MAHARASHTRA: Transparent Governance

As part of

the Maharashtra Seas project, the State Ex-cise Department, Government of

Maharashtra has completed the process of computerization. Work on the project

commenced in 1998 and the task of completing and maintaining the project was

assigned to CMC. Initially it started with providing software development and

basic awareness to approximately 1,000 employees. The State Excise Application

Software has 19 modules and the activities specific to individual departments

have been categorized into independent modules. Says SK Paradkar, Deputy

Director, State Excise Department, "We are providing access of information

to specific departments and only that, which is of specific use to them."

So the accounts module, used to capture revenue paid to the government by the

licensees because of various fees and duties, would not be accessible to other

departments, unless granted permission. Moreover, it has plans to make the

information available online and storage of data would be centralized and easy

to analyze. Some of the 19 modules undertaken in this project include

accounts, audit, checkpost, chemical laboratory, data extraction, legal, license

and systems administration.

Stamps and Registration

project

The Stamps

and Registration Department of Maharashtra, nowadays stamps its authority (pun

intended) over other departments. Annually, Maharashtra collects revenue to the

tune of Rs1,900 crore. Subhash Lakhe, Superintendent, Department of Stamps,

says, "Earlier there used to be a lot of backlog as a result of manual

operations, but with computerization all that will change". With

computerization, the department hopes to bring transparency and accountability,

which seems to plague all government departments. The development of software

has been completed and department staff is currently undergoing the process of

testing and training the software. There are plans of integrating all the 365

offices, but in a phased manner. Initially, it is looking at computerizing 165

departments. The total investment of the government in this project has been

approximately Rs10 crore. When the systems are in place, documents would be

registered within an hour and the original copy of the document would be handed

over to the recipient, which is not the case at present. This is expected

to eliminate the chances of favoritism and bring in more transparency.

Connectivity project

The

Government of Maharashtra has identified connectivity as an important issue for

successful e-governance. And for this the state has taken up the task of

connecting around 3,000 offices through a network. With the help of VSATs, which

is used at present and with the reach of the internet, the reach will be further

extended to the sub-taluka level where the government is setting up gram-sachivalayas.

The Mantralaya’s LAN is in the final stages and every typewriter has been

replaced. The government has gone for a district wide area network (WAN), which

is linked to 3,000 districts. There are 465,000 sales tax assesses filing about

four million returns every year and these returns are filed through 2,200

branches of various banks. For this, computerization of banks and introduction

of payment-gateways are important. The government has further plans of

computerizing all the 300 treasuries and sub-treasuries and connect them to all

the 10,000 offices for online billing, processing, payment and auditing. The government

has developed 50 applications including registration of deeds, stamp duty, works

management, tendering, human resources amongst others. There are plans to

implement these applications quickly.