Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation

Bhubaneswar, May 7: The Odisha government’s claims about IT development notwithstanding, a number of IT-enabled services in the state are in a mess making a mockery of the claim.

The e-municipality project, under which various municipal services are being made online, has come to a halt at 44 urban local bodies (ULBs) in the state following a glitch in the server room of the Odisha Computer Application Centre, the technical directorate of the state IT department, since Wednesday. At the same time, services such as online holding tax collection are yet to materialise.

Sources said authorities of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation had compiled data of 82,000 holdings in the city and were supposed to upload them on May 1. But, it could not be done following the server problem. However, had the data been uploaded, even then people could not have used their credit cards to pay the tax online, as the service was unavailable.

Sources said the e-municipality applications did not support an e-gateway through which online payments could be made. The e-gateway makes payments secure.

“We make tall claims about online services, but cannot allow citizens to make online payments. The situation is such that senior citizens staying at Patia have to come all the way to Kalpana Square to make payments in the corporation,” said Gatikrushna Mishra, a Patia resident.

Another reason the online payment is yet to become a reality is that the Odisha e-governance Services Limited (OESL) has not been able to convince banking institutions to allow citizens to pay online. The OESL is a body floated by the centre and Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Limited, a private company, to facilitate e-based transactions of the state government.

However, Manoj Kumar Pattnaik, general manager (administration), of the centre, said: “Everything is fine at our technical directorate on IT development. An OESL staff member has already been asked to speed up the gateway application. We have called a meeting of 12 leading banks for e-transactions.”

Regarding the technical problem another official said the banks claimed to spend Rs 42 for each online transaction. “For bigger monetary transactions there is no problem, but for micro transactions such as a payment of Rs 10 or Rs 25, the banks are not coming forward. There are many facilities such as death and birth registrations, where a person is supposed to pay a nominal fee,” he said.