E-Governance News: 20/11/09

DELHI PROPERTY REGISTRATION SYSTEM TO BE DIGITISED
New Delhi
The Times of India

The archaic property registration system in the city may soon give way to a digitised and transparent mechanism under which genuine owners will be given a unique identification number and title for their properties.

Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna said the proposed system, being structured on the lines of the one existing in European countries, will stop all fraudulent property transactions as an online database of all genuine properties will be put in place to ensure transparency.

The city Government has been working with various stakeholders for the last three years to frame a new legislation to provide a legal framework for granting property titles in the national capital to all property owners and check fraudulent transactions.

Addressing a consultative meeting on the new legislation, Khanna said, "Enormous amount of efforts" will be required from the Delhi Government to make the ambitious project a success.

SMART CARD FOR BUS FARE IN DWARKA
Megha Suri Singh, New Delhi
The Times of India (Delhi edition)

Taking a big leap towards a common smart card for seamless travel in city buses and Delhi Metro, the transport department has developed a pilot for automated fare collection (AFC) on six air conditioned Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) buses to be run on the special Dwarka shuttle route. The project, which will be flagged off by chief minister Sheila Dikshit, on November 24, will soon be extended to all buses and later integrated with Metro.

The smart card, modelled on London’s popular Oyster card and exactly like the one used on Delhi Metro, will for now be valid in six buses running on the 28-km Dwarka shuttle route, which starts at Dwarka More and traverses through all sectors of the subcity. The buses have been fitted with smart-card readers — two on each bus — where commuters need to flash the card while entering and exiting the bus. The readers are connected to the Global Positioning System (GPS) device, which helps it track the bus’s location at the time of the swipes and then calculates the distance travelled by the commuter.

527 CENTRES FOR SPEEDY ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS
Pune
The Indian Express

The government-run citizen facilitation centres (CFC), where people are supposed to get easy access to caste certificate, domicile certificate and other affidavits easily, have failed to deliver due to surging crowd at the 14 CFCs — one for each taluka in the district.

It doesn’t help when people are required to come again and again as the required documents are not made available due to a number of reasons — staff crunch, system failure or insufficient availability of data.

The state government has roped in four private players — Reliance Communications, Spanco Limited, 3i Infotech and CMS Computers Ltd — between whom different regions of the state have been divided for this Government-to-Consumer (G-2-C) initiative.

Coming the way of Pune in a month’s time, with a basket of value-added services such as birth and death certificates, 7/12 extracts and about 46 other documents will be Spanco, that has been selected for western Maharashtra and Konkan regions. Pune district alone will have 527 such centres in addition to the 14 CFCs, thus ensuring better coverage for the citizens. Of this, 467 will be in rural areas and 60 in urban areas of the city and will go under a new name — Common Service Centres (CSCs).