The Department of Housing will launch an experiment this week to enable beneficiaries of housing schemes to claim entitlements directly, without going through the routine formalities.
The Rajiv Gandhi Rural Housing Corporation, the State-level body monitoring housing schemes in villages, aims to avoid delays in disbursal of incentives to beneficiaries by this method.
The corporation has developed an online tool to speed up the process by creating a platform where beneficiaries in each village can directly communicate with the corporation.
A smartphone app will aid officers to monitor the process. It will be tried in some areas in the first phase and expanded to the whole State.
Till now, beneficiaries of low-cost housing schemes were paid in installments based on the stages of construction of their houses.
This had to be certified by village-level officers like Panchayat Development officers. But now, the beneficiaries can take pictures of the various stages of completion of their houses, send them to Bengaluru online and claim the money due to them.
“This is a natural progression of our schemes,” says Munish Moudgil, managing director, RGRHC.
“Some years ago the corporation started the process of transferring money directly into the accounts of beneficiaries. Now we are allowing the beneficiaries to upload updates of their progress directly on our portal. This will save time and avoid unnecessary file work,” he said.
He feels that increasing usage of technology will further simplify and democratise the working of the corporation.
“We have digitised the entire process of allocation of houses to the poor. There is an app that helps PDOs organise gram sabhas to select the beneficiaries. A programme built on a data base of latitudes and longitudes rejects the list of beneficiaries if the gram sabha is not done in the specified village. Once the beneficiary is approved, he gets to login the corporation’s portal and can start building his house. With the completion of every stage, he can take pictures on his phone with an app that contains location details and other specifications. He has to take pictures from the same location till the house is complete. He can keep sending us pictures and we will keep releasing money,” said the MD.
Each of the pictures would be scanned using image processing software in the head office.
A team of officers will sift through the images and cross-check with the fact file submitted by the gram panchayat.
PDOs will also be given a target of visiting each site at least once during construction.
“There are enough checks and balances in the way the scheme would be implemented. We will also keep fine tuning the IT tool when we start getting feedback,” Mr. Moudgil added.
