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Introduction
In order to develop a model for Municipal GIS in Uttar Pradesh, Gorakhpur was taken as a model city. It won over a Municipal GIS in Kanpur because it had a computerized billing and pay-roll system since 1988, unlike in Kanpur where the Ganga Institutional and Community Development Project (ICDP) had been trying unsuccessfully since 1996 to start basic computerization of the billing system within the Municipal Corporation. The Pilot Phase of the project was a joint venture of the Society for Planning & Research in Sustainable Management (PRISM) and the Gorakhpur Nagar Nigam.

When the Gorakhpur GIS came into being, the only other much talked about GIS for a city was that of Mirzapur. But the realities of the city of Mirzapur were different from that of Gorakhpur in the sheer size of the problem. Mirzapur was a city with a population of 2 lakhs and 23,950 properties while Gorakhpur with a population of 6 lakhs with 67,155 properties was considered as one of the Kawal towns in Uttar Pradesh.

The Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation (GMC) is financially stable, unlike most Urban Local Bodies in India. Thus the fact that a Municipal GIS is self-generating, and the adulation that the Mirzapur GIS had received, acted in its favor and the pilot phase of the Gorakhpur GIS was underway.

In order to further augment the coffers of the GMC, PRISM developed a successful intervention package that included immediate property identification and reassessment. The primary program objective was the proper enumeration and mapping of all properties, using GIS as a tool.

The Municipal Corporation employees had already computerized the billing system, as stated earlier. This system, which had been created in FoxPro, was adapted into the project for faster execution and easy understanding of the GMC employees. According to this, all assessed properties lying within the purview of the Corporation were given a record number on the computer, coded in the form of a 10-digit number. This simple number is very scientific in it’s structuring. The first 9 digits pinpoint the location of the property ward downward to house partition, if any. The last is a check digit generated automatically by the program once feeding of data for a record is completed, thus preventing duplication errors.

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