Bhubaneswar, September 19: In a step towards digital management of collections and especially holding tax, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) today distributed 13 hand-held devices to its tax collectors of North Zone. Now, the tax collectors can provide system-generated payment receipts of holding tax to citizens at their doorsteps.
In a meeting organised at the Corporation Hall this evening, Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena distributed the devices to the tax collectors and said that this would be the first step towards the digital management of the collections by the tax collectors as these machines are GPRS (general packet radio service) enabled and are working with SIM (subscriber identification module) cards like other Smart devices.
The experts from Tata Consultancy Service (TCS), who explained the gathering regarding operation of the hand-held devices, said that all tax collectors had been given training so that they can operate the devices for collection of holding tax with generation of payment request of the household. The payment request will be same as the digitally generated ones and after getting the receipt a holding tax payer can cheque the payment details online to know his payment status.
The introduction of the hand-held devices is part of the e-municipality project and the holding tax payers can cheque their details through the website www.ulbodisha.gov.in. The machines are able to find a day’s transactions after the day’s work and in case of loss of telecom network can send the payment details to the BMC server later once the signals from the network is available.
Deputy Mayor K. Shanti, Deputy Commissioner (Revenue) Srimanta Mishra, Deputy Commissioners Pramod Prusty and Subhranshu Mishra were present.
The TCS expert said that besides sending details to the Central Server in BMC the hand-held devices would also be safe and secured as all the machines are individually protected with user IDs and passwords. Once the tax collectors in North Zones start use of the machines efficiently, tax collectors in other zones in BMC i.e. South (East) and South (West) will be given the similar hand-held devices for use.
In future when the city-wide common payment card system will operate for various city-level services, these devices can also be interlinked for better transparency and digital control.
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