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The proposed property tax increase of about 7 times would only be adequate to restore basic services over a number of years. After many months the city council members came to realise this. Investment in new and costly infrastructure instead of basic repair and rehabilitation would quickly exhaust the limited municipal funds and not achieve any significant system service improvement. As a result, it was necessary to determine the costs of the most basic repairs through pilot investments. Then maps and infrastructure inventories were developed to identify and implement the most critical repairs in an urban services restoration program. The first Municipal Geographic Information System in India made it possible to prepare a citywide investment programme. Project funds were only sufficient to complete part of this long-term effort, the most visible of which are the street drain repair programme and the city wide solid waste collection programme.

In Mirzapur over 10 percent of the city residents contributed upto 30 percent of the cash cost of these improvements. This genuine involvement by the public is developing into active support for future service improvements.

There are no easy ways to achieve success in improving governance. However, there are approaches and techniques that can achieve positive results. Some of these have been gathered together in the Mirzapur Model approach. The project was recognised by the United Nations as a Good and Best Practice in 2000 and was nominated by the Government of India for the Habitat Scroll of Honor and the Dubai Habitat Awards. Recently, it was also nominated for the Stockholm Challenge (information technology) Award. The Mirzapur experience is also one of the subjects of the documentary “Water: The Drop of Life,” prepared for the Second World Water Forum at the Hague last year.

The Need for an E-Babu
Once the first phase of the Mirzapur Model City Programme had demonstrated that all types of critical improvements could be achieved, concern was raised for the long-term sustainability of the improvements. A programme to achieve this was a challenge of a deeper and more complicated sort than the technical work of the first phase. E-governance can be initiated through technology, but it can only be sustained through E-babus. The most important E-babu in a municipality deals with the tax records. The following is the programme that was developed to achieve the long-term objectives of providing good E-Governance to a mofussil town.

Traditional Tax Department Structure
The main responsibility of the municipal tax department is to assess and collect property tax. Tax collectors collect house and water tax directly from property owners at site, assist in processing transfer of ownership applications and other related matters. Demand clerks maintain the hand written assessment records, related documents, and demand and collection registers, but since the introduction of the computerised system they no longer prepare bills by hand. Demand clerks distribute bills to tax collectors for collection and transfer collection entries from receipt books to demand registers. They are expected to issue notices and initiate other actions to collect overdue bills, but rarely do. Demand clerks address public complaints and information requests, and supply authenticated copies of ownership documents. Every five years they are expected to assist in the property survey and reassessment, and to routinely record casual assessment of new properties. However, there was no functional management system to make this happen until the introduction of the new municipal information management system.



First Stage E-Babu Procedures
Property assessment records were computerised in 1996 and since 1999 have been reconciled with the tax billing and collection records. Only two computer operators can now maintain all the assessment, and billing and collection records, print bills, enter tax collection records, assist with assessment and reassessment of properties and backup all records. These computer operators do most of the work that the 12 demand clerks used to do. In the early stages of the computerised record system the municipality used hand written receipts to update the computer records, but with full implementation of the system this is no longer needed. Generally no action has been taken for non-payment of taxes resulting in considerable unpaid balances. Personal collection of taxes combined with the lack of penalty for late payments, or discount for early payment resulted in partial tax payments for accounts that were never cleared and heavy tax payments at the end of the Fiscal Year Tax.

Second Stage E-Babu Administrative Procedures
Relocation of the tax department to new offices in 2000 coincided with the new fiscal year and the integration of the department with the computerised information system that had been operating in parallel with the old handwritten system for the previous 4 years. The department will soon eliminate hand written entry of tax collection, assessment record changes and posting of collection. This will allow a change in staff duties so that demand clerks will be able to devote their full attention to following up the collection of overdue taxes and updating property information from a continuous inspection programme.

Third Stage E-Babu Administrative Procedures
The old practice of personal tax collection by tax collectors is terribly inefficient. In modern systems property tax, electricity and telephone bills are sent to property owners by ordinary post, the cost of which for Mirzapur would be about Rs.80,000. This can be weighed against the current staff cost of more than 1,300,000 and the total tax billing of approximately 30,000,000 in 2000/2001. The postal delivery system has been tested and is planned for introduction in Mirzapur. After introduction, if a bill is not received property owners could obtain duplicate copies of bills from the computerised system for make timely payment possible. The municipality is also considering allowing banks to collect, deposit and report bill payments on its behalf at branches throughout the city to reduce inconvenience to the public. The Rs.100,000 cost of this will be offset by improved collection and further redeployment of staff. With the change in these two procedures tax collectors will be able to concentrate on the more important work of property surveys, bringing more properties into the tax net and reassessing under assessed properties.

Fourth Stage E-Babu Administrative Procedures
Revenue inspectors rarely conduct field visits to reassess properties, monitor property construction activity, monitor property transfers, and supervise tax collection activities. Under the new E-Babu system top priority will be given to this work so that properties do not remain un-assessed or under-assessed for more than a short time. Tax collectors can be reassigned to support other staff in a rigorous programme of daily field inspections for continuous monitoring and updating of records. Incentives based on the increased tax valuation of the existing records may be introduced to achieve the needed results quickly. The first step in this system is already in place. Building permit applications are forwarded from the development authority, mapped and added to a temporary database to monitoring the progress of assessment. Extension of this system is planned to include building permits and property transfers as well.

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