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).

E-Governance News : 19/11/09

NRIS WILL GET UIDS TOO, SAYS NILEKANI
Rashme Sehgal, New Delhi
The Asian Age

Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Nandan Nilekani, said the scheme will be extended to include Non-Resident Indians (NRIs).

Speaking to journalists at the Indian Women Press Corps, Nilekani explained that under the dual citizenship, NRIs who own a place of residence in India will get this 16-digit number that will be unique to them.

The scheme, the largest of its kind in the world and which is expected to provide biometric details of fingerprints and photograph of 1.2 billion Indians, will be used to confer benefits to the poor availing the NREGA and other programmes of social uplift. Nilekani said.

FIRS CAN BE FILED ONLINE IN AP
Hyderabad
The Hindu Business Line

Following a direction from the Union Home Ministry, the Andhra Pradesh Police is in the process of making the details of the cases and crimes online.

Mahaboobnagar, East Godavari, Kadapa, Srikakulam and Medak districts are among the top performers with averages in the range of 80-98 percent when it comes to filing FIRs (first information reports) online.

PLAN TO MAKE UIAI GENERATE OWN RESOURCES
New Delhi
Deccan Herald

The Centre is mulling over a proposal to make the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) generate its own resources by providing services relating to identity and residence verification of citizens.

“A mobile connection or getting a credit card needs address verification and the service providers have to hire agencies to do the job. Since we will have a database, we can do on-line verification and get the fees,” Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, told a group of women journalists here on Wednesday. “Thus we can offset some of the expenses the government has to incur for providing this number to more than one billion people,” he said.

Enrolment process
Maintaining that citizens would not have to apply separately for such a number, Nilekani said the enrolment process and the subsequent issuance of the number would start when someone would seek to get a service provided by the government.

“Suppose you want to open a bank account and you do not have a unique identification number, the bank will forward your name and other details to us and the process will take off from there,” he said adding that the Authority would issue a letter to the concerned person giving that unique number.

Enumerating the biggest challenge for the project, as a part of which the first set of numbers would be issued within the next 18 months, Nilekani said setting up and maintaining the biometric data base of 1.2 billion people would be something which the world has never seen.

Responding to queries on whether foreigners residing in India or the NRIs would get the unique number, Nilekani said a committee headed by former Central Vigilance Commission chairman N Vittal is working on a set of eligibility criteria necessary for the number.

“We are working on the security devices necessary to protect our data bank from hacking and also looking at the privacy and legal aspects. A separate committee has been set up to look into the biometric standards to be used in our database,” he said.

Maintaining that the database would have the print of all the 10 fingers of a person, the former Infosys boss said the rate of false rejection would be minimised.

DOP THINKS OUT OF THE RED BOX
Devina Sengupta & Vinaya Gopaal, Bangalore
DNA (Bangalore edition)

The Karnataka Circle of the Department of Posts (DoP) is betting big on the retail portfolio (including forex, passport, railway ticketing services) to boost its revenue. M P Rajan, the chief postmaster general, Karnataka Circle, India Post, said that although around 42% of the revenues come from mails and 40% from financial service offerings, the department is expecting the remaining 18% of the revenue mainly to come from the retail offerings.

The Department of Posts recently tied up with global management consulting, technology services company Accenture for securing robust IT architecture.