Katol gets the ‘e’dge...

17-04-14

A SUNDAY SUNDAE Feature 

Usually, one associates smaller towns with rural feel and imageries of narrow roads, open drains, slow citizen services etc. If one talks of schools run by the local bodies in such town, others perceive those to be not-so-clean environs and lack of proper learning facilities for students. However, Katol Municipal Council in Nagpur district has taken a great leap ahead in changing these perceptions about smaller towns. It has launched various initiatives with e-governance modules. Let us know more about the initiatives and the results...

By Kartik Lokhande
Faster citizen services, online property tax assessment, building permission, well-prepared website, closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in office, LED street-lights... One may associate these sophisticated features with bigger municipal corporations. But, Katol Municipal Council has proved this notion wrong. For, it has adopted e-governance with such zeal that all the above features are visible for all in Katol.
For a long time, Katol was treated as one of the 10 municipal councils in rural areas of Nagpur district. Steadily, it started witnessing growth. The penetration of Internet and mobile phones made people aware of e-governance initiatives. “Once we started adopting the Kalyan-Doimbivali Municipal Corporation or KDMC’s module in this regard, we realised its potential. On that strength we built on and now we have got A+ rank in e-governance initiatives,” Sunil Ballal, Chief Officer of Katol Municipal Council, told ‘The Hitavada’.
Ballal is all charged up about the initiatives taken and the results those yielded. And, he has a reason to be so happy. For, according to him, Katol is the only municipal council in entire Nagpur Division that has launched e-learning project in its schools, and only council to have installed biometric attendance system with CCTV cameras in its office. “We have adopted KDMC Module of e-governance for registration of births/deaths, despatch, marriage registration, property tax, town planning etc,” he adds. All the initiatives have helped in increasing transparency in functioning of the municipal council, and effective co-ordination in staff is visible, he observes.
Katol Municipal Council has started double data entry and Ballal expects the task to be finished by April 30. As far as proper tax is concerned, the entries are being made online. Copy of tax assessment, receipts are being provided through e-module. Further, employees have been trained appropriately to provide building permissions online apart from engineer’s certificate. While narrating these achievements, Ballal does not forget to attribute the credit to these developments to Saralatai Uikey, President of Katol Municipal Council; and Rahul Virendra Deshmukh, Vice-President.
Like any other municipal corporation in more developed urban centres, Katol Municipal Council has prepared its website npkatol.org and its domain name has been registered after receiving static Internet Protocol number. The task of updating the website is in progress. Ballal expects that the website will be in service of the people by May 31, 2014. Already, many citizen services are being provided through e-governance module.
Apart from these steps, Katol Municipal Council has taken the initiative of replacing the old street-lights with LED. Already, LED lights have been installed at several places. This is being done from the aid received under district-level scheme. “We have some more plans on the anvil, but once we accomplish the tasks at hand, we will give those deeper thought,” adds Ballal with a smile and a glitter of a promise in his eyes.

Katol Municipal Council
Established in the year 1919, Municipal Council of Katol (previously Kuntlapur) is one of the oldest municipal institutions in India. Katol is an ancient town but it reached the first stage of modern municipal development only in 1905 when it was notified as a Town-Fund area. For the first year, its income was only Rs 4,761. Its economy depends mainly on cotton and orange trade.

E-learning facility in this
town’s municipal school!
If one visits the schools run by Katol Municipal Council, one is pleasantly surprised to notice that e-learning facility is available there like any other posh school in major urban centres of Maharashtra. As a result, many parents are inclined towards admitting their wards to municipal schools here.

Students getting benefited through ‘E-learning Project’ in one of the schools run by Katol Municipal Council.

The ‘E-learning Project’ has been launched in Municipal Upper Primary School numbers 2, 3, 5, 11 and Municipal High School. Under the project, these schools are linked to ETH Research Lab through digital campus. ETH Research Lab is led by Dr Vijay Bhatkar, father of Indian supercomputer. In one of his articles, Dr Bhatkar opined that ‘Education-to-Home (ETH) happened through the advances in Information and Communication Technologies. According to him, the coming of Internet, launch of EduSAT, decreasing prices of computers and networking, proliferation of CDs and DVDs, recent reductions in cost of projection systems and increasing awareness of e-learning will make the ultimate goal of ETH possible.
Under the project being implemented in Katol Municipal Council’s schools, it is envisioned to connect students, teachers, managers, and parents with each other. In these schools, through the project, students are getting acquainted to educational and technical skills.

The KDMC Module
To create a system-driven municipal corporation with the highest levels of transparency, accountability and citizen standards, Kalyan-Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) implemented e-Governance application software coupled with necessary administrative reforms in 2002. Government of Maharashtra decided to transfer horizontally this application software along with the KDMC Best Practices in all urban local bodies (ULBs) in the State. In all, 231 ULBs across Maharashtra were proposed to be covered under the initiative. These included nine ‘D’ class municipal corporations, 15 ‘A’ class municipal councils, 61 ‘B’ class councils, and 146 ‘C’ class councils. Katol is one of the municipal councils proposed for implementation of the module, and it has done quite well with all the modules going ‘live’.

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