How is NDMC leveraging IT in order to facilitate good governance?
Municipalities are government bodies that have the highest level of public interface as opposed to any other agency. Agencies like NDMC can claim to be enabling good governance only if the processes are smooth and fast and, for this, we are trying to make use of technology wherever possible.
We are a municipality with two distinct and unique functions. We are also a distributor for water and electricity in our operational areas, besides other roles. We have already brought about heavy computerization in order to automate things. We have moved many functions like complaint registration online. This function is bound by stringent deadlines, failing which the responsible officials will be fined for which they will be required to pay from their own pocket.
All the recruitment processes, right from accepting an application, to moving an employee on to the payroll are computerized.
We are also investing in other technologies. For real time assessment of sanitation, we approached an Indian software company that has helped us install an off-site real-time system on a GPS-enabled mobile phone using which an employee can take a picture of a location and send it directly to the NDMC servers with its exact location and time.
The sanitation supervisors produce photographs of their sites every day as a proof that that the area has been cleaned. This data is sent to the NDMC server and the reports that are generated can be viewed by the respective zonal officers both on their mobile phones and desktops.
We have deployed financial software from Infosys, and several other specialized solutions from various other providers. We are also in the process of finalizing the Building Plan software procurement, so that the building plan approvals can be obtained online.
We have implemented Work Assets management solutions in our Electricity Central store and Water Supply Division. We manage our own portal and the data center.
The biggest challenge for an agency like ours is the integration of standalone systems as one platform and this is what we are working on. SAP has already given us a project feasibility report to integrate all of the IT systems into one. We aspire to be a municipality with a difference and automating processes is a step towards it. It is time to roll out smart ICT-enabled government and public utility services.
Pune became the first Indian city to have its CIO. Do you think India too needs a model like some of the developed nations where cities have designated CIO/CTO to prepare the city’s IT infrastructure?
My role is equivalent to that of a CIO’s with the only difference being that, in the national capital, there are different agencies looking after the municipal operations. The largest, almost 95% of the area, is under the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Small pockets are taken care of by the Delhi Cantonment Board and the NDMC. In this case, our jurisdiction is limited. It might sound Utopian but efficient governance will require various other agencies like the Traffic Police and Police to team up. Only then can we imagine smartly governed cities. However, there are huge gaps between the IT maturity of various agencies and these need to be closed first.
What is the next big IT project that you are working on?
The topmost priority for us is redo our data center, which can be termed as primitive considering our requirements today. We have shortlisted two locations—the primary location will be the head office in Delhi and a mirror data center will be set up at Gole Market. The idea is to rip and replace the data center from scratch and we are in talks with players like IBM but have not closed on any vendor as of yet. However, we expect that a decision will be made soon.
Considering the popularity of the electric bikes in the city, there were plans to set up recharge stations and deploy NFC or smartcard payment systems. What is happening to that proposal?
We hope that the charging stations will be ready within two to three years. The payment criteria has not been decided upon so far. The plan has been presented to an agency of the Transport Department. We are looking forward to a PPP model here. The users will be charged on an hourly basis or on the basis of the units of power that they consume.
In fact, we are also planning to develop a mobile application to popularize these stations among users. This app will let users check the availability of a free charging station in an area close by.