Un-Paid Egovernance in Revenue Department

Saif Technologies, one of the earliest Data Processing Centers in Kashmir, setup in the year 2002 enthusiastically took up the project to computerize the Land Records for the Revenue Department of Jammu and Kashmir through Financial Commissioner Revenue, J&K Government, few years back.

Today, the Department is in pocession of fully computerized Land Revenue Records for the convinience of a normal citizen and can be enabled to provide it online to it's users. But, the burecuratic mafia, which is always in full force in the department is creating all the hurdles it can in stalling the process as the lower rung employees loose an opportunity to earn easy and quick bucks by providing land record information to the land owners, etc. The higher ups in the department are impotent to handle the lower rung employees and as a result the land record digitized information is not being made available to the common people.

Not only that, the Department has failed to release payments for the work done by Saif Technologies and is using all it's stunts and child games to avoid paying the company which put almost everything that it had at stake to execute this order.

The moral of the story is: even if the Government is willing to get an IT project executed, unless the payments are not made in advance, never rely on thier words or their sweet promises because they are incompetent to help release the payments for deploying technology and they feel handicapped in front of the lower rung employees who object to technology.

Saif Technologies approached the Tech Savy Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, uduring the IT Expo in October 2009 and he assured him that his payments would be released and also conveyed the same to his Principal Secretary who said that the payements are in process and shall be released as early as possible. But, after a gap of over 5 months, there has been no clue on their payments, maybe Saif Technologies need to do more research to understand what the Government Officials mean by 'soon'.

Wishing good luck to Saif Technologies and with appeal to the concerned officials in the Revenue Department to help out a growing IT Company and to not be a reason for hindering it's growth.