When V Radha, joint municipal commissioner of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), decided to create a central depository system for the estate's departments, she was in a fix. With no space at all BMC wards and headquarters, it was an exercise to find an office for her staff to inspect lakhs of silver-fish and moth-ridden documents of BMC properties.

"Thankfully, we found an unoccupied BMC building of 1.5 lakh sq ft, constructed six years ago, at Kandivili," she said.

The document management system is a project which is gigantic and first-of-its-kind in the country. This system is required as many a time, we are not aware of the properties in our name," she said.

White ants have taken over record rooms of BMC's estate department. It is very difficult to check property records of the pre-1980 era as the papers are tattered. Many lease and ownership records turn to powder at mere touch.

The estate department and the property tax department have lost many records. The property-tax department is in possession of approximately 50 lakh documents. These include Tabulated Ward Reports, Form-I i.e. Property assessment books, inspection books, and the complaints register. The estate department, at Crawford Market, has double the number of documents.

Document Management System, a Rs 56-lakh project, will be carried out by Science and Technology Park. They will implement the system for the assessment and collection (Aamp;C) department and the estate department.

A demo project has been carried out with 500 documents from the Aamp;C department of R (South) ward. Collectively, 6,800 files will be digitalised. Pankaj Joshi, an architect on the BMCs heritage panel has been appointed as a project consultant to design layouts and storage systems in the building which the BMC has named, Property Bhavan.
Source : DNA