Rollout of the Delhi leg of the project is critical because the registry here serves about 1.4 lakh companies — the largest concentration among about 7 lakh companies in India.
Soon after the MCA21 was launched in New Delhi on March 18, 2006 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the facilitation office set up by the government to help smaller companies make the transition to electronic filing of documents struggled to cope with the rush.
The facilitation centre, named Physical Front Office (PFO), had to cope with a rush of people who misunderstood its nature of work, government officials said.
PFOs are designed to help companies file documents. However, a number of early arrivals at the New Delhi PFO had come to apply for the unique director’s identity number, Director Identification Number (DIN).
Tanmoy Chakravarty, vice-president and head of global government and industry group at Tata Consultancy Services, the software company that is implementing MCA21, said the New Delhi PFO staff had to spend the first day educating visitors about the role of the centre. The situation has since stabilised, he added.
In order to cope with the sheer number of companies with the New Delhi registry, one PFO was opened in Gurgaon this week. Another PFO is to start functioning in the Noida special economic zone. The speed of service in the New Delhi PFO has improved after an increasing number of people have started bringing data to the centre in electronic form, Chakravarty said.
A visit to the PFO showed that typically people who brought data in electronic form were able to get their work done in about a third of the time it took people with hard copy data.
Quelle: Business Standard, 06.04.2006
