E-Governance experiences in India

For last few years computerization has become common in all government departments and we can do a number of tasks online. 

Last few days I had different encounters with a few government systems here around. I'll summarize my experience as below. 

1. Online Tenant Registration

I'm living at present in a rented apartment. Recently I was looking at a new vehicle purchase and one condition was the tenant should be registered at nearest police station. Being lazy, I looked up if there is anything online for this. Funnily enough, there is a website: http://tenantreg.in. It was started two years back on the outset of "German Bakery Blasts" and "26/11 Mumbai Attacks". The website when I tried to access was down. I tracked the registration and found out one probitysoft maintaining it. I found mail of the registering person and fired an email to that person. I didn't get any reply or acknowledgment, but the website miraculously came online. I went through the options and checked the various operations. 

It looked functional enough, but me being the pessimistic type decided to go visit the police station. It didn't turn out that exciting but anyway this is one story of eGovernance.

2. Online Tax Payment and RTS queries

This is from KalyanDombivali Municipal Corporation website. They had an old system 4 years back which was okay'ish. But the payment options were dreadful with only 2-3 banks supported. So couple of years back they revitalized the whole thing and computerized a number of departments. 

The new system is up to date, is easy to use and is not an eyesore. For this I must give credit to the developers and the corporate admins who helped put this together. 

The payment part now uses two payment processors techprocess and billdesk which means anybody - I mean totally anybody can perform an online payment. I have been using this system to pay property taxes for one of my properties there and it's worked fine. A good example of eGovernance. 

But that's just one part. Recently I have to use their RTS functionality - this one for getting online No-Dues certificate. The process is straightforward. You fill an online form, pay 15Rs online, and you get a ticket whose status you can see online. 

You get an SMS on your registered phone no when the request is processed, then you can download the certificate from the website. As simple as that. If you have any dues, you can pay them right away and continue to filling the form. 

Brilliant. I got the certificate within two days as promised. This is a really good example of eGovernance. 

To look at it this way, since I do not live in the city it would have taken me one leave, about INR 500/- for travel and a lot of physical discomfort to get this done. But with this online facility, it's all saved. 

So from these experiences you can see that more and more eGovernance is needed. Lets hope the government puts more and more functionality on the computers.