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E-Governance in urban planning
Urban Development Authority
If the information from the Revenue Department and the Census Departments are layered with that of the ULB’s, it will provide the Urban Development Authority valuable information on Urban sprawl. The direction of city growth, where the development authority should plan its colonies and if need be where the unauthorised Malin Bastis can be rehabilitated. Fire Department Problem areas in the city can be easily identified, if the type and quality of construction of houses is mapped. Food & Civil Supplies Department It can maintain an accurate account of which house has what type of ration card. Police Department This department can maintain a record of FIR’s lodged, lost and found valuables/ persons/ dead bodies per area, visually. Electricity Board The Electricity Board can keep an account of the wattage supplied and used per household; bills issued and arrears, if any. Road Transport Office The R.T.O. can maintain a record of registered vehicles and driving licenses issued per household. Telecom Department The Telecom Department can keep a visual record of telephone connections/house, the number of STD/ISD connections, bills and arrears. Postal Department The Postal Department can map the beat of the Postman. The administration can prepare for disasters like floods and cyclones by superimposing a contour map on the base map and making a model in GIS. It will give an accurate description of the areas and population that needs evacuation during such a calamity. Efforts in the direction of EG & Urban Planning are being made in different parts of the country. One such attempt is being made jointly by the Society for Planning & Research in Sustainable Management (PRISM) and The Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation (GMC), for the city of Gorakhpur, U.P. Given below is the case study of Gorakhpur and its efforts towards EG in Urban Planning through GIS. Case Study: The Gorakhpur Geographical Information System The Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation (GMC), which is responsible for the provision of basic amenities and city governance, serves an area of 147 sq. km. It has a fully functional computerised billing system for properties, including yearly record of payments and arrears, since 1988; even the staff pay roll was on the computer. But there was a total lack of visual representation of data. The only map possessed by the Municipal Corporation depicted ward boundaries for the city. As a consequence the Corporation employees faced innumerable problems when they went on the field or the matter of settling a property dispute arose, forcing them to refer to a Revenue map dating back to 1913. The last blanket assessment of properties within the limits of the Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation was done in 1984. Since then the city has grown to almost twice that size, with a proportionate increase in the number of properties. But many of these properties are unaccounted for, even in the older areas of the city making reassessment of properties an essential need for the accuracy of this study. Keeping in view the larger goal of Urban Planning & EG, the GMC tool the initiative for making a property map for the city on GIS. Even though GMC had divided the city into 8 Circles for its convenience, the 60 Census Wards of 1991 were taken as the starting point for this study. As per the computer records, the total properties falling under the purview of GMC were 67,155 (on 30-06-2000). In order to minimise the disturbance that would be caused by devising a new system, the computerised property records of GMC were adapted into the project. According to this, all assessed properties lying within the purview of the Corporation have a record on the computer that has been coded in the form of a 10-digit number ( Fig. 2). 
The database of the Municipal Corporation is on FoxPro. But it does not include any information pertaining to assessment of a property and the employees of the Municipal Corporation have to rely on the judgment of the Tax Inspectors and the clerical staff for assessment of properties. The only method of crosschecking this information is either to look up the ledgers or to visit the site, a task that is extremely tedious. Added to this is the problem of property number allocation, which many a times is done by the clerical staff without even visiting the site, making it extremely difficult for the tax inspectors to locate the properties once they go on the field. Some other problems that highlight the need of a Geographical Information System are:
The project is divided into two phases. The pilot phase of the project has been completed and it covered two wards namely, the Civil Lines Wards I & II (ward no. 45 & 48). This area comprised the three Mohallas of Civil Lines, Bilandpur & Kalepur, together housing a total of 1,073 properties, as per the computer records of the Municipal Corporation (on 30-06-2000). The second phase of the project will aim to cover the entire city. The study area was duly representative of the older and newer parts of the city, the Civil Lines mohalla representing the former and Bilandpur mohalla representative of the latter. While Kalepur, is a mixed set of both the old and the new. Bilandpur Mohalla had a very high percentage of new properties because of its proximity to the city center as well as accessibility to reclaimable low cost land along the National Highway. The Objective The objective of the project was to organise and map the property tax structure of the corporation, using GIS as a tool. |