Please tell us about MCD’s IT vision and plan?
Our vision at MCD is to provide state-of-the-art, secure IT-enabled environment to the citizens of Delhi. The primary goal is to optimize our resources and improve our overall quality of services. We intend to use technology as an enabler to improve our key backend and citizens facing processes and services.
Meeting the expectations of the key stakeholders, essentially the citizens, businesses, vendors, and peer government organizations, is an important part of this major initiative. While improving overall quality of operations of MCD, the programme also envisions providing seamless information sharing, transparency and imposing more accountability on us.
Our organization is committed to the success of the programme and we have created a right partnership and collaboration model with our IT implementer with multi-level review processes to achieve success as we have envisioned. We have set up several key joint teams, steering committees and operational teams to deliver various streams of the programme. We are embarking on a multilateral organizational change management initiative to ensure appropriate training, knowledge and skills to run the programme successfully.
What are your major IT initiatives? What are the incentives that the government would be offering to the IT companies?
The major IT initiatives are primarily to enable backoffice, front office, citizen-centric processes and related information. Through these, we would provide better services in the areas of health, education, environment, engineering services and other key streams of municipal governance. We will have the capability to do better revenue stream analysis, which would provide insights and maximize over a period of time. The system would also help us in improving revenue realization in the short- and long-term perspective as well.
Connectivity is a major component of this initiative. Through this programme, every office of MCD would be digitally connected. All the activities in the corporate sector would be IT enabled.
MCD is one of the key organizations and any big IT vendor would desire to partner with MCD for a long time. When we announced the programme, more than a dozen IT implementers and system integrators of both national and international repute competed. Well, the IT companies want to partner with MCD because the reach, range, depth and complexity of our processes would be a strong reference that would enable them to compete on the e-Governance initiatives of hundreds of urban and local bodies in India and many all over the world.
Can you throw some light on MCD’s  hospital related projects?
The Property Tax has been one of the major streams of revenue and we are always looking for ways to improve the services related to tax administration. We feel proud that we already have IT-enabled property tax services to citizens which can be paid online.
The birth and death Registration (RBD) are currently provided through our Citizen Service Bureaus. Every month, we provide approximately 55,000 certificates. The system will soon have capabilities to measure service levels of certificate issuance to the citizens.
We have also recently started a new online software called the Maternal & Child Welfare Information System (MCWIS). So far, it is not a part of the HIS (Hospital Information System), but in due course of time we would like to integrate it in HIS.
The spread of IT to a select few is widening the gulf between the e-haves and the e-have-nots. What is your plan to bridge the digital divide in MCD?
We have recognized this need from the very beginning. We have already started a major organizational change management, mentoring and training initiatives to bridge this gap. Several departments like Engineering, Health, Procurement, etc. have already achieved a certain degree of IT experience and their learning would be cross-pollinated within MCD.
What is the administration’s take on the ICT policies?
Taking a cue from peer government organizations and our IT implementers, we hope to establish a formal ICT policy that would cover all the aspects of IT-enabled governance and operations compliant to the country. The ICT policy would be governed by a senior team of MCD officials and would be administered by our IT Department.
How was the shift for the MCD team?
The shift has not taken place yet, but is still in the process. Our target is to make our work more and more paperless. Though we have all the mechanism in place, it would take us some more time to make it fully operational. We also have to take into consideration the fact that the officials are still not used to it. Then, there is the major issue of digital divide among the citizens which needs to be done away with, if we really want this endeavour to be a success. So to achieve this objective, we are setting up “Government to Citizens Kiosks” (G2C) in the city. We have a target of setting up around 2,000 kiosks in the city, which would have all the facilities for the citizens to avail of. The digital divide which continues to exist is proposed to be removed by way of setting up these G2C kiosks.
Once these G2C kiosks are fully operational in the neighbourhood, the citizens simply need to approach these kiosks to avail the facilities, without having to travel to places for seeking them. We have already 500 locations earmarked for these kiosks, 40 are already operational and as we go along, we will have around 2,000 kiosks operational by next year. These kiosks available 24x7 will also come handy during the forthcoming Commonwealth Games, when the foreign officials or visitors will be able to access information in a fraction of a second.Â
How has the deployment of biometric systems of attendance in the MCD offices taken off?
Biometric Systems of attendance that we have deployed of late has been a grand success. It has been possible to take this system of Biometrics to all the departments and cover all the employees, except the Education Department. Not only in the offices but this particular system has also been introduced in the fields in the form of mobile biometrics systems. Post deployment, there is a total change witnessed in the work culture. By means of this system, the employees in every office are required to report on time and leave only after the appointed hour, bringing efficiency and transparency in the work.
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