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E-Governance: Mirzapur sets the trend...
Scott Gibbons Team Leader, Urban Management Specialist for the Bangladesh Central Municipal Support Unit, Dhaka gibbons@lged.org E-Governance can be initiated through technology but it can be sustained only through E-babus.
Municipal institutions are ultimately responsible for basic urban services. In most developing countries these services need urgent improvement, but administrative capacity is inadequate. This presents a challenge: how can administration and basic service provision be restored or upgraded at the same time? A successful formula for successfully meeting this challenge was developed in Mirzapur, using modern computer and management techniques. These techniques established only the foundation for developing E-Governance, but implementation required achievements that would restore public confidence. A brief summary of the key achievements is given here:
 Fig.2: Community awareness programme for garbage disposal These are only the most quantifiable achievements. The real success of the project is in changing the direction of the overall civic culture where the municipality had almost stopped functioning. How bad were the conditions and how difficult the problems in Mirzapur at the start of the project? Legislation devolving self-government powers to municipalities was enacted by the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 1994. This required municipalities to assume responsibility for providing a basic level of urban services. Municipalities would have to generate most of the revenues needed to restore urban services, which had gradually broken down. The 200,000 population city of Mirzapur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh was chosen as a test case for developing a strategy to address these fundamental changes in municipal administration. Neither administrative officers nor elected city councils had initiated any substantial tax increases for nearly 35 years. The civic environment was not encouraging for the future of the city. Laws and regulations were in place and senior civil servants agreed on principles of good government, but in the end people just didn’t do their jobs. In the early project stage there was no active interest in the local community to improve anything. In order to achieve broad government objectives the project had to be an advocate for better civic conditions. Pushing improvements such as good governance, let alone E-Governance, would have been resented and resisted. The only hope for success was to persuade and introduce the feasible improvements to the institution, which have given the community a fighting chance to adapt to modern conditions and make a success of self-government. By 1995 increased establishment costs and broken infrastructure forced the municipality to consider ways to increase revenues dramatically. However, records were inaccurate, out of date, difficult to manage and often not even available. Once property tax records were computerised it became clear that stock solutions to inadequate revenues such as collection drives were not realistic. Computerised billing tripled tax collection in 4 years, but since the base was 35 years old revenues were still far too low. Correcting and updating the property valuations were unavoidable in order to increase municipal revenues to a level equal with basic expenses. This was achieved under the existing administrative procedures through a complete property survey and valuation analysis. This also produced the first ever property tax maps for the entire city.
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