Karnataka e-governance project to begin in April

The government of Karnataka is taking its first big step to provide the benefits of IT to the common man.

BangaloreOne, the state government's e-governance project to provide integrated services under one roof to citizens by deploying ICT tools has moved another step closer to reality.

The state government has signed an agreement with a consortium of CMS Computers Ltd and Ram Informatics Ltd to implement BangaloreOne project from April 2005. The agreement includes execution on a build-operate-own-transfer basis.

The project would begin with 15 BangaloreOne centres which will provide 24 government to citizen (G2C) services across the city. Each centre will have 15-20 counters.

According to Rajeev Chawla, secretary (e-Governance) and special secretary (Bhoomi) revenue department, government of Karnataka, "This initiative will make Bangalore one of the most citizen-friendly cities. We will have a total of 50 BangaloreOne centres within the next two years by when we plan to cover all municipalities within Bangalore."

Some of the important services to be provided by each BangaloreOne centre will be water/electricity/telephone bills payment, property tax payment, learner's driving license renewal, road tax for transport vehicles, sale of passport application forms and new passport application registration, collection of Karanataka Sales Tax and entry tax.

The total expenditure for the project at the initial stage is Rs 10 crore. Microsoft has provided end-to-end technical consultancy. The project has been designed, conceived and implemented by the government of Karnataka in association with the National Institute of Smart Government.

Chawla said that a citizen will have to wait for a maximum of 15 minutes during peak time. In fact, the agreement signed today clearly states that the consortium will be penalised for any transaction that exceeds 15 minutes.

The vendors (consortium) will be paid Rs 4.70 per transaction by the government. This amount is inversely proportional to the volume of transactions. These vendors have bagged the project by beating the likes of Wipro and TCS.

UTI Bank will provide the payment portal, handle cash transctions and pay the salaries of those manning the cash counters.

Nearly 600 employees working in two shifts will be paid at the rate of Rs 4,000 per month, costing UTI Bank Rs 3 crore a year. Besides getting an opportunity to get branded in a busy spot with heavy floating population, UTI Bank will also have the advantage of utilising the funds in transit.

The centres will be open from 8 am to 8 pm and would have a seating arrangement for all those who are waiting for their turn to get to the counter. User charges will be levied only on specific requirements like passport forms, birth/death certificate etc.