All civic bodies, nagar panchayats to go digital

People living in distant cities and small towns will also now be able to reap the benefits of e-governance. For the first time, the state government has decided to digitise the civic services of all municipal corporations and nagar panchayats, through which the common man living even in remote areas can obtain municipal certificates with a click of the mouse.

As a part of its ambitious e-governance project, the state government has invited bids from interested companies for providing the ‘Centralised Web-based System for Urban Local Bodies (ULBs).’ The software will be developed for 26 municipal corporations and 340 municipal councils/nagar panchayats.

The request for proposal (RFP) has been issued by the department of information and technology (DIT) for 11 modules — Birth & Death, Assessment, Water Billing & Accounting, Food Licence, Market Licence, Accounts, CARE (Customer Grievance Module), UWMS (Workflow Management System), EIP (Enterprise Information Portal or website), Town Planning and Marriage Registration.

Manisha Mhaiskar, secretary, urban development department, said, “We have decided to develop software for all ULBs in the state to provide citizens state-of-the-art services. While the project will be implemented for all 340 municipal councils and nagar panchayats, the 26 municipal corporations will be given an option to accept it or implement their own system. The project is likely to be implemented within a year.”

According to state officials, municipal corporations of major cities like Mumbai, Pune, Thane, and Pimpri-Chinchwad have been excluded from the project, as they already have their own software for citizen services. “The objective of this project was to implement this software to provide integrated citizen-centric services through the ULBs. Based on the developments post-implementation, other future enhancements could be integrated with these modules to spruce up the efficiency of the ULBs,” said a senior civic official.

Initially, for a period of two years, the bidder should host the entire solution in a tier-3 data centre within the country. Later on, the entire solution shall be shifted to the State Data Centre. The maintenance phase will be for a period of five years, said officials.