All municipalities to go paperless

​Hyderabad: All municipalities in the state, including the newly-formed 62 municipalities, would go paperless. Thanks to the initiative of the state government for introducing online building permissions in the urban local bodies (ULBs) a mandatory.

The Commissioner and Director of Municipal Administration (CDMA) has asked all the municipal commissioners in the newly-formed 62 municipalities to have online building permissions in their respective local body. The municipal administration department has been taking up several initiatives as part of the ease of doing business and introduced online building permissions in the 72 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in the State from June 2016.

According to the officials, the online system introduced in the local bodies is functioning successfully in all the ULBs and the CDMA had received a national level award for this initiative. The state government constituted 68 new local bodies in the state and these have been functioning since August 1, 2018. There are 73 municipalities and from now onwards, the online system would be implemented in all these local bodies, including the 62 new municipalities.

The official said that the Director of Town and Country Planning asked for extension of online building permission under the Development Permission Management System (DPMS) for the newly-constituted ULBs in the state. The official informed that M/s Softech Engineers Limited was made software development for the new ULBs and DTCP has established CPUs and DTCP office and DPMS was made live for the new ULBs from Monday onwards.

The official said that all the municipal commissioners have been asked not to receive any manual building permission applications and dispense with the manual processing of building permission applications and to strictly process the building permission applications only through the permission management system. The director of town and country planning, Hyderabad, has been asked to assist the new ULBs through CPU and also issue instructions to town planning staff for strict adherence. 

The official said that the IT initiative would help the ULBs to avoid discrepancies in the buildings and layouts. The official recalled that when the system was implemented in 73 municipalities, it was observed that about 20,000 properties were not under the tax net and it helped the department in getting tax revenues.