Applicants’ wait for civic services continues in Coimbatore

Civic body has suspended processing of all applications as it is migrating to new IT system

Around 1,000 applicants are waiting for the Coimbatore Corporation to respond after processing their applications for water connection. As many number of applicants are also waiting for the Corporation to assess their buildings for tax.

Sources in the civic body said that sometime in July, the civic body had suspended the process of assessing buildings for property tax, applications for water tax, collecting vacant land tax and approving applications for underground sewer connection. The suspension followed the move to migrate from the Corporation’s own data management system to the Urban Tree Information System, a system adopted by most urban local bodies in the State.

The period of migration saw the Corporation also suspend collection of property tax and water charges. After migrating the existing property tax assessments and water connection data to the Urban Tree Information System, the Corporation resumed collecting the two a few weeks ago.

However, the wait for applicants for assessing buildings for tax or for water connection or the other civic services continued.

The applications were piling up and the civic body seemed to be doing very little to quicken the process, rued P. Muralidharan, a joint secretary of the Coimbatore Corporation Registered Plumbers’ Association.

As for water connection, the Corporation had suspended accepting new applications as it was unable to give acknowledgement, generate demand for applicants to pay or process applications where applicants had paid money.

M. Ranjithkumar, another joint secretary, said despite representation to officials at various levels, the Corporation had done little to address the issue. His estimate was that at least over 1,000 applications for water connections were pending at the five zonal offices.

The impact of the delay was that the plumbers who had moved the applications on the applicants’ behalf were facing the heat.

The Corporation sources said the migration of data to the Urban Tree Information System was almost complete. Debugging was going on and in the next few days, the Corporation would be in a position to resume the process for all civic services.