news

27 July 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov

Maharashtra civic bodies in e-lane

Having tasted early success, the state is now rolling out e-Municipality project for 231 bodies

By Pravin Prashant

s the broadband divide between the haves and have-nots continues, the torch bearers of digital democracy look at

wireless with hope, just as they did one-and-a-half decade ago...

Wireless, which was in second genera-tion then, did not let the hopefuls down. As is acknowledged now, wireless has given tele-density a boost to the extent of causing a telecom revolution.

Maharashtra has taken a lead vis-à-vis other progressive states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The state is deploying standard enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages in all its 232 municipalities, which is a great achievement since other states are still debating and waiting for funds from Ministry of Urban Develop-

A ment (MoUD), government of India under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

Under this mission, MoUD has decided in the first phase to implement automation in 35 municipalities out of 423 cities spread across 15 states and covering around 80 urban local bodies. The purpose of automation is to improve quality of government services for citizens and businesses, reduction in transac-tion cost to citizens and businesses, speeding up processes for improving internal efficiency, making processes more accountable and transparent, encouraging citizen participation, and reducing costs and increasing revenue.

Identified municipalities have to introduce e-Governance system so that citizens can benefit in terms of service level agreements with respect to different services like birth and death certificates, water connection, complaint redressal, assessment of property

tax, building plan approval, getting license and e-procurement.

The Maharashtra government’s experi-ment in e-Municipality started with Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC) in 2003 whereby ABM Knowledgeware revisited around 400 business processes in all the departments and undertook business process reengineering (BPR) to make it more simplified and auditable. The software deployed serves as an ERP tool for municipal bodies and covers citizen services, revenue generation, on-line services, MIS and integration with GIS.

All this led to increased efficiency in municipalities and better quality of service for business and citizens. Also, the administration has benefited due to better MIS leading to improved forecasting and increased revenue collection. For example, in FY 2009-10, KDMC handled 40,000 applications from citizens and managed collections of Rs 361crore.

Tasting success, the Urban Development Department, Government of Maharashtra awarded e-Government contracts worth Rs 60.03 crore to ABM Knowledgeware for 231 municipal bodies. The scope of the work includes replication of comprehensive e-Government software called Municipal Administrative Information Network (MAInet), thereby benefiting more than 42 percent of the urban population in the state. All this will lead to better revenue collection for municipalities and also for Maharashtra in coming years.

“The project is planned for completion by March 2013, but we have targeted to complete the same by March 2012,” says Prakash Rane, Managing Director, ABM Knowledgeware.

The project is not in public private partner-ship (PPP) mode but funded by the state government. Some of the municipal bodies are funded by the JNNURM scheme. Even the local bodies will spend some amount on creat-ing civil infrastructure like citizen facilitation centers for providing G2C and G2B services to businesses and citizens.

Currently, the project is being rolled out with distributed deployment architecture but it is designed for implementation in centralized application architecture, says Prakash.

Once the infrastructure becomes reliable and bandwidth improves, the application can be loaded on SDC-SWAN backbone, thereby reducing O&M (operation and maintenance) expenses for e-Municipality project.