Looking to cast its property tax net as wide as possible, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is getting ready to keep an online eye on people taking home a nod from the civic building proposals department and on flat-owners getting property registered.
‘‘We’re trying to develop this interface,’’ said additional municipal commissioner Manu Kumar Srivastava. ‘‘It will streamline the registration of sale deeds with the inclusion of new property owners in our database of assessees.’’
Through SARITA (Stamps And Registration with Information Technology Application), citizens register documents including property transactions, access a web-enabled infobase of ready reckoner rates, compute stamp duty online, etc. Thanks to a scanning module, all registered documents are maintained in a huge database—about 1 million documents are registered in Maharashtra every year—in electronic form.
Also proposed is an interface with city survey documents, so that any mutations in land records—change of zoning, change of title, instances of property passing on to heirs—are also made note of by the civic tax assessors. ‘‘That will enable us to know accurately whose name the next year’s property tax bill should be addressed to.’’
Permissions and formalities to access the database of other departments will take longer, but the online property tax payment system will be ready by October. ‘‘We propose to test it thoroughly for a month and then go online in November this year,’’ said Srivastava.
Meanwhile, a core committee including officials of the assessment and collection department who are actively involved in the development of the software, are busy ironing out inaccuracies of the existing tax billing system. But there are serious roadblocks: The system being developed by ABM Knowledgeware Ltd is not web-enabled and requires to be replatformed.
With the octroi department which nets 60 per cent of the BMC’s revenue already fully computerised—a paper-free octroi naka at LBS Marg, Mulund, is under tests for replication—an online payment gateway for property tax (it contributes 19 per cent of BMC revenue) will cause two of the BMC’s biggest grossing revenue streams to fit seamlessly into an interactive website with multi-payment gateways.
Not So Easy
- A series of bottlenecks are slowing down the ambitious e-governance initiative of the BMC. Two major revenue streams, the property tax billing system and the water billing system known as AQUA were passed by the Standing Committee last week for ‘‘replatforming’’. That means, the ready software requires enhancements to web-enable the system, to make it more user-friendly and transparent, according to Tata Consultancy Services, the BMC’s IT partner
- ‘‘This won’t really slow anything down,’’ says Additional Municipal Commissioner Shrikant Singh. ‘‘If anything, there could be delays caused by how fast we are able to supply data for the database.’’ For example, with an employee strength of nearly 1,40,000, getting all their details online for the HR department is a huge task requiring weekly review meetings.
- The progress on other counts: The data centre in Worli, its civil works and air conditioning done, is waiting for the servers to be installed so that the HQ can be linked with various ward offices. The server is expected to be online by October-end.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Kavitha Iyer
Quelle/Source: Mumbai Newsline, 30.08.2006
