Bhoomi glitch hits hard RTC applicants

MANGALORE: Bhoomi, the path-breaking e-governance initiative system, used to deliver RTCs in less than two to ten minutes.
A peek at the Deputy Commissioner's office premises show long queues at the Bhoomi office and the minimum time taken to deliver one RTC is 30 minutes to a little more than 120 minutes.
Server glitches have hit the Bhoomi project here and at the receiving end are the applicants who spend as much time as they used to spend when the manual system was in place before the introduction of this e-initiative.
Uday Kumar, 64, who stood in the queue for two hours to get his first RTC says: It was bad. The e-initiative does not have the proper ground support. I cannot say whether there was a server problem since I saw many people getting inside the office and taking copies. Kumar who suffers from spondylitis said if there were more counters things would have been much easier.
Abdul Rehman, 68, from Kotekar-Beeri had a 30 minute wait to get his RTC. In Udupi RTCs are issued faster. Here there is no one to monitor the process. Though they say there are three counters, people are queued up in front of only one counter. When the queue is long we cannot even leave it as others grumble when we rejoin the queue. They should have seating arrangements instead of standing like done in the Mangalore Central Railway station reservation counter,' said the real estate agent.
Raghavendra, consultant, Bhoomi said the servers are being replaced and new software is being installed, hence the glitch. Pointing out that 90% of work was over; he assured that things should be okay by Monday.
What's Bhoomi? It is the project of on-line delivery and management of land records in Karnataka. It provides transparency in land records management with better citizen services and takes discretion away from civil servants at operating levels.
The Revenue Department in Karnataka, with the technical assistance from National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bangalore, has built and operationalised the BHOOMI system throughout the state. The BHOOMI has computerized 20 million records of land ownership of 6.7 million farmers in the state. This initiative has reduced the discretion of public officials by introducing provisions for recording a mutation request online. Operators of the computerized system are made accountable for their decisions and actions by using a bio-login system that authenticates every Login through a thumbprint. A log is maintained of all transactions in a session.