Coimbatore goes the e-gov way

CHENNAI: Coimbatore, popularly known as Manchester of South India, with an approximate population of 11 lakh and a floating population of around 1.5 lakh, has adopted Anything Anywhere project for better transparency in its governance.

Before E-governance, collection of corporation dues like property tax, water charges, etc., citizens applying for any specific service in the corporation, the capital and maintenance works executed by the corporation and issue of various certificates like birth and death certificates and trade license certificates was done manually and took a lot of time to process.

The Corporation answered these impediments by developing a dynamic web portal www.coimbatore-corporation.com, which now acts as a citizen's interface. Besides this, the Corporation has also developed some important modules like accounting module, workflow management module and grievance redressal module.

In addition to this, the Central Transaction Server (CTS) situated in the Corporation main office contains all the data relating to the Corporation. In order to enable banks and the Corporation facilitation centers to access these data and offer various services, separate collection/Service modules have been developed using XML- based, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This technological architecture empowers the Corporation, its offices and the banks to exchange information in a decentralized, distributed and secured environment.

Through this Collection / Service module banks get connected to the CTS by a dial-up connection through their respective ISP, enabling free flow of information at a faster speed. The banks thus collect the Corporation dues relating to property tax, water charges, profession tax and non-tax. All transactions are securely logged and directly updated to the CTS on a real time basis.

Today, the citizens of Coimbatore, no matter where they live can watch the activities of Corporation including sanctioned/pending/application on various civic services offered by the Corporation, defaulters list of property tax and water charges; real time demand collection balance (DCB) of Property tax and water charges and details of development work.

(CyberMedia News Service)