Rajiv Gandhi Housing Corp Uses Geotags to Monitor Construction
Rajiv Gandhi Housing Corporation (RGHC), a nodal agency for construction of affordable houses, has come up with a mobile application and control room to monitor all its construction activities.“We can monitor our projects on
Rajiv Gandhi Housing Corporation (RGHC), a nodal agency for construction of affordable houses, has come up with a mobile application and control room to monitor all its construction activities.“We can monitor our projects on a real-time basis using a simple mobile technology — geographical tagging (geotagging) using photographs and videos of houses under construction,” said housing department secretary Manoj Kumar Meena. RGHC is presently monitoring as many as 10 lakh housing constructions across 27,000 villages and 279 urban local bodies.The Centre has taken a cue and implemented a similar system across the country. The geotagging method has also been listed as one of 20 best practices across government departments by the state’s planning and statistics department to motivate others to use technology.Under this system, every construction site is geotagged before work begins. Next, the local panchayat development officer inspects it for physical verification and uploads pictures real-time on the Indira mane mobile application. This is done at every stage of construction so that beneficiaries can claim subsidy. “Without geo-tagged pictures, neither the state, nor the Centre releases the subsidy amount,” said RGHCL managing director S Basavaraju. On average, the application allows uploading of 7,000-10,000 pictures every day. The final disbursal of the subsidy is done through direct benefit transfer (DBT), which is linked to Aadhaar.The housing department launched a call centre called Spandana, wherein it receives close to 2,000 requests every day for registering various complaints, including delay in release of funds. The state government in its overall audit of the scheme has found that the system has led to 50,000-70,000 beneficiaries having received their subsidy amount weekly through direct bank transfer.