Taking a cue from the Hyderabad civic body, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) will offer a host of services — including renewal of trade licence, collection of property tax, distribution of mutation forms and granting permission for water supply connection — through the e-Seva booths, to be run by authorised agencies.
Municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay, who returned from Hyderabad on Sunday after studying the e-Seva services there, said: “We will ask our consultants to restructure the ongoing e-governance scheme in the CMC, keeping in mind the proposed retail scheme.”
A Rs 100-crore e-governance programme, funded by the Department for International Development of the British government, has just kicked off in the civic body. Work is likely to end by 2008.
The CMC has engaged Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the project and signed an agreement with BSNL for installation of networking facilities.
The commissioner said the CMC maintains a chain of over 100 offices across the city and TCS is devising an integrated municipal administrative system through a wide-area networking (WAN) and an inter-departmental local area networking (LAN) facilities.
Once the e-governance scheme is ready, the civic body will be able to decentralise its activities, which is the precondition for the success of proposed retailing of services, Bandyopadhyay explained.
Quelle: The Telegraph, 19.04.2006
