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Towards more professionalism in governance
Written By murali772 - 1 June, 2011
Bangalore egovernance governance BBMP property taxes Media Reports efficiency outsourcing
While the number of persons paying online may have doubled this year - from 32,000 to 71,000 - many more may have logged on, and then logged off in frustration. Property owners in several parts of the city were in for a shock, when the computer refused to accept their payment, saying they had not paid the previous year’s tax. “We have bonafide receipts of taxes paid last year. How can the system say we have not paid? Isn’t it ridiculous that we now have to go to the BBMP office? What’s the point making it online if the taxpayer has to trek to the centre?” asked Sumithra Raghavan. The reasons are not too far to seek. The ground staff at work have not updated their previous tax data in the database. Helpless, these taxpayers returned to the queue at the BBMP help centres. Some others could not take printouts of their tax paid receipts.
BBMP officials also admit to the folly. “Yes, it’s unfortunate that we have had many such complaints this time, mainly from the newly-added areas. Data updation for 2009-10 and 2010-11 is still in progress and will take another 15 days to complete. But thereafter, there should be no problems for people to switch to the online mode,’’ BBMP deputy commissioner (revenue) I Ramakant told TOI.
For the full report in the ToI, click here.
As per the report, only Rs 37.52 cr, out of the Rs 520.36 cr received so far, was paid online, accounting for a miniscule 7.2% for supposedly tech savvy Benagaluru. This includes my contribution too.
As a blogger from the time blogging started, I have generally managed to keep myself abreast of the tech upgrades, though, in my late middle age ( I am trying to avoid the word 'old'), it's not been as easy, as say for my son. But, I have generally been making all mine and my immediate family's travel bookings, whether by air, rail or bus; banking operations; insurance policy renewals; credit card payments; etc, all from home, through the net, saving me a considerable amount of time, effort, and travel. I have generally found the sites user friendly, and once you have navigated through the process the first time, it becomes kind of child's play thereafter.
BBMP is about the exception. If I have managed to make online payment of my property taxes over the years, it required my "cracking" of the process each time, through painstaking effort, apart from some bit of luck.
The difference plainly is one of professionalism in the approach. It's like when a person wants to build his house. Now, any body can build it all on his own, and in the process, save himself the 5% odd fee that the architect may charge, though, at the end of it all, he may land up paying 20% more than what he would have, if he had engaged an architect. This is apart from the question of liveability of the house.
BBMP's approach is very much like the person who believes in doing it all by himself, even in today's world, which has become a lot more professionalised, quite in tune with the day's demands. Their team consists largely of just one professional, and the rest all part timers, if I understood it correctly. When some of us met him, quite like the person who has chosen to build his house himself, this professional too was eloquent about how, if the job had been outsourced to say a TCS, it would have cost the BBMP some tens of crores, as compared to the few lakhs he and his team is presently costing the BBMP. The point he misses is that, if indeed a TCS had been engaged, they would have brought in a lot more value additions to the whole exercise, making for a far more dynamic and buoyant tax collection mechanism. This is apart from the huge savings in manhours for the BBMP corresponding to the staff deployed in the physical collection exercise, assuming that they have something more productive to do, which of couse is a big question mark.
It all again boils down to professionalisation through outsourcing, simultaneous down-sizing, payment of better than market salaries for the remaining staff, and making all of them more accountable. Readers of this blog may want to read this also.
Muralidhar Rao
COMMENTS
idontspam - 18 July, 2011 - 15:25
The state knowledge comissions fellowship or some such information circulated a while back was interesting & a way out. I cant find it on Praja, was it on email then? GoK was inviting young professionals to participate in governance. They will be deputed to work on projects for 6 months to a year with a stipend. Can somebody share that link if they find it?
murali772 - 11 May, 2013 - 13:00
"We were a group of retired government officials who set up Search India (a registered body to carry out surveys on behalf of the Election Commission) in 2002. We were not experts in conducting surveys. When the project was handed to us, there were 14-15 people working for the organization. The project was relatively bigger and we had to employ people for it. But the amount funded by the EC was meagre in comparison to the project size," says Nagaraja Rao, director general, Search India.
According to Nagaraja, the organization is on the verge of being shut down. "More than 50% of our people are either disabled or have passed away. The project was supervised by Alfred Samuel, who passed away.. The company doesn't have staff for field work," Nagaraja told TOI. He added that he was not satisfied with the report.
For the full report in the ToI, click here.
Though this refers to last year, before the current CEO, Mr Jha, took charge, there is no guarantee that this will not happen again under the next CEO.
The entire approach of a whole lot of government johnnies appears to be to invent some work, whether beneficial to the organisation or not, and palm them off to some favoured people, either to curry their favour in return, or to collect kick-backs - all at tax-payers' cost. If genuine surveys/ studies are required, a proper search will throw up names of enough and more organisations with good credentials, who besides you can readily hold accountable, as compared to say a JPC (joint parliamentary committee) that you'll have to have for 'gol-mals' of the above kind.
The sad part of such 'worthless gol-mals' (compared to what the Pawan Bansals of this world are upto) besides is that the likes of Mr Nagaraja Rao will not only not get anything worthwhile for the effort put in, but may even land up paying heavily out of his own pocket.
murali772 - 18 July, 2011 - 13:21
A prominent citizen (MK) posted the following excerpts from an article on Mr Ashank Desai (of MASTEK) along-with the comment "Why can't we get him here?" on the save-koramangala y-group:
The latest feather in Desai's cap is a huge project to decongest the swirling traffic on theLondon roads. And this project promises to make all the difference to an average day's traffic in London.
The project restricts movement of vehicles in the city centre by charging a hefty toll. The result: Traffic is now reduced by 10-15%, queues reduced by up to 20-30% and traffic speeds increased by over 10-15%. All these thanks to a software that comes from Desai's firm.
"The London congestion charging project is one of our biggest projects. It feels good to have made a difference to the lives of so many people," Desai says matter-of-factly.
I responded with:
If the government wants to, there are plenty of ways of figuring out solutions, and many of them for free. The problem obviously is that the government only wants to put on a show of solving problems; but clearly, they don't want solutions, because of the well-entrenched vested interests.
MK came back with:
Professionalism is much spoken and used word. Whether it comes free or not I hesitate to comment.
To which, I responded as below:
I fully endorse your view that no services should be free, or even under-priced (and, of course, not over-priced), like perhaps in the quarter-baked 'project management' package sold to BBMP (like the one cited above), which from day 1 itself is a dead asset. And, there are so many such dead assets with our government departments/ agencies.
While Ashank Desai's MASTEK may have an interesting personal story angle to it, all our TCS's, INFOSYS's, WIPRO's, etc are also doing similar things for government departments/ agencies in even the most advanced countries. Unfortunately, however, namma Karnataka government departments/ agencies are refusing to engage them, since it will then mean a paradigm shift in the entire work culture (you can't have situations like not having held internal audit since '64), the prospect of which is making them insecure. The price the city/ state lands up paying as a consequence is huge in terms of inefficiency, loss of revenue, and ultimately the quality of life of the citizen.
The silver lining here is that atleast the central government is now beginning to do it - as in the case of outsourcing by the Passport office of all of its back-end work to TCS.
Now, the debates and discussions over Praja themselves have generated a whole lot of ideas for solutions to all kinds of problems facing the city as well as the state, and if there was even the slightest of backing from the governmental departments/ agencies concerned, we could have evolved, nurtured and even incubated many of them to a stage from where they could be outsourced to professional agencies for full scale implementation. In fact, if a MASTEK were to be invited to adapt and implement their solutions for Bangalore, their job will become a lot more easy if they choose PRAJA for crowd-sourcing of feedbacks from the members, many of whom are doing similar things themselves already. As such, if we can get our state to emulate the Central govrnment's example of outsourcing (as in the case of the Passport back-end work), Bangalore can easily become the trend-setter for evolution and implementation of all kinds of solutions for all kinds of problems, in view of the large cache of tech resources readily available on PRAJA. This is not just an empty boast. I am fairly confident of it.
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