Citizen service digitisation: Bytes from Kozhikode

Getting a building plan approved has been quite daunting for citizens of Kozhikode in Kerala as it took a year for many. Thanks to digitisation, such plans are getting a green signal in 15 days including the site inspection.

So far, 1650 applications for building plans have been approved and the so far the platform has covered 219,605 square mt area for building plan since inception in May.

The city administration has used a technology solution named Building Plan Approval (BPA), developed by DIGIT, an opensource platform of eGovernments Foundation, to significantly reduce processing time and cut costs.

“In 2015 when we had the new corporation elected, our corporation wanted to digitise the citizen services and reduce corruption. State government suggested us to start with one area,” said Abdul Malik chief town planner, Kozhikode.

He said this system serves the purpose of reducing corruption.

“In Kozhikode at a time we used to have 2000 applications pending and now it has come down to 200. And interaction between the applicant and the corporation is limited, thereby reducing scope of corruption. This is likely to be extended to other city corporations,” added Malik.

The BPS platform cuts cost significantly since there is no AutoCAD licence fee involved unlike the existing drawing approval processes across civic bodies, said Hiren Doshi, vice president, Strategy and Partnerships, eGovernments Foundation.

BPA has brought 546 architects, engineers and supervisors together under on technology platform for a seamless approval.

This means various parties tasked with the plan approval process are seeing applications or drawings in real time. As the platform is fully hosted on the cloud (internet-based server), once a drawing is uploaded on to the platform it prepares a report faster to ascertain whether the plan conforms to the rules of the city and state.

Existing software systems across many civic bodies take many days to check the drawing manually, said Hiren Doshi, vice president, Strategy and Partnerships, eGovernments Foundation.

“Apart from Kerala, we are in the initial stages of implementation of this cloud-based platform in seven to eight other states. This entire ecosystem helps reduce time and cost for one of the important citizen services,” said Doshi.