The Ludhiana municipal corporation has decided to link its rental properties with a Unique Identification (UID) number.
In this way, the tenants would be able to check the rent and clear their dues online. They will also have the option to pay offline.
Besides, the MC is planning to give different colour coding to MC rental properties and the officials claimed they had to recover Rs 11.49 crore in dues from its tenants.
However, the officials had tried selling these rental properties to the tenant as well, but that had not worked in the past. Now again, attempts are being made to convince interested tenants for the same.
There are around 625 properties of the MC given on rent on nominal rates. Though there is a provision of self revision in the rent amount after every year, still it is not much profitable for the civic officials.
Superintendent of MC Rajiv Bhardwaj said, “As of now, clerks have to manage all records manually and when some clerk gets shifted from the seat or gets retired then it becomes a tough task to arrange previous records. It has happened in the past where we could not find previous records. With this system, every rental property will have it’s unique number and entire record will be online.” He said it would take another 10 days in bringing everything online.
Meanwhile the officials have plans to start issuing trade licences online, as well. Earlier there was a separate portal where this provision was kept, but it did not work well. So now on the MC website itself, people will get a chance to apply for trade licence and then pay the fee online.
Apart from this, now they have started scanning all types of records, especially property tax. These files are being scanned and will be stored using cloud-based technology, so that there will be no need of maintaining the records manually. They claim all approvals will also go online, and the entire process will be made paperless.