The work of the KDMC, a pioneer of e-governance at the municipality level, forms part of the Rs 20,000-crore National e-Governance Plan, one of whose thrusts is to construct 100,000 citizen service centers or as Citizen Facilitation Centers (CFCs) as the KDMC calls it. The financial well-being of these centers, which form the bottom of the e-governance pyramid, is crucial to the overall success of the plan.
CIO: What challenges do you face as Commissioner of the KDMC?
R.D. Shinde: Kalyan is called the dormitory town of Greater Mumbai because its residents commute to Mumbai everyday. Being a dormitory township, the twin-city puts tremendous pressure on the citizen infrastructure of the KDMC. The challenge is to provide infrastructure to an ever-increasing population.
Managing finances has also been a sizeable test. Earlier, the Kalyan-Dombivli area housed major chemical and pharmaceutical industries such as Century Chemicals and National Rayons, which were a huge source of revenue in the form of tax. However, in 2003, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation was taken off the KDMC map and declared part of a separate village. This put KDMC in a financial crunch. The immediate revenue loss to us was about Rs 50 crore. This affected several capital investments the that KDMC wanted to make, especially developing roads and other citizen facilities.
How are you overcoming financial challenges?
That’s where IT helps. We are looking at ways to collect property tax efficiently. Kalyan is a key junction on the central railway line and has huge potential for growth in the field of construction. Since, it is considered the best dormitory town for Mumbai, several residential complexes are coming up. We expect this to increase our revenue from property tax. Technology will make recovering taxes fast and efficient.
On another front, we recently introduced a payment gateway facility to enable citizens to make Web-based payments to the corporation. We have tied up with IDBI, ICICI and HDFC.
As an administrative person who believes in IT, how do you calculate return on IT investment?
We have already received full returns on the investment made in developing software for the CFCs. The government of Maharashtra has given us Rs 2 crore as royalty for our intellectual property, which we developed with ABM Knowledgeware. This has been instrumental in the entire recovery of our investment in the CFC project.
The government has started replicating KDMC’s e-governance model in 245 municipal bodies across the state. Already the Nagpur Municipal Corporation and six other bodies including the Pune Cantonment Board have launched similar e-governance projects.
Have CFCs impacted revenue collection?
Definitely. We have been able to recover our dues only because CFC branches were available at the ward level — there are six CFCs across KDMC limits. During the 2005-06 fiscal, property tax collection was Rs 56 crore, which represents close to 85 percent recovery. For water tax, recovery has been 95 percent. This has been possible only because CFCs make it more convenient for citizens to pay their bills.
Today if someone says, “I don’t know how much my outstanding property tax is, but I would like to clear it”, we can help him. Using a unique citizen number or an address or name, we can locate his account number and inform him how much he owes the government.
How do you explain the success of the CFCs, given that close to 85 percent of e-governance projects in India fail?
The key issues with e-governance projects are that there are too many alterations to the original plan or that solutions aren’t properly tested at the pre-implementation stage.
Fortunately, our CFCs are designed so that there’s hardly any scope for large alterations. The system allows for addition, not deletion.
CFCs have also been successful because of their comprehensive nature. The services they cover include the issuing of birth and death certificates, goods licenses, market licenses, water connections and complaint redressal, among others. It also covers administrative jobs such as giving permissions to citizens, scrutinizing proposals and building approvals, issuing NOCs (no objection certificates) for different licenses, etcetera. The health department is covered, but not to a great extent. The city engineering and town planning modules are yet to be implemented fully.
How do you plan to take this success forward?
CFCs automate, integrate and simplify the citizen-to-corporation interface. Now, we are taking town planning and revenue collection to the next level. We are undertaking a GIS (geographic information system) project, which is quite large. The KDMC will map out the entire Kalyan-Dombivli area through geo-referencing and satellite imagery.
A ground-level city survey is already taking place. KDMC’s city surveyors are physically measuring every structure in the twin-city area. Around 20 percent of survey work is done. Each building is being categorized, whether they are residential, commercial, industrial or agricultural. This will help us assess property purpose-wise. If a building is being used for a commercial purpose, then we can double our revenue from it — compared to a residential property.
Both the satellite images and the data coming from the survey will be integrated with our MIS. This will facilitate increasing our revenues. We expect a 30-to-40 percent increase in our property tax revenue, at least. The software part of the GIS will cost between Rs 30 lakh-40 lakh. The cost of the other components is still being assessed.
Are there other projects in the pipeline?
Yes. We plan to deploy an HR package that will cover all 5,500 employees of the KDMC. We also plan to invest in a biometric authentication technology, which we will link to employee attendance. We are inviting tenders for biometrics consultants. We’re introducing biometrics to prevent employees from cheating over their attendance.
Swipe cards have been used in the government, but they can be inter-changed. With a combination of a thumb impression and a swipe card, the scope for such irregularities can be reduced. It will also act as an internal security measure. We intend to complete all these projects by end of the current financial year.
Autor/Author: Nagesh Joshi
Quelle/Source: CIO India, 01.06.2006
