Mee Seva money vanishes from records

Revenue Department has no records of service charges paid through Mee Seva centres

Hyderabad: Quite surprisingly, the Mandal Revenue Offices (MRO) in Hyderabad district fail to maintain records of the service charges they get through the citizen service centres (MeeSeva). According to sources, the Revenue Department is probably not following the guidelines for utilising the department share.

As per the IT rules and guidelines, the amount or fee transferred to the department towards department share should be used for capacity building, to maintain databases and necessary infrastructure etc. But no such audit report or specific head is being maintained at the MRO offices to show the department share of Rs 7 per transaction. There are two broad categories of services being provided under MeeSeva/APOnline - Category A and Category B services.

The category A services are those for which the databases are already available and all that the operator needs to do is to access that databases and pull out the information which then gets printed and given to the user. The cost to the user in Category A service is Rs 25. The Category B services are those in which some kind of workflow is required at the level of issuing authority. This workflow might include field inquiries and other departmental work flow.

The cost to the user for availing Category B service is Rs 35. In this case, the department share of Category A (Rs 25) is Rs 7 and MeeSeva/ApOnline is Rs 18 whereas in Category B (Rs 35), the department share is Rs 7 and MeeSeva/APOnline is Rs 28. KN Sai Kumar, an RTI activist told The Hans India said that a recent reply to an RTI filed by him in the department supplied him incomplete and misguided information. In his query to Asifnagar Tehsildar, he asked about the expenditure of the department share of MeeSeva transactions, but got the answer that the file was being generated and not available in Telugu language.

“I filed again to District Revenue Officer (DRO) to supply full details of each Tehsildar office under his jurisdiction about the department share and its expenditure, who in turn asked all the 16 Tehsildar offices of the district to provide details on an urgent basis,” said the activist adding that the Asifnagar PIO informed the total number of certificates instead of indicating the factual position about the transaction made between with APonline, Mee/Seva and E-seva centres.

“The MeeSeva project was launched by the government to provide smart, citizen centric and effective governance facilitated by technology. The payment collected from the applicant at the kiosk is distributed online automatically to various stakeholders in real-time which they claim saves problems of reconciliations, late payments and embezzlement, but no relevant information whatsoever was provided,” Sai Kumar said around 50, 000 transactions per month were made in each MRO of Hyderabad district.

The activist also pointed out considering Rs 7 as department share and taking 50,000 transactions per month in all 16 MRO in Hyderabad district, it cames to (Rs 7 x 50,000 x 16) Rs 56 lakh per month which had no audit paras. “The case hearing was on February 26 but the audit report was not prepared,” he said.

By:Victor Rao