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.