After a five-hour-long regular Kochi corporation council meeting, the civic body again failed to find a solution to its floundering e-governance system, even as city residents mill about the corporation office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to pay taxes or get birth and death certificates issued.
A meeting of the corporation’s steering committee and all stakeholders would be held soon to resolve the issue, said Mayor Soumini Jain, after Opposition councillors demanded an inquiry into the matter.
According to a report prepared by the corporation’s IT officer, the existing system is in a dire situation. “The hardware is clogged and an urgent decision would have to be made about whether new hardware must be procured or if the data should be shifted onto the cloud. If this matter is not resolved immediately, the server is likely to collapse and the corporation will no longer be able to provide its services,” Ms. Jain said.
An urgent backup of existing data is necessary, along with a firewall, without which the data is not secure.
Opposition councillors demanded that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which had developed some modules of the e-governance system, be replaced with the Information Kerala Mission (IKM), since the corporation’s agreement with TCS had already expired. TCS had not completed its obligations but had been paid nearly ₹5 crore of the stipulated ₹8 crore for their services, pointing to the civic body’s inefficiency in implementing the project, said LDF councillor Poornima Narayan.
Mr. Sabu and Deputy Mayor K.R. Premakumar pointed out that without the help of TCS, it would not be possible to shift the data onto a new system or fix the existing problems in the e-governance system.
Further, in a meeting chaired by Minister A.C. Moideen in July last year, TCS had pointed out that till a work order was issued to them, two of their employees could be appointed to help the corporation at the civic body’s expense. But the matter about the employees’ salaries had not featured in the meeting’s minutes, and despite three requests to make the addition, no response was received from the LSGD, said UDF councillor, A.B. Sabu.