Bollywood affocianados would perhaps remember the celluloid classic Do Bigha Zameen where the rural family turns up in the city in search of jobs and eventually adds up to the urban slum. While this Balraj Sahni caper might have taken place more than half a century ago, down the decades, the motif of rural populace driving down to the cities and adding to the already strained urban milieu have recurred many times in Indian movies. Be it Naseeb, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, or Chandni Bar, one can point out several examples in this genre.

Just as Bollywood reflects many realities of Indian lives, the fact that migration of a large segment of rural population is leading to tremendous strain on urban infrastructure is a reality. A daily look at the teeming millions landing in Mumbai's Victoria Terminus or New Delhi Railway Station or Kolkata's Howrah Station vividly illustrates the extent of this problem. Numbers too support this trend: the percentage of India's population living in cities and urban areas has doubled to 28.8% by 2001, from 14% at the time of Independence.

Obviously, this has put tremendous pressure on the urban local bodies, viz, the municipal corporations, nagar panchayats, etc to deliver quality administration. And, thankfully, many of them have turned to e-governance to do so. “The whole e-gov movement in municipalities started some 8-9 years back, when municipalities started going online with applications like property tax, payment of birth and death certificates, etc, but now it has truly expended in every way, be it the length or the depth,” says Sanjay Jaju, MD, Infrastructure Commission, Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Reaping Benefits of IT
It's not just states like Andhra Pradesh, even the Central government has realized the importance of automation in urban local bodies, especially thanks to the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992; the act that significantly increased the responsibility of local bodies in India. Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), too, are witnessing a significant increase in responsibilities with greater powers and decentralized authority. Effective governance at the ULB level, among other things, requires internal financial systems that embody the standard accounting practices. In addition, the Right to Information (RTI) Act also mandates that the ULBs proactively share data, including key financial indicators, with the citizens. E-governance has a key role to play in supporting both these objectives.

It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the Government of India has finalized the National Mission Mode Project on e-Governance in municipalities, in 423 cities with a population of a lakh or above, over a period of five years. The Minister of State for Urban Development, Ajay Maken, informs that the scheme has been designed to cover eight services within urban local bodies. The services include registration and issue of birth and death certificate, payment of property tax, water supply and other utilities bills, building plan approvals, grievances and suggestions and procurement and monitoring of projects including e-procurement.

Health programs, licenses and solid waste management, accounting system and personal information system are other services covered in the e-governance scheme. The total estimated central share for implementation of the scheme is Rs 676 crore. Five mega cities-Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore-are covered under centrally sponsored scheme of infrastructure development. “The government has commissioned financial credit rating exercise in respect of various urban local bodies of the mission cities under the infrastructure and governance component of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) during 2007,” says Maken.

However, the minister informed that the new CSS for cities and towns other than 35 cities would wait for the present till the implementation of this witnessed. The exercise is aimed at enhancing the preparedness of urban local bodies to approach the market to finance its projects. “What has happened everywhere in the country, so far, is that municipality automation is being taken up individually, and then, the government has spurred in to action by trying to map the use of ICT in a planned manner,” explains Vivek Bharadwaj, special secretary, Department of Urban Development, Government of West Bengal.

Under JNNURM, there are some mandatory reforms planned related to e-gov adoption by ULBs. These would include adoption of modern accrual-based double entry system of accounting in ULBs and parastatal agencies; introduction of a system of e-governance using IT applications, such GIS and MIS for various services provided by ULBs and parastatal agencies; and lastly, reform of property tax with GIS. It becomes a major source of revenue for ULBs and arrangements for its effective implementation, so that collection efficiency reaches at least 85% within the next seven years.

The success stories of individual states make for interesting reading. In Gujarat, until now, fifty-one municipalities have introduced the e-governance projects, while fifty-eight more expect to introduce it by October. The remaining thirty-two municipalities will be covered by year-end.

Once this happens, Gujarat will become the first state in India to be completely e-governed. Some state governments are building their initiatives block by block. The Karnataka government, for example, started by computerizing six of its largest municipal corporations to cover functions such as property tax valuation, collection, issue and record of death/birth certificates, water supply billing, consumer complaints and internal MIS functions. The second phase involved networking 100 smaller municipalities.

The Andhra Pradesh government, on the other hand, has opted for a state-wide rollout. It has set up 253 e-service centers across the state, covering 117 municipalities. Impressed by these initiatives, other state governments are keen to follow suit. Rajasthan is busy drawing up a detailed plan to rope in IT majors and line up funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The West Bengal government is setting up a geographical information system within the sprawling city of Kolkata, with the financial support of agencies like Unicef.

The sheer economic sense of e-gov impacting Indian municipalities is gradually dawning upon all quarters. With municipal administration becoming increasingly tougher, the benefits of IT adoption are becoming more and more visible across several municipalities. Take some of these facts: India's first e-governed municipality in Gujarat's Ahmedabad district recorded an 85% in tax recoveries; the first nine municipalities in Gujarat that implemented e-governance saw tax recoveries grow from 35% to 65%; and, in Gujarat again, the Municipal Corporation of Surat, which shot to limelight on account of a plague epidemic in the nineties, now has an award-winning system for addressing citizen complaints.

Examples of beneficial automation don't stop here: the municipality of Visakhapatnam provides a number of basic services online including tap connection status, status of garbage pick-ups, sanitation tenders, and building plan status; Coimbatore, a bustling city in Tamil Nadu, has computerized its database for property taxes and water charges; Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, uses a management information system that has helped the city improve its resources mobilization; and, Anand, a rural district in Gujarat, which pioneered India's cooperative movement, has nine municipalities. Each is e-governed.

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