GHMC to go paperless in six months

​Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has decided to go paperless soon and the communication with officials too would become easy and files could be tracked by pressing a button.

The civic body officials have decided to digitise all wings and put them on the public domain in order to maintain transparency and accountability.

Officials said the citizens can even register grievance or apply for permissions and check the status of the file. The corporation has decided to use state-of-the-art high-end servers in order to facilitate citizens.

According to the officials, 25 wings working in the civic body will become paperless in the next six months. This initiative will eliminate manual file movement in the GHMC.

The IT wing during the first phase will collect data from all wings and prepare a roadmap for paperless functioning. The corporation had already succeeded in various paperless initiatives, including MY GHMC App, where citizens can register their grievance on birth certificates, get digital birth certificate and others.

The GHMC even introduced biometric attendance system, e-office, geo-tagged estate and other properties which have helped to minimise corruption.

A senior GHMC official told The Hans India that the civic body has already made several reforms pertaining to technology.

He said the current office system can be only monitored by the GHMC officials and not citizens. He said in the paperless project, citizens can apply their application through online and monitor the flow of the file. He also said citizens can directly download the sanctioned applications or permission which will be digitally signed.

The GHMC official further said that the main aim of the project is to facilitate citizens where he/she can apply for permission or register their grievance by not doing rounds around the civic body's circle and zonal offices.

"The scope for corruption would reduce drastically as officials would no longer be able to demand bribes to clear files. The communication with officials too would become easy and files could be tracked by pressing a button," he said.

Speaking about bottlenecks in the digitalising and migrating the files, GHMC official said, “Only the town planning department, issue of birth and death certificates would take some time as there are a large data and huge maps.

Scanning machines too would be provided to all the departments. In the town planning department, the work would start with occupancy certificate.”

The GHMC official said the data would be stored at the primary data centre at the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) and a secondary data centre at Marri Channa Reddy Human Resource Development Institute (MCRHRD).

"The work is being taken up in a thematic manner. Earlier, there were small servers but those have been replaced with state-of-the-art high-end servers." he said.