Mounting site errors irk users
Bangalore, April 11, 2018: Citizens are unable to pay their property tax or file complaints to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) because the BBMP’s Complaint Monitoring System website and property tax payment system has been giving multiple errors.
Lately the BBMP Complaint website which has been made in collaboration with the Indian Centre for Social Transformation (ICST), a registered Public Charitable Trust, has seen a mounting number of operational issues ranging from inability to register a complaint to being unable to view complaints on the website. Moreover, the users have been complaining of the in operational audio and video options available on the website.
Sri Kumar Ramanathan, Founder and Chairman of ICST said, “I am not aware of these problems but I will definitely look into it and get it fixed as soon as possible.”
The website was built as part of the Indian Centre for Social Transformation’s Project Vigeye—a project aimed at reducing corruption and increasing government transparency and accountability. Interestingly, the Project Vigete’s own website is non-functional.
The BBMP online tax payment system is also suffering from several issues like excess tax indicated by the tax calculator, unable to find Active Transactions / Challan found for a user’s application, online tax payments error, not being able to view ‘Khata details’, double tax payment, excess tax payments etc.
Sudhindra M.S, Technical Head of the BBMP Revenue department said, “There have been problems where the information is not received by the servers and people have tried to generate a receipt for their payment immediately and have failed to do so. The banks of the taxpayers take some time to confirm the payment and until that happens the system cannot generate a receipt.”
Anjum, a resident of Bangalore said, “I tried using that website a while back and found it quite inconvenient. There are some problems in the way it works.”
Sudhindra added that “There have been instances when one user is trying to make four payments consecutively but he is receiving the confirmation for only the last payment and not for the first three. So the bank’s servers should also work in tandem with our servers. The banks are also to be blamed here.” He said that citizens should be a little more patient and wait for around four hours for receiving payment confirmation and having the amount deducted. “In such cases where BBMP receives the payment four times and has to refund the surplus, the process takes time since it is the election season.” P Dayananda, the Revenue Officer in Kengeri said, “There have been complaints issues, I will contact the IT team and get it fixed.”
