Kerala local bodies to go digital on New Year's Day

Thiruvananthapuram, Dec 28

KSMART, the Kerala government's ambitious project to make services of local self-government bodies available digitally over a uniform platform, will be rolled out across the state on January 1 by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

State Local Self Government Minister M.P. Rajesh said with the advent of K-SMART (Kerala Solutions for Managing Administrative Reformation and Transformation), services of local bodies will be available at fingertips.

"It will enable people to access services of all local bodies in the state in a time-bound manner without visiting the offices. The application is embedded with Integrated Messaging System that will ensure delivery of receipts of applications and complaints through the respective login of the applicant/complainant and also over their WhatsApp and e-mail," he said.

KSMART divides the operations and services provided by local bodies into 35 modules, which can be accessed by citizens over a single platform. One can login to the web portal and access the modules and initially eight services will be available to the public over KSMART.

"These services are death, birth and marriage registration, business facilitation (licenses for traders and industries), property tax, user management, file management system, finance module, building permission module, complaint redressal system. K-SMART will be especially beneficial to expatriates as they will be able to access the services of local bodies without physically visiting the offices," added Rajesh.

Once the video-enabled KYC (Know Your Customer) using login ID is also introduced, expatriates will be able to do marriage registrations and similar other formalities from their foreign destination itself.

These services will also be accessible over K-SMART mobile app.

Through this new facility, building permits will be issued to the applicants in the least possible time besides people will be able to know the kind of buildings permissible in an area with the help of the ‘Know Your Land’ feature in K-SMART.

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