ICICI Infotech outsmarted Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro to get the mandate from states for setting up a national tax information exchange system (Tinxsys) to track inter-state transactions and check tax evasion.

Tinxsys would enable states to assess the sales tax and other local taxes running into Rs 1,00,000 crore (Rs 1,000 billion), Ramesh Chandra, member secretary of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers, said on Tuesday.

The VAT panel has asked ICICI Infotech to run the system in at least seven states in the next seven months on a pilot basis and then cover the entire country by January 2006.

ICICI Infotech got the IT outsourcing project worth Rs 30 crore (Rs 300 million) beating two other heavyweights TCS and Wipro, its executive director Manoj Kunkalienkar said.

"It's a historic occasion as 28 states have come together to put in place Tinxsys. The network is for tracking inter-state transactions. It will go a long way to detect if there is any tax evasion," Chandra said.

The technology backbone is key to state governments' vision of improving tax administration, especially when the country switches to the VAT regime from April 2005.

Under this project, ICICI Infotech would provide solutions in software development, data warehousing, data centre, networking, disaster recovery services, call centre services and training.

The project would be implemented on Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) basis over a period of five years.