The Hindu : New Delhi News : Scanning becomes the buzzword at DDA

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 04, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

Scanning becomes the buzzword at DDA

By Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

NEW DELHI, FEB. 3. Delhi's premier land owning and development agency, Delhi Development Authority, is these days busy scanning millions of files and challans pertaining to various properties and departments as part of a major initiative to store all its records in computers for facilitating large-scale use of technology in all transactions.

According to the Commissioner (Systems), Sunil Sharma, the scanning work will encompass around 15 lakh challans. For the purposes the challans are scanned and then stored in the data-base so that any senior official can access information pertaining to them by recalling their image on the computer and verify if the signatures and information available on them match with the office records.

As for the files, the official said, while one lakh had already been scanned another 30 lakh remained in all. As of now the scanning work involved only Housing Department files and those too of closed cases initially in which the conversion has taken from leasehold to freehold and DDA now has no further role to play in the dealings.

For expediting the scanning of these files, DDA intends to increase the number of its own personnel on the job from the present figure of 30 to 50 while plans have been drawn to engage 25 people from outside agencies as well.

The scanning work will also help DDA clear its offices of files which provide an unclean and unkempt look to the premises. "Storage space is being created for around 5 lakh files which will be removed from Vikas Sadan premises alone after the scanning work. These would include two lakh files each of the housing and land departments while the rest will be from other departments." Thereafter, the official said, files would also be removed from other offices which would help make more of DDA officials more pleasing to the eye and easy to work out of.

While as of now about 150 files are being scanned daily, the number is expected to be raised to 300 soon with the addition of more staff. Working on around 200 days in a year, the staff would thus be able to scan about 60,000 files in a year and about 1,20,000 in two years time. But as the drive proceeds, DDA expects to rope in more hands for expediting the process.

Through the scanning of the challans and the files, DDA is trying to computerise its entire database. With the computerisation process within the organisation still in a stage of infancy, it is hoping to make it more exhaustive so that it becomes compatible with the overall working system which is being improved upon through a major networking drive.

While the Software Technology Parks of India and through it software giant, Wipro, have been engaged for designing and installing an integrated computer system covering all aspects of operations, DDA is also going in for its own web server to provide people direct and uninterrupted access to its website for accessing information and performing various interactive functions.

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