Sunday, Jun 15, 2003
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Tamil Nadu-Chennai
By Saptarshi Bhattacharya
The server has been in place for the past four years and the cabling across various departments has already been laid. The civic body's web site, inaugurated about four years ago, kept going on and off the Net. While the neighbouring States of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have made strides in e-governance, Chennai is yet to make any headway. In the Hyderabad civic body, most of the public transactions happen across the counter, while in Bangalore, a similar online system is in place. Even the Tiruchi Corporation has set up an online system for property tax and other taxes, trade licensing and birth and death registration. The Congress Councillor, Saidai P.Ravi, raised the issue in the last Council meeting asking why the civic body could not implement the process while a smaller Corporation like Tiruchi was able to do so. While sources at the civic body claimed that most of the data entry pertaining to property tax records was over, the scheme as a whole had not lifted off. A people-friendly system of payment of taxes and renewal of trade license still remain a pipe dream as far as the city's residents and traders are concerned. Long queues outside zonal offices, inordinate delay in getting old records and graft-seeking staff have been the hallmark of the civic body's tax collection drive even now. An online system will not only help streamline the tax collection, but also enable the administration to decentralise operations, acknowledge Corporation officials. Besides maintenance of records, the civic body could have a well-regulated system of receiving public grievances through e-mail and recording the follow-up action online. When contacted, the Deputy Commissioner (Revenue and Finance), D. P. Yadav, said the civic body had set June 30 deadline for putting up details pertaining to property tax and profession tax on its web site. "We hope to put all the records online which will be protected by individual passwords. The immediate priority would be to provide connectivity to the zones so that at least tax collection and birth and death registration can be made online. We are thinking of using the optic-fibre cable facilities laid by the different telecom companies," he added. The delay was caused primarily because the ECIL, which was given the contract of feeding the data, did not complete the exercise for so many months. It had recently been completed, Mr. Yadav said. Gradually, records of shopping complexes, progress of works and town planning would be put online. However, establishing internal connectivity within the Ripon Building would take time. Following a Council resolution in 1997, the Corporation borrowed Rs. 1 crore from the TNUIFSL and purchased nearly 100 computers and installed them in almost all the 18 departments and 10 zones. The necessary software programmes were sourced from the ECIL at a cost of Rs. 19 lakhs. Most of the computers purchased by the civic body now lie idle in various departments and zones.
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