The systems integrator will look after all aspects pertaining to hardware under the department's ambitious plan to network all its 745 centres in around 510 towns and cities and create an integrated National Data Centre.

The department is expected to issue a  letter of intent for the project, expected to be worth a couple of hundred crores of rupees, in April. While IBM was in the fray for supplying IBM solutions, TCS would provide HP's solutions and Wipro would provide Sun Microsystem solutions, officials said.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram had, in the Budget, said that computerisation of the income tax department would be completed by December 2006. However, the department is hoping to operationalise the National Data Centre in Delhi by the middle of the year.

Data contained in the data centre will be replicated at a business utility centre in Mumbai. In addition to this, there will be a disaster recovery data centre in Chennai.

Both these centres are also expected to be operational by the middle of the year. Data from 36 data centres of the income tax department will be integrated at the National Data Centre.

Government officials said the systems integrator would supply the hardware, including servers for connecting the network, provide data storage systems, mail and messaging systems, data back-up solutions and an anti-virus solution.

The department, in October last year, had appointed IBM-Bharti for providing software solutions for the computerisation project. The contract, awarded on a build-own-operate basis, is valid for five years and is estimated to be worth around Rs 240 crore. Under it, IBM-Bharti is to provide all equipment and assets and additional bandwidth on demand to the tax department.

Officials said technical experts from the IITs, IIMs, Infosys [Get Quote], Nasscom and the Manufacturers' Association of Information technology, as well as independent consultants, had provided inputs to the department for implementing its computerisation programme.