E-Governance News: 6/1/10

PROOF OF CONCEPT BIDS INVITED FOR BIOMETRIC, FINGERPRINT DEVICES
New Delhi
The Hindu Business Line

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has invited bids for supply, installation and commissioning of biometric and fingerprint devices.

However, the bids are meant for proof of concept and not the full project, sources said. The UIDAI has fixed January 17 as the last date for submission of technical and commercial bids. “This is aimed at identifying standards and testing out various devices for proof of concept,” sources added.

The UID project aims to handout a unique identification number to every Indian resident.

When contacted, the UIDAI Chairman, Nandan Nilekani, declined to comment on the bids. Asked about the status of the ongoing dialogue with various States, he said that talks with 18 States has already been concluded and that remaining would be covered by March. Over the last few months, the authority has been discussing the UID project with various State governments and is also giving presentations on the approach and strategy in this regard.

It may be recalled that the UIDAI recently invited proposals from consulting firms for services pertaining to the setting up of Central ID Data Repository (CIDR) and selection of managed service provider. The RFP for consultants is being seen as the first step towards the creation of back-end IT infrastructure for the project.

STATE SET FOR E-MOTIONS IN ASSEMBLY
Avinash Kalla, Jaipur
The Times of India

The Rajasthan assembly is all set to have lots of e-motions. In a first in the country, members of the House can raise questions online and also get their answers online. This is likely to be in place by the end of this year.

For the past six months, programmers and systems analysts of the National Informatics Center (NIC) have been busy developing a system for the assembly, which will allow members and various government departments to be linked with the assembly on the World Wide Web.

In the first phase, an intranet will be developed for the assembly allowing online interface between the assembly and various departments of the state government. In the second phase, the members will be connected and they can post their questions online.

A senior official working on the project, said, “On the intranet all departments will be made available and the assembly will send them the various questions online pertaining to their department, to which they will send a reply which will be digitally signed to ensure the validity of the reply.”

At present neither Parliament nor any state assembly has this kind of facility. “In the LS, questions can be submitted over the email but no such integrated system is in place. Once put to practice this will be one of its kind mechanism,” an NIC official said.

TO NAIL TAX EVADERS, GOVT OFFERS MCD GEOGRAPHIC SURVEY DETAILS
New Delhi
The Indian Express

The biggest municipality in South and Southeast Asia, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), also is one of the poorest.

The reason: property tax collected this year comes from merely 20 percent of existing property owners. Now, the civic body is planning to force tax evaders to pay up.

For this, the Delhi government has sent a proposal to the MCD to use Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure to increase its collection. The geo-spatial survey of Delhi reveals that though tax is collected only from eight lakh properties, more than 40 lakh properties exist in the city.

The proposal sent by the government’s IT department entails that all manual property tax data available with the MCD be integrated with the data generated from GIS (Geographic Information System) survey done by Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The idea is to centrally manage all property records.

E-Governance News: 5/1/10

REGISTRATION PROJECT TO PROVIDE FASTER REGISTRATION OF DOCUMENTS
Kolkata/Bhubaneswar
Business Standard  

The people of Orissa can get their land and other documents registered in less than an hour compared to 30-45 days taken under the prevailing system manual registration, thanks to the roll out of e-Dharini, the e-registration project of the state government. The e-Dharini, a Rs 100 crore project was rolled out on Monday by chief minister Naveen Patnaik.

This project which is one of the Mission Mode projects of the state government is implemented by by Orissa e-Governance Services Limited (OeSL), a special purpose vehicle formed by Orissa Computer Application Centre (OCAC) and IL&FS-Infrastructure Development Corporation. The project is being taken up on the public private partnership (PPP) mode and it would be implemented by on BOOT (build, own, operate and transfer) basis

“The e-Dharini project is aimed at offering citizen centric services to the people of Orissa. Under this project, a deed can be registered in less than an hour”, Patnaik said after rolling out the project. S N Patra, the state minister for revenue and disaster management; Ramesh C Majhi, the minister for information technology; P K Mohapatra, the state IT secretary; R K Sharma, revenue secretary and Dinesh K Tyagi, chief executive officer, OeSL were present on the occasion.

The project will make use of biometric authentication system to ensure that there is no manipulation of records by unscrupulous methods, he added.

The e-registration project will be applicable to all essential records including birth, marriage and death certificates as well as land records.

 

E-FILING HELPS STATE REAP SALES TAX RETURNS BONANZA
Yogesh Naik, Mumbai
The Times of India (Mumbai edition)

The state’s finances would have been severely hit, but for the 100% e-returns scheme introduced by the sales tax department. This switch will help the department not just comfortably meet, but cross its revenue target for 2009-10. The department is expected to rake in Rs 34,000 crore against the target for the period of Rs 31,346 crore.

Sales tax commissioner Sanjay Bhatia said, “We introduced compulsory filing of e-returns in January 2009 and Maharashtra was the first state to achieve 100% filing. Before we introduced e-filing, traders and companies barely filed returns on time. The system shows that around September 2007, only 30% of traders had filed returns.

“But this year, when we checked in October 2009, we found that 80% of them had filed on time. This has led to a big increase in revenues and without e-filing, the earnings would have been in a mess.”

The state has also introduced e-refunds, interstate forms, e-registrations and e-audit forms. This has helped reduce red tape and corruption. “Earlier, people had to queue up for two hours to collect forms and there was corruption in the sale of forms too,” said a sales tax officer.

“Before e-filing, it took us nearly four months to find who had defaulted. Now, they can be found immediately after the last date of filing.”

The sales tax department has also begun sending email and SMS reminders to traders.

E-Governance: 4/1/10

E-SHAKTI CARD IN BIHAR
January 4, 2010
The Indian Express

Bihar government has decided to issue over one million E-shakti, a biometric muster roll-cum-job card, by March 31, 2010. Patna was chosen as the first district to extend benefit of the smart card. The service provider Smaartech Technologies limited will cover beneficiaries in over 1300 villages spread over 23 blocks in the district.

The E-shakti project was inaugurated on February 24, 2009 in the Paliganj block of Patna district by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and till now around 8.76 lakh village labourers of 14 blocks have been registered under it. Over 3,000 smart cards have already been distributed.

E-Shakti card will be distributed among 24 million NREGA beneficiaries in approximately 39,000 villages spread over 534 blocks in next four years.

 

TELANGANA STIR’S UNIQUE IMPACT
January 3, 2010
Business Standard

Originally, Andhra Pradesh was to be the recipient of the first unique identification (UID) number. However, political unrest in the state has taken its toll. Now, it appears that Nandan Nilekani’s project will be rolled out first in the state most ready for it — Karnataka. Pilot projects have already been done and the majority of Karanataka’s population will have UIDs by the end of 2011. The proactive state government has also set up an empowered committee on UIDs under the chief secretary. The state cabinet will, at its next meeting, decide who will be on the committee. The numbers will begin to be issued by February 2011.

 

RECORD OF ALL STOLEN VEHICLES SOON
Pawan Pandita
Hindustan Times (Delhi edition)

If you are planning to buy a second hand vehicle, your concern whether the vehicle is a stolen one is soon going to be over.

The district Transport Department is going to have a database of the vehicles on the Internet that will be linked with the other states.

The softwares for this new system have been developed by National Informatics Centre and are called Vaahan and Saarthi.

The Union Ministry of Surface Transport has issued directives for the preparation of a national as well as a state register for feeding all related information including registration of vehicles and driving licences issued by the states.

This register will have to be maintained by all the states on the basis of two softwares - Vaahan (for details pertaining to the vehicle) and Saarthi (for information pertaining to the driver of the vehicle), which will come in handy in the event of any offence registered against a vehicle. The information in the two registers would be accessible by the police, intelligence, insurance, income tax and transport departments.

Mukul Kumar, Sub Divisional Magistrate, Faridabad, is also the road transport authority for non-commercial vehicles.

 

PLAN TO DEVELOP SOFTWARE TO TRACK SALE AT PDS SHOPS
Vivek Narayanan, Chennai, January 4, 2010
The Times of India (Chennai edition)

Ration shops have for long been seen as places for hoarding and illegally selling products meant for the Public Distribution System (PDS). This could, in the coming years, end with three departments, including the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection (TNCSCP) department, planning to develop an integrated software to track the supply, storage and distribution of PDS articles.

Till September 2009, over 1,700 cases were filed under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 in Chennai and Tiruchirappalli; 75 persons detained under the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies and Essential Commodities Act, 1980 were prosecuted. The licences of more than 240 vehicles used for smuggling rice were cancelled. Officials were also advised to monitor a possible nexus between ration shop employees and ricemill owners.

Taking the cue, the TNCSCP, TNCSC and the Registry of Cooperative Societies (RCS) decided to come together to curb the illegal sale of rice and other PDS commodities. Work on the software will begin after March as the officials are now busy weeding out bogus ration cards.

“We will have an integrated software to track the supply, storage and distribution of civil supplies commodities. A private firm has been given the task of preparing the details to be fed into the software,” said TNSCP commissioner K Rajaraman.

Using the software, he said, officials can monitor the quantity of rice and other products being supplied, the quantity is being stored and the quantity actually being distributed. “If the stocks and sale details do not tally we can easily find out the ration shop involved in illegal sale,” he said.