress in implementation in these sectors.

Ahluwalia was addressing delegates at a conference on Y2K preparedness organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here on Wednesday. He identified atomic energy, civil aviation, insurance,banking, power, ports, defence, petroleum, railways, space and telecommunications as the 11 critical areas among the 65 government departments being examined by the task force.

Banking and insurance are among the remaining areas where the action force is yet to carry out comprehensive reviews. The Y2K problem, also called the `millennium bug', can arise in old-generation computers that use only the last two digits to denote a year in their date-fields. Unless rectified, the bug can cause systems to crash and consequent complications on the dawn of January 1, 2000.

Ahluwalia said key government departments were presenting the action force with details on problem identification, inventories, rectification steps, internal auditing and contingency plans. "Each department is submitting to us very detailed assessments on what they have done in each of the five areas," he said.

He said the Department of Telecommunications and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd would be compliant by the end of September, the petroleumsector had no compliance problems and the space programme had a multi-layered action plan to tackle the Y2K bug. Aviation authorities had worked out compliance measures, contingency plans and advisory services, he added.

Singh said most of these sectors will publish a compliance report by September-end. Key government departments and utilities will present an action plan with details on problem identification, inventories, rectification steps, internal auditing and contingency plans.

V Kumaran, additional member of the Railway Board, said the highest priority affected area related to the passenger reservation system which benefits 6 lakh customers every day. The railways electrical, signal and telecom departments were testing to confirm that they do not have any Y2K problem. He added that the hardware, middleware and applications software will become Y2K compliant by September-end.

...power may play spoilsport

The power sector may pose a hurdle in the efforts to minimise the risk posed by themillennium bug. Experts fear that the Y2K bug could potentially affect a number of power generation plants in the country.

However, Montek Singh Ahluwalia sought to downplay the impact on the power sector, but even he acknowledged that at least 10 per cent of the total capacity had a chance of being affected. "Only 27 of the 315 power plants could possibly face Y2K problems," he said. He added that the National Informatics Centre (NIC) was undertaking a special Y2K audit drive to ensure compliance in these plants. Central Electricity Authority (CEA) chairman RN Srivastava said that there was no move to isolate the non-Y2K compliant state electricity boards (SEBs) from the national power grid as "it is low on our priority list and as of now I do not think it will be required".

He added that power company CEOs would hold meetings twice a month to review Y2K compliance from October 1 onwards. As such, a meeting of the national standing group on Y2K was held on Wednesday.