Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Smart City has bagged the prestigious SKOCH Awards in two categories, for which announcement was made in November 2021.
While the Bhubaneswar Smart City has won the award under Urban Governance Category for unified city portal Bhubaneswar.Me, it has won the Ease of Doing Business award for the Building Plan Approval System (BPAS) for it’s citizen-driven service and utility.
Instituted in 2003, SKOCH Award salutes people, projects and institutions that go the extra mile to make India a better nation.
The Roll of Honour of the SKOCH Award over the years is a testimony to this. The award covers the best of efforts in digital, financial and social inclusion. It encompasses the best of governance, inclusive growth, excellence in technology and applications, change management, corporate leadership, corporate governance, citizen services delivery, capacity building, empowerment and other such softer issues that get normally lost in the glamour and the glitz of industry sponsored or advertising focused jamborees.
SKOCH Award not only acknowledges exceptional achievers—organisations and individuals—but also spurs inspirational guidance and motivational leadership.
Managing director and CEO of the Bhubaneswar Smart City Ltd Sri Sanjay Kumar Singh said “the Temple City is proving it’s mettle over the digital governance segment time and again and would implement more citizen-centric measures in coming days.’
It can be mentioned here that the unified city portal Bhubaneswar.Me has been helping the citizens immensely by providing an effective and common e-platform for quality service delivery.
Bhubaneswar.me is a unified service portal which currently delivers 100+ citizen services from 16 government organisations that is divided in 9 broad categories of public amenities such as search for safe public transport, access of high-speed WIFI system, citizen services, City events, city maps etc.
At present it has a user base of more than 4 lakh citizens and more than 2 lakhs grievances has been resolve with this portal. The portal has customisable dashboard for officers and citizens to track their requested services. This portal is also equipped with citizen document locker and an interactive chat bot for easy access of the application user.
Similarly, the BPAS of the Bhubaneswar Smart City is delivering the time-bound services to help people get the building plan approval under the civic jurisdiction in a smart and time specific way and people are saving a lot of energy and resources in this regard.
BPAS aims to develop an automated online system by removing redundant steps and cumbersome approval methods. The BPAS is a platform for all stakeholders to carry out the transactions through a work -flow based mechanism with auto assignment and SLA based escalation mechanism. It caters to round robin based for low risk building & demographic based allocation for high risk building. It has PI level integration with agencies having online systems and providing logins for other in the existing BPAS along with availability of Pre-Approved architectural designs for low risk buildings. All of it is integrated with payment gateways for real time transactions and refund with multiple payment options. It comprises of detailed, real time, configurable analytical dashboards to monitor the process and support in data backed decisions following its integration with Digital Lockers for hassle free and secure management of documents.
On June 25 last year Bhubaneswar.Me became third project under Governance Category in the India Smart City Awards (ISAC 2020). The award was given by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) during the Sixth Anniversary Celebration of Smart City Mission, AMRUT and PMAY (Urban). In this competition all 100 Smart Cities participated.
