DATAQUEST issue: April 30, 2008.

A host of e-governance initiatives are changing the face of urban local bodies across India

Monday, April 21, 2008

Bollywood affocianados would perhaps remember the celluloid classic Do Bigha Zameen where the rural family turns up in the city in search of jobs and eventually adds up to the urban slum. While this Balraj Sahni caper might have taken place more than half a century ago, down the decades, the motif of rural populace driving down to the cities and adding to the already strained urban milieu have recurred many times in Indian movies. Be it Naseeb, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, or Chandni Bar, one can point out several examples in this genre.

Just as Bollywood reflects many realities of Indian lives, the fact that migration of a large segment of rural population is leading to tremendous strain on urban infrastructure is a reality. A daily look at the teeming millions landing in Mumbai's Victoria Terminus or New Delhi Railway Station or Kolkata's Howrah Station vividly illustrates the extent of this problem. Numbers too support this trend: the percentage of India's population living in cities and urban areas has doubled to 28.8% by 2001, from 14% at the time of Independence.

Obviously, this has put tremendous pressure on the urban local bodies, viz, the municipal corporations, nagar panchayats, etc to deliver quality administration. And, thankfully, many of them have turned to e-governance to do so. “The whole e-gov movement in municipalities started some 8-9 years back, when municipalities started going online with applications like property tax, payment of birth and death certificates, etc, but now it has truly expended in every way, be it the length or the depth,” says Sanjay Jaju, MD, Infrastructure Commission, Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Reaping Benefits of IT
It's not just states like Andhra Pradesh, even the Central government has realized the importance of automation in urban local bodies, especially thanks to the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992; the act that significantly increased the responsibility of local bodies in India. Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), too, are witnessing a significant increase in responsibilities with greater powers and decentralized authority. Effective governance at the ULB level, among other things, requires internal financial systems that embody the standard accounting practices. In addition, the Right to Information (RTI) Act also mandates that the ULBs proactively share data, including key financial indicators, with the citizens. E-governance has a key role to play in supporting both these objectives.

It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the Government of India has finalized the National Mission Mode Project on e-Governance in municipalities, in 423 cities with a population of a lakh or above, over a period of five years. The Minister of State for Urban Development, Ajay Maken, informs that the scheme has been designed to cover eight services within urban local bodies. The services include registration and issue of birth and death certificate, payment of property tax, water supply and other utilities bills, building plan approvals, grievances and suggestions and procurement and monitoring of projects including e-procurement.

Health programs, licenses and solid waste management, accounting system and personal information system are other services covered in the e-governance scheme. The total estimated central share for implementation of the scheme is Rs 676 crore. Five mega cities-Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore-are covered under centrally sponsored scheme of infrastructure development. “The government has commissioned financial credit rating exercise in respect of various urban local bodies of the mission cities under the infrastructure and governance component of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) during 2007,” says Maken.

However, the minister informed that the new CSS for cities and towns other than 35 cities would wait for the present till the implementation of this witnessed. The exercise is aimed at enhancing the preparedness of urban local bodies to approach the market to finance its projects. “What has happened everywhere in the country, so far, is that municipality automation is being taken up individually, and then, the government has spurred in to action by trying to map the use of ICT in a planned manner,” explains Vivek Bharadwaj, special secretary, Department of Urban Development, Government of West Bengal.

Under JNNURM, there are some mandatory reforms planned related to e-gov adoption by ULBs. These would include adoption of modern accrual-based double entry system of accounting in ULBs and parastatal agencies; introduction of a system of e-governance using IT applications, such GIS and MIS for various services provided by ULBs and parastatal agencies; and lastly, reform of property tax with GIS. It becomes a major source of revenue for ULBs and arrangements for its effective implementation, so that collection efficiency reaches at least 85% within the next seven years.

The success stories of individual states make for interesting reading. In Gujarat, until now, fifty-one municipalities have introduced the e-governance projects, while fifty-eight more expect to introduce it by October. The remaining thirty-two municipalities will be covered by year-end.

“Municipality automation is being taken up individually, and then, the government has spurred into action by trying to map the use of ICT in a planned manner” Vivek Bharadwaj, special secretary, Department of Urban Development, Government of West Bengal   “We believe that the big bang approach of rolling out all applications in one go does not work very well” AM Seshagiri, general manager, Sales, Government, Education and Healthcare, Oracle India	Once this happens, Gujarat will become the first state in India to be completely e-governed. Some state governments are building their initiatives block by block. The Karnataka government, for example, started by computerizing six of its largest municipal corporations to cover functions such as property tax valuation, collection, issue and record of death/birth certificates, water supply billing, consumer complaints and internal MIS functions. The second phase involved networking 100 smaller municipalities.
	The Andhra Pradesh government, on the other hand, has opted for a state-wide rollout. It has set up 253 e-service centers across the state, covering 117 municipalities. Impressed by these initiatives, other state governments are keen to follow suit. Rajasthan is busy drawing up a detailed plan to rope in IT majors and line up funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The West Bengal government is setting up a geographical information system within the sprawling city of Kolkata, with the financial support of agencies like Unicef.
	The sheer economic sense of e-gov impacting Indian municipalities is gradually dawning upon all quarters. With municipal administration becoming increasingly tougher, the benefits of IT adoption are becoming more and more visible across several municipalities. Take some of these facts: India's first e-governed municipality in Gujarat's Ahmedabad district recorded an 85% in tax recoveries; the first nine municipalities in Gujarat that implemented e-governance saw tax recoveries grow from 35% to 65%; and, in Gujarat again, the Municipal Corporation of Surat, which shot to limelight on account of a plague epidemic in the nineties, now has an award-winning system for addressing citizen complaints. Examples of beneficial automation don't stop here: the municipality of Visakhapatnam provides a number of basic services online including tap connection status, status of garbage pick-ups, sanitation tenders, and building plan status; Coimbatore, a bustling city in Tamil Nadu, has computerized its database for property taxes and water charges; Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, uses a management information system that has helped the city improve its resources mobilization; and, Anand, a rural district in Gujarat, which pioneered India's cooperative movement, has nine municipalities. Each is e-governed.

What Automation Entails
AM Seshagiri, general manager, Sales, Government, Education and Healthcare, Oracle India, believes that things are actually moving quite well as far as automation of municipalities goes. There are various applications that are helping municipalities do a job better. We categorize solutions for municipality in two ways; one which are the large number of citizen facing services and the other the large number of back-end applications required to maintain records. Both of these are extremely critical, so all efforts are focused on offering integration of these two.

Accounting systems and GIS are perhaps the two biggest areasone front-ending citizen services and the other geographically mapping the cities at the back-end, impacted by automation. Design and Implementation of Accounting Systems to Municipalities involves complete support at both policy and process levels: drafting of policies, regulations, rules, manuals, development of software, training, implementation support as well as regular handholding.

Examples include the implementation of Fund-Based Accounting System for the Bangalore City Corporation. Funded by the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, this assignment involves complete (re) design of state of art accounting system integrated with complete MIS for decision making at various levels, including elected representatives. The specialty of this assignment is that it involves drafting of various policy, process re-engineering, implementation and hand holding, including training and software development.

Decentralization initiatives in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, were funded by FIRE-D-USAID. This assignment involves total reengineering of various activities for the governance at the third tier level of the Government in the Corporation of Jabalpur. The assignment includes both re-engineering of various processes for change over into modern accounting under computerized environment. Also, it involves a strong HR element, which includes draft of HR policy and practices. Required training to concerned officials is addressed, including the draft of a training manual.

Implementation of Fund-Based Accounting System for Tumkur was similar to that of Bangalore City Corporation. Tumkur municipality is the first municipality in India to finalize accounts and draft financial statements on the basis of fund-based accounting system method. Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation based on Asian Development Bank project funding funded this.

Adds Seshagiri, What we believe is that the big bang approach of rolling out all applications in just one go does not work very well. We have seen that incremental approach of first laying the base and the foundation and than starting with the services is the right way to go.

He supports his opinions with examples. Today, I feel Hyderabad is a model example for the incremental approach that I talked about. They have started strengthening the backend by being the first to move out from a cash basis accounting to a procurement system in place. Today Hyderabad is the second largest municipality in terms of the geographical area after Delhi. In Delhi also a lot is happening but in bits and pieces. The state has plans to put in place everything on an integrated platform. They have big plans on using GIS-based system.

Life in a Metro

Mumbai: While the impact of IT is visible across all municipal bodies throughout the country, it obviously had a significant role to play in metropolitan cities already burdened with an increasing urban population and growing infrastructure. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) has also notched up several firsts on the e-gov front.

A first of its kind project in the country and among the largest initiatives of its kind in the world is MCGMs citizen portal. Providing a time-independent window that lets citizens avail themselves of over two hundred services offered by MCGM, this portal is virtually transforming the way Mumbai functions, ensuring freedom from queues through e-governance.

Mumbaikars are already witnessing a 25-50% reduction in delivery time for 215 services. This has been possible because of the online availability of most of them through interactive forms, secured payment gateways for online payments, online registration of complaints and status monitoring, property tax, water billing, octroi, and e-tendering processes delivering citizen empowerment like never before. Currently, the services available to the citizens include birth/death certification processes, health services, MPFA licenses, shops and establishments, trade licenses, and hoarding and advertisement licenses.

The entire initiative was steered by MCGM through the project management task force (PMTF). There is a rising demand from citizens to avail services in a transparent and time-bound manner, and in that light, this e-governance initiative by MCGM is a milestone in itself.

The Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation is another big project in Maharashtra. Its a twin city corporation (for the suburbs of Kalyan and Dombivli) located about 50 km from Mumbai. KDMCs e-governance project was initiated in 1999 and launched in May 2002. The project is considered one of the most successful e-gov initiatives in the country and has received various awards from the government and the corporate world.

The state government also plans to replicate the KDMC model of the e-governance solution across over 240 ULBs in the state. Subhash Patil, system manager, Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation, says that KDMC had subsequently submitted the detailed project report to the state government for this replication project.

Kolkata: Individuals, too, have helped the automation of municipal bodies. Vivek Bharadwaj as project director of the India Population Project, a scheme assisted by World Bank, was responsible for formulating the project proposal for Darjeeling municipality and getting the approval. The project is being entirely funded by DFID and done under the program Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor.

According to Arnab Roy, project director, Change Management Unit, Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor, Department of Municipal Assets, fifteen modules included in the project include financial and accounting system, property tax management system, ward works management system, trade system, building plan approval system, birth/death registration system, infrastructure management system, public grievance and redressal module, health system, water works management system, city Web portal, school information system, integration with GIS and MIS.

The ULBs will be networked and linked to a central data-monitoring center. The GIS systems are also being refined and streamlined across all municipalities. This will include getting images from aerial photography, development of a comprehensive GIS software, and attribute data survey.

Pune: The terrain covered by IT at the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) includes online birth/death certification as well as pending certificates, property tax, online tenders, besides a citizen complaints registration and complaint status system. Property tax covers tax due details, tax paid details, approvals on adjustments, dakhala and dakhala changes, besides demolishing recommendations and acceptances.

The benefits of applying IT across development areas are gradually becoming visible. PMC commissioner Praveen Sinh Pardeshi says that besides authorized PDF certificate validation, birth/death certificates can be downloaded online. In case of online tenders, all centers work online sans contractors and hard copy versions, even the evaluation happens online.

Around five lakh properties have been covered by online tax and billing, with provisions of self-assessment. All building permissions have started morphing into a transparent list of documents, Pardeshi adds. This helps in the fastest possible processing of development plans through an online mechanism. The building plans have been initiated on an electronic format with no hard copy versions allowed. What usually takes a week to clear a mid-size project accompanied with a wide margin of errors is attempted to being shortened to a few minutes.

Besides doing away with paper, the project professes to reduce the discretionary element in the early stages of screening, and enables instant approval of building plans. All the development control (DC) rules have been converted into AutoCAD files that will screen and compare the plans with the DC rules and point out deviations.

Delhi: The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) that together cover Delhi have both adopted e-gov initiatives to transform the urban face of the national capital. Launched by NDMC, the e-Gov Financial System is a fully integrated accrual-based double-entry accounting system. It is based on the National Municipal Accounting Manual launched by the Urban Development Ministry in association with the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in February 2005.

This system is the financial spine of NDMC, claims a senior NDMC official. It is a fully online system which ensures controls like role-based access and reduces data entry errors. It also ensures that all the reports are generated in real-time to enable better decision-making by the council. Apart from its numerous advantages, this system enables citizens to log on and track their bills and payments through real-time data. All one has to do is log on to the system and view the list of all the dues such as license fee and property tax all at once.

The Urban-e States
Andhra Pradesh: Like many other aspects on the e-gov front, Andhra Pradesh, too, led the way in the IT-ization of its municipal bodies. This started under the umbrella of e-Seva, a concept devised by the Andhra Pradesh government, it started a one-stop shop for over thirty government to citizen (G2C) and business to consumer (B2C) services. Initially deployed over 280 service counters at over 35 locations in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, it has moved to over 110 municipalities.

e-Seva offers facilities such as payment of utilities bills, certificates/permits/licenses, transport department services (information and reservation), B2C services like ATM withdrawal all through a single window.

Jaju, as municipal commissioner of Andhra Pradesh, initiated a comprehensive facility, Saukaryam, to complete and improve the delivery of the civic services given by the municipal corporation. An organization that was running with a deficit of over Rs 30 crore turned around to become a Rs 100 crore-plus organization. His claim to fame was the municipality project that he initiated in Vizag, as there was absolutely no computerized database. That was the biggest challenge. We started with an incremental approach using the most elementary tools. However, in Hyderabad, the database was already in place for all municipalities, which is quite unique. So it was only the higher application that we had to build on. Hyderabad inherited the Vizag project.

Karnataka: The Karnataka municipal e-governance implementation project is a significant departure from the traditional, erstwhile tried out approaches, to municipal e-governance implementations. Covering the fifty-seven largest municipalities in Karnataka, the implementation covers the entire suite of municipal e-governance applications developed by the e-Governments Foundation, a non-profit organization with focus on leveraging e-governance for improving governance and service delivery in India.

The first phase witnessed the launch of city websites and a public grievance tracking and redressal system. In parallel, the accounting reforms process was launched, followed by the implementation of a financial management system. Other e-governance applications being implemented in the current phase include a GIS-based property tax system and a birth/death certificate application.

Karnataka has 212 ULBs that include corporations, city municipal councils, and town municipal councils. The Nirmala Nagara project seeks to empower each of these by 2009, and its first phase began across 63 ULBs in August last year. It entailed putting in place an integrated financial management system among other implementations such as property tax information system with GIS.

Life Beyond Metros
Kalyan-Dombivli: In December 1999, the Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC), on the outskirts of Mumbai, which serves the citizens of the twin cities of Kalyan and Dombivli, automated access to all functions and services related to more than hundred citizen services, by putting them online. In doing so, the corporation broke free from the archaic manual systems it had used for decades to carry out day-to-day administrative tasks. The corporations previous systems were inefficient, unproductive, time consuming, and hindered citizens from submitting payments for municipal services on time.

For its efforts, KDMC was awarded a certificate of recognition from the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions, Government of India, for exemplary e-governance initiatives.

Coimbatore: Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, has a population of over 1.2 mn citizens. The Coimbatore Municipal Corporation (CMC) is responsible for various administrative and infrastructural civic duties such as town planning, health, engineering, and tax collection. CMC chose an e-governance approach to markedly improve citizen welfare, operational productivity and efficiency, and revenue collection.

Since launching its e-gov initiative, CMC has seen improvements in several areas. Prior to the launch of the initiative, citizens had to go to specific manual collection centers to pay property taxes, water charges, professional taxes, trade license fees, etc. These centers had restricted hours and were often poorly staffed; this led to long waiting periods for citizens and delays in collecting revenue for CMC.

Now citizens can make speedy payments at six computerized facilitation centers or at fifteen banks conveniently located throughout the city. Citizens applying for specific services can now easily keep track of their application status without having to make frequent trips to CMC offices. All applications are given a unique reference number that can be traced through CMCs website. Certificates for birth, death, tax collection, water charges collection, non-tax items, dangerous and offensive trade fee, prevention of food adulteration fees, etc have also been automated and can be issued at the collection centers or can be requested via the portal with payments made on delivery.

Visakhapatnam: The Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation is using the telephone to deliver government to citizen (G2C) services. The citizens wanted an effective complaint management system through which they could register their complaints without any hassle, and give effective feedback to municipalities. Earlier, the citizens had to travel a minimum of 3-4 km to reach the nearest municipal corporation center. The municipal corporation of Visakhapatnam also wanted to send timely reminders and notifications, and disperse personal information (about tax dues, etc) pertaining to the citizens and city administration in an effective manner.

A solution called T-governance was developed to address these concerns. Four major components of the T-Governance solution were created: Samacharam (an automated information retrieval process via SMS and IVRS), PrajaNadi, (an automated opinion poll system using SMS and IVRS), Dandora (an information broadcasting and alert system using SMS and IVRS), and Firyadu Kendram (an automated complaint management system using IVRS).

Through Samacharam, citizens can retrieve information such as house tax, water tax, lease tax, advertisement tax, semi-bulk or bulk tax, government welfare schemes, and important telephone numbers by sending an SMS or making a phone call to T-Governance. Similarly, PrajaNadi lets citizens send an SMS or call up the system and vote or give an opinion on any issue.

Dandora uses SMS and voice messages to communicate with citizens when tax payments are due or overdue. It can also send messages regarding meetings, circulars, important notifications, and floods or cyclone alerts. The Firyadu Kendram system walks citizens through a series of voice messages and their complaints are registered. An SMS is automatically sent by the system to the person designated to solve the complaint.

Rajneesh De & Urvashi Kaul
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in