AMC civic centres reasonably successful: IIM-A

After establishing 18 computerised civic centres in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), an independent impact assessment study has rated the project as reasonably successful.

Computerisation has allowed the system to cope with a 38 per cent growth in the transaction volumes in the last few years.

The AMC civic centres have been operational for three years. Seven civic centres were started in 2002-03 and another nine were added in 2004-05. These centres were set up to deliver services that include the annual payment of property tax, issue of birth and death certificates and issue of shop licences.

An international team led by Subhash Bhatnagar, a professor, and consisting of professors Rama Rao, Nupur Singh, Ranjan Vaidya all from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) assessed the impact of eight projects in three states of the country.

They have rated the e-seva project in Andhra Pradesh and Bhoomi in Karnataka as the two most successful projects of the lot.

The eSeva project is aimed at integrating and offering a wide range of government to citizen services at a single location. Nearly 300 eSeva centres have opened in various cities of Andhra Pradesh.

The Bhoomi project of Karnataka deals with computerisation of land records. Nearly 200 Bhoomi kiosks at taluks and 800 kiosks in rural areas issue copies of land titles online.

The impact analysis of the AMC civic centre was taken up with a systematic survey of 250 respondents from eight wards by a market research firm.

"Quantitatively there did not seem to be a difference between improvements through computerisation in the top three projects "" e-seva, Bhoomi and AMC Civic centres," said Subhash Bhatnagar, Professor, IIM-A who is also an advisor at the World Bank.

He added that while some of the projects had reported a significant level of corruption amongst its officials, this was not the case with the AMC civic centres.

The total investment over the last three years in the AMC civic centre project has been Rs 25 crore on hardware, data entry and furniture.

Following computerisation, the revenue from transaction fee has grown by 17.5 per cent to Rs 53.3 crore in 2005-06. The revenue from tax has grown 44.72 per cent over three years to Rs 1,974.2 million in 2005-06.

As the AMC earns Rs 3.4 crore a year to pay for the investments, it is expected that it will pay back in seven-eight years at the present levels of user fee.

The study has shown that AMC civic centres have lowered travel costs by Rs 22 per transaction for their users who are all urban. Waiting time in the centres has been halved from 29.3 to 14.63 minutes.

The time elapsed to complete certain types of transactions has been cut from 9.8 days to 5.3. There has also been a perceptible improvement of 0.75 points on a five-point scale in the quality of governance and a 0.7 points improvement in service quality.

"A common feature in all the analysed projects is that over 90 per cent of the respondents preferred the computerised system over the manual system. In terms of costs and time saved for nearly seven lakh citizens that used the system last year and the increased capacity in AMC of monitoring default in payments by the citizens, computerisation has definitely made an impact, " added Bhatnagar.