A report of the Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) has exposed the deficiencies in the e-registration system of the state government.
The e-registration system that started in January 2010 aimed at replacing the existing manual system of registration of deeds, valuation of properties, capturing and preserving copies of documents, conducting searches and maintaining back office records, enhancing the quality and speed of service delivery to the citizens and maintaining transparency in valuation.
The CAG found that appropriate procedures were not followed for vendor selection for the project where the government committed to bear 68 per cent of the cost. This was in addition to the total cost for digitisation of legacy data. Capital expenditure of the project was assessed at Rs 28 crore of which the government's contribution was Rs 19 crore.
"No competitive bids were insisted for selection of vendor and discovery of service charges. Moreover, the selected vendor (IL&FS) had no prior experience in developing automation software for property registration in any other state," said the CAG report for revenue sector for the year ended March 2014.
CAG further observed that the e-Dharani application software developed by IL&FS had no significant advantage over the ORIS software of National Informatics Centre (NIC) except that the former was web-based centralised.
"ORIS would have trouble free integration with the Bhulekh software in view of NIC support. Major states in India had opted for NIC for software support and service provider for delivering e-services to citizens," the report said.
The e-registration project in the state was awarded to Odisha e-Governance Services Ltd (OeSL), a special purpose vehicle (SPV) formed by state owned Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC) and IL&FS. The project was to be implemented on build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) basis on the public private partnership (PPP) mode.
In reply to the audit's objections, the state government in its reply, in November 2014, stated that since OCAC, a public sector organisation of the state government was involved, the selection was done without bidding. The CAG said the reply of the state government amounts to acknowledgement of deviation from NLRMP (National Land Records Modernization Programme) which required competitive bidding in PPP projects. Audit also observed several deficiencies in providing online citizen centric services. The basic facilities required for providing e-services such as downloading of formats of deeds and basic instructions, applying for issue of encumbrance certificate, viewing status of documents, facility of registering documents anywhere in the state were not available to the citizens in the public domain.
