Corruption

Bangalore city administration (BBMP-the municipal corporation, BWSSB-the water supply agency) have issued notifications asking citizens to produce documents which are maintained by the govt! To understand the implication of BBMP/BWSSB notifications lets take a typical scenario: Lets say an 80 year old is living in a property and renting out portions for income. Lets assume the khatha account, bwssb, bescom connections were made when her grandfather purchased the property in 1910. Even though she may not have any records of the applications she can be assured of continued service since by law once service is commenced it can only be stopped by Court order. Now with the BBMP/BWSSB notifications she will be forced to reveal she does not know the applications numbers. What wouldbe ironical is that her connections records may have been lost due to BBMP 's own poor record management. Now this becomes the start point for land grab. Alternate documents linked back to the original application can be created and her own connection can be linked to a fake application. Her rights over the property can then be challenged and she may not be ableto prove her legitimate ownsership of the property. As you can see this initiative can quickly turn into a fishing expedition to identify properties with shaky documentation. But the whole point of the law is to avoid this very situation. As long as there is only 1 set of documents she can enjoy her property since there is no other comparison. Accountability:citizen vs govt By law govt agencies maintain accurate records using specialized administrative processes governed by highly trained administrative officers(KAS/IAS). In contrast, citizens need not even be literate to own property. Further,the documents they have could be misplaced, tampered, stolen etc. Hence the laws rely on documents maintained by govt agencies. It then makes no sense for BBMP to ask citizens to furnish documents. The documents it is asking of citizens are actually sitting in its own database. As for electricity bill, anyone including BBMP can get the bill through RTI. So it should be clear there is no basis to ask citizens for information. Now consider who is accountable for errors? When BBMP does this activity on its own it is responsible for any errors. However, when citizens provide the information BBMP absolves itself of responsibility and unnecessarily burdens citizens with providing correct information. Hand over errors too can create problems: Lets say Citizen hands over X while BBMP records Y was handed over. How to decide who is right? Collecting records at doorstep is very error prone and should be avoided. If BBMP officials can accurately upload documents provided by citizens then they could as well pull the same information from govt. databases. Also, as seen from Bhoomi which has been termed 'garbage in, garbage out' by some there is no point in digitizing without establishing measures for accuracy. Land grab implications Similarly consider cases where the electricity bill does not contain proper address (quite common). How is this interpreted to be associated with the property? Take a scenario where two parties A and B are both claiming possession of a property. BBMP officials can claim they validated A's documents and ignore B's just because B was not around when BBMP team arrived. There are other variations to this: BBMP may visit and pick up documents from A later. No lead time to object Typically citizens must be alerted about any such proposed scheme so that they can analyze and raise red flags. Right now this activity is being communicated after the govt. order has been passed and implementation supposedly in progress. That is not at all appropriate for something that deals with a high value asset such as property. The govt should not depend on citizens for documents it already maintains. It has no right to ask citizens details of what document copies they maintain.