The Delhi Government has launched an Android app called mSeva, in association with the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), which will let citizens pay their water bills through the app. It also lets users view and download previous bills and payment receipts and check the water consumption graph, allowing them to skip queues at DJB and its associated centres. This facility is also available on the web. The government also has a host of other health and generic apps.
The DJB has implemented a revenue management system for this and will also let users apply for a new connection, disconnection, reopening, grievance logging and tracking application status. Interestingly, if a user takes a picture of their water meter, the app will generate a bill. This is basically a revamp of the DJB app, which was launched in 2014 for registering water complaints, leakage, sewer overflow and missing manhole covers, and will cater to the city’s 21 lakh water connections.
Last week, the Delhi government also launched a Dvat Bill app for transparency in tax collection, developed by the Trade and Taxes department.
Other government developments:
– Earlier this month, the Indian Ministry of Culture collected data of over 5.5 million artists, as a part of the Cultural Mapping of India (Bharat ka sankrutik manachitran) project. The ministry will also seek help from respective state governments and other organisations to collect artist data for the project.
– Tourists landing in India with an e-tourist visa, will get a ‘gift kit’ on entering the country, consisting of a SIM card among other things. The SIM card will be handed over on arrival, although tourists will have to first recharge it to make use of it.
– Last month, all CBSE textbooks and other learning material would be made available online by the NCERT, which has already made some of its books available online through its mobile app and e-books.
– The department of registration and stamps in Maharashtra appointed Mumbai-based Network People Service Technologies as an authorized service partner (ASP) to provide online registrations of rent agreements.
– In October, the Government’s National DigiLocker reached nearly a million users. Overall, the website has stored over 1.069 million documents, indicating that on an average users store less than 2 documents on the platform. The most uploaded document is the Aadhaar card, which is required for signing up on the platform in the first place.
Image Credit: Andrevruas under CC BY 3.0
