Even as efforts are in full swing to make village offices smarter with better facilities, the demand of the Revenue department staff to introduce a single-window portal in the State to streamline various e-services is yet to become a reality. Officials and general users now use over six different portals to avail various e-services with separate user names and passwords.
Officials with the Land Revenue department say the delay in introducing a one-stop portal has been creating a lot of technical hurdles for processing various online applications. The poor bandwidth and other technical glitches of these scattered portals are also affecting the pace of online service delivery at peak hours, they say.
The websites now operational for various services of Revenue department include cm.kerala.gov.in, revenue.kerala.gov.in, donation.cmdrf.kerala.gov.in, lrd.kerala.gov.in, village.kerala.gov.in and rr.kerala.gov.in. Officials point out that integration of all these websites, including the edistrict.kerala.gov.in portal, into a single user-friendly portal can drastically improve the quality of various e-services apart from facilitating an easy access for all authorised persons with a single username and password.
Functionaries of the Kerala Land Revenue Staff Association say village officers made efforts to highlight this requirement during their State-level meetings with Revenue Minister K. Rajan. According to them, the absence of a unified portal, which was proposed seven years ago, has hampered e-service delivery in more than 1,660 village offices across the State.
Challenges
As the Revenue department portals are being managed by IT department officials, it has led to several administrative inconveniences. Many users with multiple accounts face issues while resetting expired passwords. Complaints are equally on the rise against the department’s “user-hostile” portals designed by people who were totally ignorant of the nature of Revenue department services.
“A lot of experienced and well-qualified IT experts are there in the Revenue department whose service can be easily made available for the launch of a unified portal. Formation of an expert committee in each district is the first step, which is yet to be initiated by the government,” says a State-level functionary of KLRSA. He also points out that the concept of smart village offices will become a reality only by improving the e-service delivery with a user-friendly website that can also function on multiple gadgets.
