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Monday, October 29, 2012

GMDA set to go online for building permission system

The Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority will move to a computerised building permission system in order to reduce the hassles of the manual system.

The new system is expected to make the whole process of building permission more transparent and user-friendly.

“We get a lot of complaints from the present manual building permission system and want to make it totally error-free,” said GMDA chief executive officer M. Angamuthu.

The new system will be a computer-aided design-based computerised solution for automatic building permission scrutiny. CAD is used to assist in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimisation of a design and many private organisations use it in varied applications.

The move comes in the wake of the recent meeting between Assam Real Estate and Infrastructure Developers Association president P.K. Sharma and Guwahati development department minister Ajanta Neog, where Sharma requested the entire process be made online with strict penal provisions for offending officials.

He had cited clause 18 (d) of the current building bylaws which states that no correspondence regarding building permission and land sale with the applicant will be served in their premises but made available at the reception counter.

He said this was one of the biggest loopholes as all other correspondence was through proper form of communication. This left the most vital issue of permission to the mercy of certain officials and led to staff at the counters allegedly deny the existence of any communication and deliberately make the applicant run from pillar to post, according to Sharma.

The development authority has initiated the process to look for experienced and reputed consultants/firms experienced in this field to submit their proposals by November 15 and already issued its terms and conditions in its Request for Proposal (RFP) document.

The selected party would have to study the existing system for approval of building plan proposals in GMDA, including the method, software and formats being used currently for sanctioning plans. “The firm will have to devise a system to incorporate best methods and practices,” an official said.

The rules state that the approved latest building bylaws and regulations of the authority will be incorporated in the software, which would be deployed in a centralised data centre. “If the proposals in the drawings are not according to permissible rules and regulations, the software will indicate the errors and give a report of failed entities,” the official said.

The system has to be foolproof and have proper user authentication and access control mechanisms to ensure that only authorised users can access a particular piece of information.

The bidder should have implemented at least one similar software solution for building plan approval in any municipal corporation/development authority in the country and the proposed software should be running for more than two years in at least one urban local body. The bidder will have to provide one-year warranty after the deployment of software.

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