With digital payment being the buzzword these days, wonder what has happened to the ‘Meeseva’ of the eponymous Electronic Service Delivery of the Information Technology, Electronics & Communication Department?
After all, starting as e-seva 15 years ago, it served as the first-ever government front office for the rest of the country in payment of bills. Apparently, the Meeseva (since 2011 after documents issuance) has been doing well clocking impressive number of transactions over the years although demonetisation has had its effect.
Through Meeseva 2.0, the Telangana government has now lined up a series of initiatives to take it to the next level.
Likely to be rolled out in a few months, citizens need not repeatedly go with documents for scanning and sourcing for any certificate at any of the centres soon.
Under the ‘Certificate Form of Governance’ initiative, once scanned, the Meeseva would be storing the information in its own server and hence, can be accessed repeatedly as a ‘single source of truth’.
Distinction between e-seva and Meeseva would also be removed and dovetailed into a single platform with a more user-friendly interface and common screen, explains G.T. Venkateshwar Rao, Commissioner (ESD) and Special Commissioner (e-Governance).
A total revamp of the services include reducing transaction time for any document or certificate to five to eight minutes from up to half an hour now. A messaging service would be introduced indicating the time frame for document to be ready and steps are also in the offing to make financial reconciliation faster with the treasury.
“We have been growing steadily. There were 3.8 crore transactions in 2015-16 with about a lakh per day worth ₹350 crore a month and ₹4,000 crore annually, because of the shift towards digital payments,” he says. The biggest challenge for Meeseva was to get hold of the land holdings data, encumbrances and other certificates, but these are now being issued within a day.
The Commissioner says the robustness of the system was tested when the government went for land regularisation scheme when 14 lakh applicants came by and about 2.65 lakh applications with the requisite documents had to be uploaded at various centres. “We are in a position to take up to three lakh applications now,” he exults, stating the way forward is through franchises only.
Demonetisation effect
Since it was mostly cash transactions, the demonetisation brought down the number to half or about 40,000 forcing the centres to begin accepting cheques, demand drafts apart from credit/debit cards.
“We could immediately install 100 PoS machines and another 110 have been ordered so as to have at least two for each centre,” avers Mr. Rao. Soon, all the centres would be in a position to accept e-wallets.
