A senior official told ET on condition of anonymity that the task, which will be led by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, will consist of three main sub-heads. A note prepared for approval by the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) pegged the five-year mandate expenditure at Rs 15,000 crore, the official said.
The first subheading is Online Governance. The mandate will identify six essential ordinary citizen services that every city local agency must provide online. These necessarily include the issuance of birth and death certificates, provision of water and electricity connections, calculation and collection of property taxes, and redress of grievances.
“All city local agencies claim to provide multiple online services. Some even list very high numbers, such as 35 online services,” the official said. “A close look at this list reveals that these are services that do not affect the lives of citizens, such as library management. Under this mandate, all urban local bodies are required to provide six common services to citizens. This means that the entire country These services will be made available to people online.”
The second subheading is monitoring and effectively managing the environmental infrastructure of 1,000 cities. According to the mandate, wastewater treatment, air quality, flood management and water bodies in these cities will be monitored through technical interventions.
