The Kaveri application, which has been successful in online property registrations in Karnataka for over a decade-and-a-half, seems to be crumbling under its own weight. While the application on which it has been working has become obsolete, it has seen increased load over the years without any upgrade.
When the system was developed in 2003, Kaveri application was meant to handle just about 10 modules, including document registration, property valuation, marriage registration, encumbrance search, and scanning archives among others. “As it successfully demonstrated its capacity, new tasks were imposed on it. In 17 years, about 20 more tasks that were not originally conceived have been added without any upgrade,” a senior Revenue official told The Hindu.
Almost every day there is some technical issue in one of the integration applications belonging to other departments, which were not part of the original module, he rued.
The Kaveri system that is now critical in the land management system has been witnessing frequent shutdowns in the last few months with at least four reported Statewide shutdowns that brought registrations to a standstill.
Kaveri 1 is running on VB platform and Win XP operating system, both of which do not get the update support of Microsoft since they have become outdated. The decentralised system is further affected since the old hardware and inefficient power back up delays restoration of data due to maintenance efficiency of 282 local servers located in each office.
Sources pointed out apart from the original tasks, Kaveri now supports land related integrations from other departments such as Bhoomi, Mojini, e-Swathu, Upor, e-Aasthi, Sakala, Udyoga Mitra Portal, Khajane II, Moulya, Digilocker, BDA, BBMP, and PAN verification services. “Not much focus is being given to upgrade the application or bring a new system that is robust and can handle newer integrations,” said the source.
Over the last five years, the Stamps and Registrations Department’s transaction in over 280 sub-registrar’s office alone has seen an increase. The number of documents registered has gone up from 19.71 lakh in 2015-2016 to 20.45 lakh in 2019-2020. In the same period, marriage registrations have increased from 1.21 lakh to 1.49 lakh, encumbrance certificates 27.75 lakh to 36.79 lakh, CCs from 6.86 lakh to 8.07 lakh.
Another officer said Kaveri was never meant to be interactive, but made partially interactive in the recent years. “It was meant to bring convenience in registrations. The number of steps used in registrations have gone from about 5 to 22 now. Ambitious plans such as sending OTP to the user during registrations has added pressure. To generate one OTP, the application makes about 15 communications that adds to the stress.”
Why is NIC application not being considered?
A National Generic Document Registration System (NGDRS) developed by National Informatics Centre is available free of cost for the State struggling with Kaveri.
According to government sources, it has been found that the free property registration related application has been adopted in eight States, and States such as Maharashtra and Telangana are considering it too. Sources said that Karnataka is part of the NGDRS committee, but has so far not considered the application for adoption. “This can be adopted within a month across the State and is expected to provide a permanent solution to the existing problem. Moreover, it is a free application,” said the source. The Centre for Smart Governance has been tasked with developing a new system to handle the existing and future needs. A revenue official said that it may be a year’s time before the new system can go live. “Till then, the daily fire-fighting continues.”
