The Online building plan approval system was launched today by Hon’ble Governor of Punjab and Administrator U.T Chandigarh Sh. V.P. Singh Badnore, in the presence of Sh. Parimal Rai, IAS, Adviser to the Administrator, Sh. Anurag Agarwal, IAS, Home Secretary, Sh. Ajoy Kumar Sinha, IAS, Finance Secretary, Sh. Ajit Balaji Joshi, IAS, Deputy Commissioner, Chandigarh and other senior officers of Chandigarh Administration. The system will be made accessible to public/architects from Monday onwards i.e. 12.02.2018.

Till now the process in Chandigarh is manual and cumbersome. There were lot of loopholes and human intervention in the process which makes it more than 3 months to get the building plan sanctioned. Major issues/challenges, administration and citizens were facing are:

• Complex by laws and approval procedures leads to subjectivity in interpretation thereby leading to delay
• Loss of revenue for Authorities due to delay in process
• No visibility of application progress or status checking to architects/citizens/stakeholders.
• Various NOCs required in manual mode from multiple agencies leading to delay, redundancy and repetition of efforts

Unique solution for building plan approval:

Innovation: Automates scrutiny of drawings vis-à-vis Building by laws

Acceleration: Accelerates scrutiny process by eliminating lengthy and cumbersome manual process

Performance Monitoring: Provides alerts and reports via SMS and email

Collaboration: Bringing all stakeholders on single platform

Features and specifications:

• Automates the cumbersome manual process
• Provision to architects to submit the application for building plan sanctioning in online mode from anywhere
• Online application status tracking provision
• SMS & Email Alerts, MIS reports
• Interface to higher authorities for overall monitoring
• Minimization of in person involvement in Approval Process
• More Uniformity and Transparency

Hon’ble Governor of Punjab and Administrator U.T Chandigarh Sh. V.P. Singh Badnore express his happiness and appreciated the initiative of creating the portal.

Value addition to earlier building plan approval process:

• 24 x7 Online Application Submission
• Online Tracking of Proposals from Submission to Completion
• Automatic Scrutiny of proposal Plans as per By-Laws of UT Chandigarh
• Deviation or loopholes are known instantly and available to architect and Higher Authorities
• Automatic calculation of fees based on the Area deduced from plans
• Reduced approval cycle resulting in better revenue growth
• Notifications by SMS and Email to all stake holders at every stages

Benefits to Citizens/architects:

• The biggest advantage and benefit derived out of this solution is that the building plan sanctioning process will be completed in 7 working days
• Transparency in government processes
• Anywhere & anytime access for application submission
• Standardization of submission drawings
• Simplification of approval Procedure & Process
• Increased speed, efficiency & accuracy

Benefits to Administration:

• Accuracy in area & Fee calculations due to elimination of manual intervention
• Storage and archival of all digitized data records
• Live dashboard monitoring to authorities to keep a check on
• Generation of regular MIS report & evaluation of workforce efficiency
• Automation will free up certain govt. resources from the process

Way ahead/future vision:

• Introduction of Self certification for all the commercial sites plan
• Pre designed templates vis-à-vis Building by laws for the lower strata of society thus do away of complex building plan sanction process for them
• Going away of PAC once the system gets stable and streamline leads to further reduction in delivery timelines
• Payment gateway will be introduced for submission of fees in online mode.