special focus
municipal e-governance
Urban Governance:
Can help? Municipal e-Governance through advanced, interactive and user-friendly technologies is the way forward. The agenda is to minimise personal visits to a government office and ensure speedy delivery of G2C services By Sonam Gulati, eGov Bureau
M
eena works as a cook in a North Delhi posh residence. Her native place is a small village in Jharkhand. She is not educated enough to read or write properly, yet when she wants to visit her village all she has to do is organise some clicks on the internet. That is the power e-Ticketing of Indian Railways gave us. No more long queues, no more tiring trips to the stations and then realising the ticket you are getting is waitlisted, no more inaccessible phone conversations to get to know the status of your waitlisted seat in the train. e-Ticketing was one of the pioneer e-Services projects of the country and till date the most successful. Mohit Bhatia on the other hand is a busy IT professional who doesn’t have time to file his income tax. Manually doing it is further a step backwards to filing it altogether. But again e-governance has changed that. Now, all you need is a well-functioning computer and internet and you can file your income tax online without going anywhere. You don’t even need to own the PC, you can go to a cyber café. Such is the power of technology that it can transform life. e-Services provided by various municipal corporations across the country have been changing the way we live. Basic tasks such as paying property tax, getting birth and death certificates, land records and even checking availability of beds in government hospitals has made the former mundane and tedious tasks to convenient and quick. The thrust now is to ensure minimal personal contact in the government offices, with the government officials and more on how to make available services and their delivery to the citizens on their PCs. It reduces corruption, increases transparency and also saves time and hassle to both the customer and the government. “Our basic vision was that people need not go to the government offices. They get the services on their PCs and the delivery happens at their doorsteps,” said Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. Municipal services are a major project under the NeGP to offer Government to Citizens (G2C)
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services to the urban population. The various services offered render a picture of a mature, tech-savvy India where technology is paving way for development.
Municipalities as a Mission Mode Project Mission mode projects (MMP) have been designed at the centre, state and integrated levels by the government under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in 2006. NeGP is a plan of Government of India to make available all government services to the citizens via electronic medium. It comprises 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) and 8 components to give a boost to e-Governance initiatives in India. Mission Mode Projects are a key part of the NeGP. There are in all 10 Central MMPs, 10 State MMPs and 7 Integrated MMPs spanning multiple Ministries/ Departments. Municipalities are one such MMP under the state government and thus its status and progress differs from state to state. The general concept is to provide all municipal services such as land records, water bills, property tax, etc online so