Citizen Facilitation Centre in city still a distant dream

Charanjit Singh Teja

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, April 21

Despite residents' demand and government directions, the Municipal Corporation (MC) has failed so far to set up the Citizen Facilitation Centre (CFC) to make all of its wings digital. Residents, in the absence of online services, have to visit the MC offices to pay bills, taxes and get licences.

An officials of the MC said the outdated system had hit the recovery of bills and taxes as people have to queue themselves up at the collection windows of the civic body. The collection process is slow as MC staff issue receipts manually in the absence of computerised billing system. The official website of the MC is outdated and it doesn't have proper information about the projects and services.

It is a long pending demand of the residents to make the system online.

MC officials in the past couple of years have claimed a number of times that the facilitation centre would be started soon. Earlier, the MC House had come up with a proposal to hire a private firm to run the centre but it was cancelled owing to some litigations.

Varun Kumar, a city resident, said, “Residents are not able to pay taxes and bills of water and sewerage online in the absence of the Citizen Facilitation Centre. MC website is not user-friendly. It is an irony that most of the tasks of the MC are being done manually in this age of computers."

Mayor Karamjit Singh Rintu said, “We had flouted tenders a month ago and found only one private firm eligible to run the centre. As per the rules, a single bidder can’t be assigned the job. We will flout the tenders soon.”