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What Automation Entails
AM Seshagiri, general manager, Sales, Government, Education and Healthcare, Oracle India, believes that things are actually moving quite well as far as automation of municipalities goes. There are various applications that are helping municipalities do a job better. We categorize solutions for municipality in two ways; one which are the large number of citizen facing services and the other the large number of back-end applications required to maintain records. Both of these are extremely critical, so all efforts are focused on offering integration of these two.

Accounting systems and GIS are perhaps the two biggest areasone front-ending citizen services and the other geographically mapping the cities at the back-end, impacted by automation. Design and Implementation of Accounting Systems to Municipalities involves complete support at both policy and process levels: drafting of policies, regulations, rules, manuals, development of software, training, implementation support as well as regular handholding.

Examples include the implementation of Fund-Based Accounting System for the Bangalore City Corporation. Funded by the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, this assignment involves complete (re) design of state of art accounting system integrated with complete MIS for decision making at various levels, including elected representatives. The specialty of this assignment is that it involves drafting of various policy, process re-engineering, implementation and hand holding, including training and software development.

Decentralization initiatives in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, were funded by FIRE-D-USAID. This assignment involves total reengineering of various activities for the governance at the third tier level of the Government in the Corporation of Jabalpur. The assignment includes both re-engineering of various processes for change over into modern accounting under computerized environment. Also, it involves a strong HR element, which includes draft of HR policy and practices. Required training to concerned officials is addressed, including the draft of a training manual.

Implementation of Fund-Based Accounting System for Tumkur was similar to that of Bangalore City Corporation. Tumkur municipality is the first municipality in India to finalize accounts and draft financial statements on the basis of fund-based accounting system method. Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation based on Asian Development Bank project funding funded this.

Adds Seshagiri, What we believe is that the big bang approach of rolling out all applications in just one go does not work very well. We have seen that incremental approach of first laying the base and the foundation and than starting with the services is the right way to go.

He supports his opinions with examples. Today, I feel Hyderabad is a model example for the incremental approach that I talked about. They have started strengthening the backend by being the first to move out from a cash basis accounting to a procurement system in place. Today Hyderabad is the second largest municipality in terms of the geographical area after Delhi. In Delhi also a lot is happening but in bits and pieces. The state has plans to put in place everything on an integrated platform. They have big plans on using GIS-based system.

Life in a Metro
Mumbai: While the impact of IT is visible across all municipal bodies throughout the country, it obviously had a significant role to play in metropolitan cities already burdened with an increasing urban population and growing infrastructure. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) has also notched up several firsts on the e-gov front.

A first of its kind project in the country and among the largest initiatives of its kind in the world is MCGMs citizen portal. Providing a time-independent window that lets citizens avail themselves of over two hundred services offered by MCGM, this portal is virtually transforming the way Mumbai functions, ensuring freedom from queues through e-governance.

Mumbaikars are already witnessing a 25-50% reduction in delivery time for 215 services. This has been possible because of the online availability of most of them through interactive forms, secured payment gateways for online payments, online registration of complaints and status monitoring, property tax, water billing, octroi, and e-tendering processes delivering citizen empowerment like never before. Currently, the services available to the citizens include birth/death certification processes, health services, MPFA licenses, shops and establishments, trade licenses, and hoarding and advertisement licenses.

The entire initiative was steered by MCGM through the project management task force (PMTF). There is a rising demand from citizens to avail services in a transparent and time-bound manner, and in that light, this e-governance initiative by MCGM is a milestone in itself.

The Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation is another big project in Maharashtra. Its a twin city corporation (for the suburbs of Kalyan and Dombivli) located about 50 km from Mumbai. KDMCs e-governance project was initiated in 1999 and launched in May 2002. The project is considered one of the most successful e-gov initiatives in the country and has received various awards from the government and the corporate world.

The state government also plans to replicate the KDMC model of the e-governance solution across over 240 ULBs in the state. Subhash Patil, system manager, Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation, says that KDMC had subsequently submitted the detailed project report to the state government for this replication project.

Kolkata: Individuals, too, have helped the automation of municipal bodies. Vivek Bharadwaj as project director of the India Population Project, a scheme assisted by World Bank, was responsible for formulating the project proposal for Darjeeling municipality and getting the approval. The project is being entirely funded by DFID and done under the program Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor.

According to Arnab Roy, project director, Change Management Unit, Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor, Department of Municipal Assets, fifteen modules included in the project include financial and accounting system, property tax management system, ward works management system, trade system, building plan approval system, birth/death registration system, infrastructure management system, public grievance and redressal module, health system, water works management system, city Web portal, school information system, integration with GIS and MIS.

The ULBs will be networked and linked to a central data-monitoring center. The GIS systems are also being refined and streamlined across all municipalities. This will include getting images from aerial photography, development of a comprehensive GIS software, and attribute data survey.

Pune: The terrain covered by IT at the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) includes online birth/death certification as well as pending certificates, property tax, online tenders, besides a citizen complaints registration and complaint status system. Property tax covers tax due details, tax paid details, approvals on adjustments, dakhala and dakhala changes, besides demolishing recommendations and acceptances.

The benefits of applying IT across development areas are gradually becoming visible. PMC commissioner Praveen Sinh Pardeshi says that besides authorized PDF certificate validation, birth/death certificates can be downloaded online. In case of online tenders, all centers work online sans contractors and hard copy versions, even the evaluation happens online.

Around five lakh properties have been covered by online tax and billing, with provisions of self-assessment. All building permissions have started morphing into a transparent list of documents, Pardeshi adds. This helps in the fastest possible processing of development plans through an online mechanism. The building plans have been initiated on an electronic format with no hard copy versions allowed. What usually takes a week to clear a mid-size project accompanied with a wide margin of errors is attempted to being shortened to a few minutes.

Besides doing away with paper, the project professes to reduce the discretionary element in the early stages of screening, and enables instant approval of building plans. All the development control (DC) rules have been converted into AutoCAD files that will screen and compare the plans with the DC rules and point out deviations.

Delhi: The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) that together cover Delhi have both adopted e-gov initiatives to transform the urban face of the national capital. Launched by NDMC, the e-Gov Financial System is a fully integrated accrual-based double-entry accounting system. It is based on the National Municipal Accounting Manual launched by the Urban Development Ministry in association with the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in February 2005.

This system is the financial spine of NDMC, claims a senior NDMC official. It is a fully online system which ensures controls like role-based access and reduces data entry errors. It also ensures that all the reports are generated in real-time to enable better decision-making by the council. Apart from its numerous advantages, this system enables citizens to log on and track their bills and payments through real-time data. All one has to do is log on to the system and view the list of all the dues such as license fee and property tax all at once.

The Urban-e States
Andhra Pradesh: Like many other aspects on the e-gov front, Andhra Pradesh, too, led the way in the IT-ization of its municipal bodies. This started under the umbrella of e-Seva, a concept devised by the Andhra Pradesh government, it started a one-stop shop for over thirty government to citizen (G2C) and business to consumer (B2C) services. Initially deployed over 280 service counters at over 35 locations in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, it has moved to over 110 municipalities.

e-Seva offers facilities such as payment of utilities bills, certificates/permits/licenses, transport department services (information and reservation), B2C services like ATM withdrawal all through a single window.

Jaju, as municipal commissioner of Andhra Pradesh, initiated a comprehensive facility, Saukaryam, to complete and improve the delivery of the civic services given by the municipal corporation. An organization that was running with a deficit of over Rs 30 crore turned around to become a Rs 100 crore-plus organization. His claim to fame was the municipality project that he initiated in Vizag, as there was absolutely no computerized database. That was the biggest challenge. We started with an incremental approach using the most elementary tools. However, in Hyderabad, the database was already in place for all municipalities, which is quite unique. So it was only the higher application that we had to build on. Hyderabad inherited the Vizag project.

Karnataka: The Karnataka municipal e-governance implementation project is a significant departure from the traditional, erstwhile tried out approaches, to municipal e-governance implementations. Covering the fifty-seven largest municipalities in Karnataka, the implementation covers the entire suite of municipal e-governance applications developed by the e-Governments Foundation, a non-profit organization with focus on leveraging e-governance for improving governance and service delivery in India.

The first phase witnessed the launch of city websites and a public grievance tracking and redressal system. In parallel, the accounting reforms process was launched, followed by the implementation of a financial management system. Other e-governance applications being implemented in the current phase include a GIS-based property tax system and a birth/death certificate application.

Karnataka has 212 ULBs that include corporations, city municipal councils, and town municipal councils. The Nirmala Nagara project seeks to empower each of these by 2009, and its first phase began across 63 ULBs in August last year. It entailed putting in place an integrated financial management system among other implementations such as property tax information system with GIS.

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