Punjab, Chandigarh go strong on e-governance

CHANDIGARH, INDIA: In tune with the revolutions happening in e-governance, the Chandigarh administration and the Punjab government separately announced some steps to go forward with the e-revolution tasking place in the country.

While Chandigarh announced that it will introduce e-stamping of the documents in the union territory, the Punjab government is set to computerize the District Transport Offices (DTOs) and outsource the registration and licensing work to streamline the process of vehicle registration.

"Chandigarh will soon adopt this practice (e-stamping) under India Stamp Act and send the draft notification to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs," a Chandigarh administration spokesperson said on Wednesday.

"This system will have round-the-clock availability, save cost and will be user-friendly. It is more transparent and assures privacy of the client information," the spokesperson added.

At present, the documents that require stamp duty include agreements, deeds of conveyances, certificates of sale, bills of exchange, partitions, power of attorney to sell immovable property, deeds of settlement, transfers of lease, mortgage deeds, insurance and letters of credit.

"The whole transaction and the system will be protected by the-state-of-the-art security measures such as Secured Socket Layer (SSL) and encryption technology," stated the spokesperson.

Meanwhile, the Punjab government said with the computerization all the DTOs in the state will become hi-tech with a provision of wide area network (WAN) by December 31.

“All the DTOs will be computerized and we will outsource the work of driving licence preparation to a professionally competent body. For this purpose, funds have already been allocated and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is selected as the implementing agency,” said Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal.

He added: "It was brought to our notice that there was inordinate delay in registration of new commercial vehicles. Their owners have to suffer losses despite heavy investment. We are confident that after the computerization, the applicants will be able to register their vehicles in a single day."

Badal also mooted a proposal to introduce spot collection of traffic challans by designated officers.

"Each designated officer would be equipped with a handy computerized device so that he could issue spot receipt and challan information would be entered into centralized server," stated Badal.

©IANS