Coming soon: Faceless services in revenue dept

The Delhi government plans to soon introduce faceless services in the revenue department along the lines of services in the transport department, revenue minister Kailash Gahlot said on Wednesday. New Delhi and southwest Delhi will be the first two districts where the services will be introduced on a pilot basis, he added.

“After the success of the pilot run, digitised certificates from these New Delhi and southwest Delhi districts shall become accessible online. After digitisation of all certificate records, online search will become seamless and will enable the verification of all certificates issued by the Delhi government,” the minister said.

Once introduced, the faceless services will also bypass the government’s ongoing doorstep delivery of services for certain documents. This means no “mobile sahayak” will then be needed to deliver the document as they would all be digitally approved, signed and generated, officials aware of the matter said.

These services are also expected to be linked with “Digilocker” (a government-approved digital archive) so the system can fetch important information to be used by the front-line bureaucracy to process any certification in the future.

Some of the certificate services that the government is planning to make faceless include SC/ ST, OBC, income and employment certificates. This service is also expected to include Economically Weaker Section (EWS) certificates — essential for citizens to claim government welfare benefits — in the future.

The revenue department has scanned roughly two million certificate records and these are expected to be completely digitised with the help of NIC by mid-August, 2022.

“These records are eventually expected to become digitally retrievable by front office executives for verification and other official purposes without having to deal with cumbersome physical extraction of old data records,” Gahlot said, pointing to the success of faceless services in the transport department since last August.

Officials said the decision to introduce these services was taken because citizens often raised grievances over the inability to verify legacy records to issue new certificates.