BMC digitised just 5cr papers in 3 yrs

Three years after passing a proposal to scan and create digital copies of over 50 crore documents, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has managed to digitise only five crore documents so far, claimed a senior civic official.

The project worth Rs81.13 crore is a part of BMC’S plans to go digital and its deadline is September 2019.

Senior officials said that bureaucratic delays are the reason why the work has been progressing at a snail’s pace.

“Department officials often stay busy with their routine work and delay in providing documents

to be processed. We are, however, trying to quicken the pace,” claimed a senior official.

The official added that documents that have been scanned

till date mostly include those from the health department such as birth and death certificates, and documents from the estate department.

The civic body has 64 departments dealing with public subjects like health, water, roads, garden, property tax etc. Some of the departments like development plan, building proposals and estates have records that are decades old and the condition of their paper is deteriorating with each day.

“It will be difficult for us to access data to respond to right to information (RTI) queries if we fail to digitise documents that are more than a century old,” said another civic official.

After the Mantralaya fire of 2012, the BMC had proposed the plan of scanning and uploading all their documents on a server to protect the information and to improve their efficiency.