The Hindu : DDA ushers in privatisation

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 17, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

DDA ushers in privatisation

By Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

NEW DELHI, MARCH 16. Though it is ushering in an era of privatisation by involving a private firm for launching its tele-counselling service, the Delhi Development Authority is insisting that the scheme is only an extension of its earlier network for providing counselling to people visiting its offices and intends to cut short their interface with middlemen as a way of eliminating corruption.

Not wanting to rake up a controversy on the privatisation issue at this stage, the DDA, while revealing the nature of work the service would provide, are keeping back information on the name of the company to which the contract has been given or the amount for which it has been contracted.

The scheme, incidentally, will not provide much more information than what DDA is already providing through its website. A senior official said the data base link will not be given to the company running the tele-counselling service. They will only get the material which is available on the websites or the seven information kiosks which have opened up at Vikas Sadan and Rohini and are going to come up soon at seven other locations.

Noting that the introduction of the service was also a way in which privatisation of small procedures was being tested in DDA, the official said it was the absence of quality people and the adequate number of such people which forced the civic body to allocate the tele-counselling work to an outside agency.

The Commissioner-cum-Secretary, V.M. Bansal, said the new scheme - expected to be launched in about a fortnight - would be very beneficial to people residing in Delhi as also outside as now they will be able to get basic information over the phone itself and will not have to make visits to the DDA offices. "As such in-between people will be eliminated, transparency will be ensured and corruption checked.''

But, he admits, the tele-counsellors will not be given access to the details of the individual files. "They will only provide basic information during the office hours and offer to get back to the callers in a day or day in case of specific queries.'' The new service would thus be an extension of the existing in-house counselling service being run through 13 experts drawn from different departments.

Mr Bansal said though DDA could have even carried out this service too through our own personnel, that would have required lots of resources, including telephone lines and staff members. Noting that the service would be equivalent to that of a top-level call centre, Mr Bansal said though the numbers will not be toll free to begin with, they will be "easy-to-remember'' type.

The contract, he said, will initially be for a term of one year. Noting that the training of those handling the call centres has already begun with the DDA, he said the the number of persons being trained was not important as the contractor has assured that he would place adequate number of hands on the service so that the callers do not have to wait for long in getting information on their queries from the civic agency.

"We are trying to limit the response time to about a minute,'' said Mr Bansal, adding that efforts are on to ensure that the "your are in queue'' message is required for the least possible period of time. The tele-counsellors will provide information to the callers about a variety of subjects ranging from conversion of properties from leasehold to freehold, documentation, stamping of properties, mutation of properties, allotment of flats, eligibility for schemes and procedure of getting building plans sanctioned.

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