In a single keystroke a few hours into the midnight of Monday, the Transport Department of Telangana made what was a revolutionary move, of going online with 59 Citizen’s Services and in the process, also making each and every one of the 49 offices across the new State, ‘cashless’.
As to what this means, for the average user, a person can book a slot online for any of the Citizen’ Services, pay the required fees through the payment gateway directly or through eSeva and get a confirmation message on his/her phone.
All that is left now for the citizen is to show up at the concerned Road Transport Authority (RTA) office with the necessary documents and departmental forms as per the slot selected.
The message on the phone is enough for the staff to print out the required form and get the citizen’s signature.
Thus, the average time that citizens need to spend at any RTA office would be just an hour and there is no need for them to look for means to make their wait easier. When contacted, Transport Commissioner Sandeep Kumar Sultania said that as teething problems started showing on Day One, techies were busy solving them one by one.
When asked to cite an example he said, “Till yesterday we did not make a provision for a person to book slot of his/her choice for the same day because there was a time window of 24 hours. But after looking at the functioning of the system, we opened up the proviso. Now depending on the availability of the slots, one can book the same day, till 12 noon,” he continued.
For the past fortnight, the department had been silently testing its servers to see how much the electro-mechanical monsters could handle.
“I did not expect such volumes of first response. But we had to push our slots capacity by 10 per cent. We are the only State to have introduced such an online system,” said a jubilant Mr. Sandeep Kumar.
Other problems that citizens faced on Day One included payment of Green Tax in case they were found to own a vehicle earlier.
This and other transactions like payment of late fee initially seemed to break the flow of processes.
“Officers have been making the rounds since morning, of all offices in the State Capital and in district headquarters town.
A late afternoon tells me that of the 15,000 slots we provided for Day One, slightly over 11,000 were taken up. Honestly, I was not expecting the number to go beyond 50 per cent,” the Commissioner summed up.
