There is an increasing interest in e-governance for better reachability of government services to citizens. This paper is on our efforts to automate a key activity of the science and technology department of the government of India. In particular, we present the design and development of a comprehensive Web-based system for inviting and processing research proposals. The architecture presented is generic in that extensions to multiple applications such as conference and event management are straightforward. We present the challenges in the automation process, discuss prior work, and then present novel aspects of our system. The system is based on PHP and MySQL. © Copyright 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.