VIJAYAWADA: Are you new to the city and struggling to find an address or directions? Worry no more; just download the VMC ZIPPR mobile app and enter the digital address of the house you are looking for, to find the directions in your smart phone.
The Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC) has launched a unique initiative of allocating digital door numbers for easy identification of residential address by geo-tagging the houses, for both administrative convenience and also to provide easy directions to the address of houses or public utilities using smart phone. It is part of making the city ‘smart’.
The pilot programme of digital addresses taken up in 13, 17, 18 and 21stdivisions of the city last year proved success and the same is being replicated across the city. For the project, the VMC had entered into an agreement with Zippr, a Hyderabad-based IT solutions company, to provide the necessary software for creating digital addresses and designing the mobile application.
A door-to-door survey was conducted to identify commercial and residential buildings in the city. As per the official sources, there are approximately 2.5 lakh houses spread across 61.8 sq km. After geo-tagging each and every building, a unique code was generated for them, which is their digital address.
The generated codes were marked on stickers and pasted on doors of the building temporarily. The unique eight-digit code (Zippr Code) has encrypted details of a particular household. The officials also collected the details of ration cards, Aadhar cards, property tax, PAN cards and voter IDs of the building owners and issued a unique identification codes (UID) to the commercial and residential buildings.
Expressing satisfaction over the use of new digital address, K Chandramouli, a resident of Moghalrajpuram said, “With the UID code, it is easy to locate an address. The UID issued by the VMC officials was handy to pay property tax and other taxes to the corporation. The code will not only act as location finder but also enable us to lodge complaints with the VMC by just giving the UID codes. The complaint will be taken into the consideration of the officials and will be looked over in week time.”
He had lodged a complaint regarding underground drainage, using the digital address, and it got solved in a short order, which normally would take a long time for the civic officials.
The digital door numbers could be easily located by the police and ambulance services during any contingency. “Right now, we are taking up the survey in a phased manner. The unique code stickers will be pasted on the households after being geo-tagged by the officials. Permanent number plates bearing unique code will be issued to the households in next two months,” VMC additional commissioner P Arun Babu said.
Digital addresses for houses