HYDERABAD: At a time when the State is advocating the government departments for implementation of online services to reduce delays and check corruption, many of the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across Telangana have not yet started the online applications for many services causing inconvenience to citizens.
In spite of instructions issued by the Telangana Director of Municipal Administration (DMA) and giving capacity building training, several ULBs have not started the online applications such as trade licenses, trade license renewal, water tap connections, vacant land tax assessment and advertisements tax etc which leads to non-encouragement in receiving and processing of online applications under taxes and non-taxes and also non-implementation of reforms under Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) in the ULBs.
Though some ULBs are receiving online applications, they are keeping them pending beyond the time limits resulting in untold hardships to the applicants.On verification of status report on ULB wise online service, it is found that many of the ULBs are not disposing the online applications including those for mutation, trade license, trade renewal, water tap, advertisements, property tax assessment, vacant land tax assessment, Development Permission Management System (DPMS) within time frame as per service level agreement under EoDB.
Unhappy over the non-implementation over the reforms under EoDB, Telangana DMA TK Sreedevi directed the ULB Municipal Commissioners that urban local bodies where online services for taxes and non-taxes have not yet started should start the same immediately. The DMA directed that no manual applications under taxes or non-taxes should be encouraged in any of the ULBs.
Also, disciplinary action would be initiated against those commissioners who were found accepting applications manually instead of the online mode.To fix the responsibilities on the municipal commissioners, ULBs concerned should issue certificate at the end of every month that no applications have been received manually and all the received applications disposed online, the directions said.
The DMA director also issued directions to the Regional Director-cum-Appellate Commissioner of Municipal Administration of Hyderabad and Warangal regions to monitor the status of online applications with respective ULBs and inform the same to the DMA. Further they are directed to train the Municipal Commissioners for capacity building and monitoring online applications.