Ahmedabad city, recently announced the Mega City in India is soon to have a GIS based water complaint redressal system. School of Planning, CEPT University in Ahmedabad is working on a project funded by the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi. The project is initially being developed for the western part of the city and will be completed within six months.
Professor Anjana Vyas from the School of Planning, CEPT who initiated the project spoke to GIS Development about the project.
‘The vision behind the project was to help the citizens facing water related problems and the municipal governance by enhancing the water complaint redressal system. Developing a GIS based system for this purpose would help the Municipal Corporation identify the exact location of the complainer. The system will assist in identifying the probable reason and location due to which the complaint arises. The system will also aid personnel management whereby nature of the complaint would become clear and the decision to dispatch skilled or unskilled personnel may be taken accordingly. Hence the project also aims to balance between the number of complaint to be redressed and the time spent on it to redress by the staff of Municipal Corporation. CEPT is getting support and information from Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) for this project. We are working very closely with the officials of Municipal Corporation to understand the exact method of their functioning, the problems experienced by them, nature and extent of the problem, their suggestions, etc. This will help us in making the system not only better but also useful for the simple and easy administration.’
Prof Vyas summarised the greatest challenge faced by them as ‘the non availability of maps showing the final plot wise use and the name of the property; location map of present water lines, junctions, TEE, valve, etc. The project is depending to a great extent on actual primary survey to gather the information on use and the name of the property. The water and pipeline related information collection is depending upon the zonal officers who with their knowledge and experience demarked the details on map. In fact 70% of the time taken in the project is being spent on the arrangement of such data.’
The project includes a user friendly web-based system to allow users to click from the list of complaints and location, register the complaints, view the status of the complaint. At the same time the administrators can update the status of the complaints, organize the system and print the periodical summery reports.
