After putting up with long queues at the civic body office and an arduous wait of several years, city residents might finally be able to access online services of the Kochi Corporation a few months from now.
The matter of tasking Information Kerala Mission (IKM) with the implementation of the e-governance system at the corporation will come up at the council meeting on Tuesday.
“Once the council’s approval has been obtained, IKM will be approached formally. The process of setting up the new modules could take around two months. Earlier this month, existing data had been secured with a backup,” said Corporation Secretary R. Rahul. There has been pressure from the government as well to implement the software immediately, since the absence of online services at the corporation has been sorely felt in the pandemic situation.
The agenda placed before the council notes that essential services such as tax payments and obtaining birth, death and marriage certificates have not yet been made available online and such a system is necessary immediately. IKM, which is already providing such services in several other local bodies in the State, would be a feasible option. “Tax collection has become difficult in the COVID-19 situation and the corporation’s financial situation is miserable,” the agenda states.
Though IKM had rolled out a new open-source software — the Integrated Local Governance Management System — it could take a few more months for it to be made available to urban local bodies, said Mr. Rahul.
The corporation had spent about ₹5 crore on a custom-made e-governance system that TCS had been roped in to implement. But some modules never got off the ground and others like the birth, death and marriage modules have been facing glitches. The services of TCS are no longer available since their contract period had ended in 2018.
Legacy data
Years worth of legacy data that is currently on the TCS software system will have to be transferred if the council decides on migrating to the IKM software.
“Current files are processed using legacy data. So the data will have to be transferred to the IKM software. How this is to be done is a challenge because TCS support is no longer available. Without help from TCS, a complete transfer might be difficult,” said S. Chithra, Executive Director, IKM.
