Tambaram municipality is e-governed

Hence forth, the populace of Tambaram need not approach the municipality office to pay their tax dues, get their birth/death certificates or procure approval for constructing buildings or run a business. The online collection centers and the touch screen is today the portal to Tambaram Municipality.

Geographically speaking, Tambaram is a small town situated some 24-km from Chennai but it has created a niche for itself by becoming the first municipality to introduce touch screen kiosks to enable citizens to access information. This is part of Tamil Nadu Urban Development Corporation's project to computerize the local bodies and Tambaram happens to be the first urban local body that has moved towards e-governance. 

The project has been undertaken in association with the Foundation of Occupational Development (FOOD), an NGO in establishing the networking facility, touch screens and hosting the municipality website -

www.snegham.com. 

The touch screen placed at the premises of the Municipality office provides information to the public both in Tamil and English. Where the touch screen enables the public to access any information, www.snegham.com on the other side is the gateway to this municipality on the Internet. The website has various modules like the birth/death records, water tax, property tax whereby the visitors can get the required information online. Besides one can view the various projects being implemented by the municipality and trace the status too. A backend tool for the e-governance module of the website allows Municipality officials to update project progress online so that the latest project information is always available to visitors. It gives general information about Tambaram Municipality like the elected members to the council, Municipal administration so also the population, area, streets, parks, markets etc of the region. 

Currently only one touch screen and a collection center at the Muncipality office is active, though they have already set up six online collection centers at various points in Tambaram. The project cost Rs 20 lakh, the fund for which was mobilized from the public. 

Through its E-governance program, Tambaram municipality hopes to provide better transparency to its activity. They have set up several information access points at Banks, Citizen Centers and Information & Facilitation Counters. The Database Servers of the Tambaram Municipality are being connected with the Citizen Centers, Bank and Information and Facilitation Counters using Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN).

Nisha Kurian