Ahmedabad residents will notice improvements such as multilingual forms, counter signage, online payment options, guided videos at helpdesks, and IEC awareness programmes, among other things, at the city civic centres and the municipal corporation’s official website soon. The adjustments have been proposed to make it easier and more efficient for citizens to access services at municipal centres.
The improvements are the result of an 18-week investigation and survey undertaken by a group of 20 CEPT University postgraduate students among 150 individuals in and around eight distinct types of city civic centres throughout the city.
During a meeting with AMC top executives on Tuesday, the students, along with members of the Masters in Urban Management programme’s management faculty — Prof Gayatri Doctor, Prof Manish Vadanere, and Prof Anup Khajuria — offered their thoughts.
“As part of the service studio (project), the students attempted to identify gaps in city civic centres and then devise solutions or suggestions for how to address them.” The immediate ones, as requested, have been shared with officials from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC),” said Prof Doctor, a faculty member and tutor for the studio that was completed this week and is on display at the CEPT University’s Winter Exhibition.
The AMC e-governance team is looking into the results and suggestions. “These suggestions will undoubtedly be taken into consideration. In another 10-15 days, residents will see short-term interventions such as signage for layout orientation, IEC improvement, bilingual forms, and the removal of variations in online and offline forms, both at civic centres and on the website,” said deputy municipal commissioner Praveen Chaudhary.
“We’re also planning a visit to CEPT University for more meetings with students and faculty members,” Chaudhary added.
Relief Road, Shahpur, Ghatlodiya, Bodakdev, Usmanpura, Maninagar, Dharnidhar, and Isanpur were among the civic centres studied by the students from August to December, with the Law Garden as the focal point. The months immediately following the first and second Covid pandemic waves were also included in the research.
“Post Covid, there was an increase in citizens availing online civic services. However, what came out while interacting with them and studying the functioning of civic centres is that there is barely digital literacy. There are not many civic centres with online payment modes. Also, basic things like signages, helpdesk and counter marking, token systems, etc are missing at these centres. As a result, once a citizen enters the centre, he gets confused as to where to avail of the services. They are moving more than required and waiting for information,” said Kavyashree KR, one of the postgraduate students.
The city civic centres offer 18 different types of services from the filing of taxes like property, professional, vehicle tax, birth and death registration, health licence, hawkers licence, city bus pass, fire NOC application, gym and swimming pool registration, among others.
“Other suggestions include queue management system, adding signages, display boards, token system, CCTV cameras, posters, videos on helpdesk kiosk, helpdesk with a chatbot, a new interface for the website with an integrated web portal for all stakeholders, including citizens, a single portal for all services, a dual-screen interface or monitor on both sides (towards civic centre employee and citizen) to avoid errors at the centre’s end while taking details like name misspelling,” said the first-year postgraduate students Rohith T and Meet Shah.
“An online database to reduce trips and carry all documents each time a citizen visits the civic centre,” said another student, Akshita Yadav (has been suggested). We’ve also proposed an SMS or message from the municipal corporation on the types of documents required for each service available, which would save citizens’ trips and time.”
The project also identified issues such as delays caused by system failure due to language constraints (80% of the forms are in Gujarati), the need for multiple visits due to a lack of documents, and the portal’s database being in Gujarati, which leads to human errors when filling out forms.
For their project, the students researched civic centres, online services, and a mobile app, and proposed solutions at each end and agency, including public and private providers such as AMC, a private bank that provides financial services, and TCS, which provides software support. During the project, students conducted case studies of civic centres from various states and countries.