C'garh Administrator launches website, online services of Estate Office

Chandigarh: Banwarilal Purohit, Administrator of UT, Chandigarh today launched the website and online services of Estate Office in the City. Addressing people on this occasion, Purohit said that today's launch encapsulated the vision of transparency, efficiency and citizen-centric services.

"This was the vision I had laid out before the officers of the UT Administration immediately on joining here. All the officers were told to make processes simple, to remove all ambiguities or anomalies, to ensure proper use of technology so that citizens could avail of services seamlessly. They were also told to crack down heavily on any malpractices and bring about reforms to end any harassment of citizens," said the Administrator who is also Governor of Punjab.

Purohit said that he had always believed that systemic change is a must to bring about everlasting and sustainable changes.

He said that the Estate Office was one of the most important offices in Chandigarh, which is providing a plethora of services to the citizens. However, most of these services were being provided through offline mode which has several inherent limitations.

To overcome these problems, the Estate Office undertook this project in August 2020 with the help of NIC. Forty teams consisting of 125 employees were deputed to digitize all property records. A Master Form was designed containing all the essential fields. Each property file has about 200 essential fields, which are needed for any transaction. All these fields were first uploaded by computer operators.

Applications have been developed for all services provided by the Estate Office and internal workflow has been changed in such a way that all the applications received will be processed online from end to end.

The citizen would be informed about the progress of his application by SMS on his phone and can also track the status by logging online. Since all the property files are being scanned, there will be no physical movement of files. All the officials in the estate office will now deal with the files on the online application only, with their digital signatures. Dashboards have been developed to monitor not just the movement of files but also the performance of different officials.