K'taka CM to kickstart BangaloreOne centers

BANGALORE: Residents of Bangalore can look forward to relatively hassle-free public utility services with the opening of 14 BangaloreOne centers across different areas in the city. These centers would provide a one-stop interface for citizens with state government departments. "This e-governance program will offer 27 services to begin with and would extend to around 200 services as the efficiency and versatility of the portals goes up," said e-governance secretary of Government of Karnataka Rajeev Chawla.






Each of the BangaloreOne centers would run from 8 am to 8 pm and would have facilities such as bill payments for water, electricity and phone; payment of property and commercial taxes; submission of passport forms; booking railways tickets and issue of birth and death certificates among other services. Each center would also have a UTI Bank ATM. Chawla said with the opening of the BangaloreOne centers, the existing Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) electronic kiosks would be either closed or relocated to other places in the city. "We have to build the credibility of these BangaloreOne centers. We hope that in future all the services will be under one roof and BangaloreOne becomes like "Foodworld" —one stop shop for all facilities," said Chawla. The services would be available in Kannada and English.





CMS and Ram Informatics are undertaking the IT infrastructure and implementation. About the investment into the center, regional manager of CMS Computers Jagannath said, "The capital investment for each center is around Rs 18 lakh —Rs 20 lakh and citizens would have to pay a nominal amount per transaction."





The system has been built on .NET architecture provided by Microsoft at 45 percent of the cost. The project is partly funded by the National Institute of Smart Governance, which has pooled in Rs 1.5 crore. The Karnataka government would equip the centers with 200 PCs.