Service seekers can apply for and receive services from the Kathmandu Metropolitan City online beginning July 16, according to Chief and Executive Officer Rudra Singh Tamang. 

“As Kathmandu is the capital city, we plan to take all of its administrative and service delivery process into a paperless e-governance system,” Tamang said.

According to KMC, piloting of Municipal Administration and Revenue System will be conducted in six wards of the metropolis by mid-June and expanded to all 35 wards by mid-July depending upon the results of the experiment. 

The KMC has allocated Rs67.5 million for installing MARS in the metropolis for this fiscal year, with the Asian Development Bank providing a financial aid of Rs90 million.

MARS team leader Lasse Laaksonen said that the system helps in linking the public with services through citizen interface system, provides internal messages, keeps unified records of programmes, and provides figures on city’s performance indicators, among others.

The project’s Financial Analyst Sandip Acharya and Senior Systems Analyst Samar Basnet said that information on current works of KMC’s wards and their progress can be directly monitored and evaluated by central officials through the system, which would help in employee management and drafting of effective plans and policies.

Earlier, a field survey conducted by the KMC last November had found that only 45.3 percent of the service seekers were satisfied with its services with a whopping 66.6 percent of the respondents saying they had been kept in the dark regarding the metropolis’ project selection and implementation procedures. Forty-four percent of respondents said they had doubts over service delivery from the municipality. A majority of the people said the lack of information regarding the services along with misplacement and disappearance of files are recurring problems they face while visiting the municipality office.

The metropolis provides a host of services such as issuing house construction permits, collecting taxes, registering births, deaths and marriages, collecting garbage, preparing documents for scholarships and recommending for citizenship certificates, etc, to its residents in 35 Wards. Service seekers have to visit the KMC’s central office at Sundhara or its 35 Ward offices for the services.