Technologies for e-commerce: India initiatives

Considering the strategic importance of e-commerce, the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, sponsored a project to develop "technologies for e-commerce" in the country. The research and development activities were jointly carried out by IDRBT and CMC Ltd. Under this project integrated product suite for conducting end-to-end e-commerce transaction using credit card and e-cheque with PKI technology for payment purposes and to address the perimeter security firewall and intruder detection system, were developed. The paper discusses various payment instruments and present one of them namely e-cheque protocol and development activities along with its usage and advantages over other.