E-governance
Reaching Out Chennai Corporation’s automated revenue collection activity weeds out manual processes and creates a proactive tax collection backbone
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hennai Corporation has 25 municipal wards all across the state; the primary responsibility of these wards is property tax collection of 6.25 lakh residential/commercial properties. Given the huge sample size, the Chennai Corporation introduced a unique mobile solution for tax collection which requires minimal documentation. The solution expedites the process of collection and bill collectors need not carry a plethora of documents anymore. Respective data is uploaded to the main server immediately and the tax payers get to know details of their arrears instantaneously. This has also helped bring down the queues at the payment counters at the zonal offices.
Challenges
Previously, the zonal tax collectors needed to go to the customers for collecting the arrears. Each collector was provided with a ledger book, where the arrears of the customer were manually recorded. After collection, the collectors update this data on the ledger book, respectively. The data subsequently was required to be fed in the Corporation’s local system. One of the biggest challenges was the manual data and that too was not in accordance with the data available in the system. Moreover the need of the hour was to get the real-time information on the arrears was not available. Given this backdrop tax collectors carried wrong or incomplete information with them all the time and that led 30 | May 15, 2012
Key Benefits
n Updating a transaction now takes about 3-4 minutes instead of 2 weeks earlier n Discrepancy in tax computation reduced following reduced multiple manual entries n Property tax collection has increased every year since the solution was introduced in 2008 n Reduced queues at counters of the corporation offices n No backlog in updating records
to numerous human errors due to manual entry.
The Solution
The Corporation rolled out airtel’s BlackBerry based solution and with that, tax collectors equipped with BlackBerry and small bluetooth printer capture real-time information on outstanding arrears customer-wise. Tax collectors accept payment either by cash or cheque/DD. The details are captured simultaneously resulting in recording of the payment history real-time and generation of a payment receipt instantaneously. According to sources, the solution is a powerful tool which empowers the tax collector with ease of services like on the spot receipt issuance, timely data updation, and visit www.dqindia.com
minimized overcrowding at the payment counters. It has helped Chennai Corporation with an increased and effective productivity and hastened customer satisfaction. Before the role out of this solution the Corporation looked at a solution which enables revenue collection field personnel to access the back-end database wirelessly. It also looked at simple and highly secure data access. Other specific things it wanted in the system were that the handheld application should also have the capability to print data from the screen on a bluetooth-enabled printer and in sum it looked at a total solution including a back-end server software and device module. n DQ Report
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