In a decision that is expected to help applicants get income or legal heir certificates sooner, the Commissionerate of Revenue Administration has introduced a colour-coding system on a pilot-basis. Under it, only a fraction of the applications will be re-verified in the field by the Revenue Inspectors after the Village Administrative Officers complete the initial field verification.
Under the revised re-verification policy (to be applicable in all districts, except Chennai), the e-Sevai application would “randomly” select those applications that would be marked as ‘red’, which the Revenue Inspectors would have to “mandatorily” re-verify in the field to cross-check the field verification reports from the Village Administrative Officers. The remaining applications would be marked as ‘green’.
For the cases marked as ‘green’, the Revenue Inspectors “must not” make any field re-verification and must rely only on the field verification reports from the Village Administrative Officers, says a circular issued to the Collectors.
In the next level, “a fraction” of the applications re-verified on the field by the Revenue Inspectors will be selected randomly and sent to the Zonal Deputy Tahsildar, marked in red, in the login task list. As of now, the colour-coding would apply only to applications for income and legal heir certificates and applications for other certificates would remain in the blue category.
R. Arulraj, State general secretary, Village Administrative Officers’ Association, Tamil Nadu, welcomed the decision.
“For income certificates, about 2% to 5% of the total number of applications would be randomly selected to be marked as red and for legal heir certificates, about 20% of the applications would be selected for re-verification by the Revenue Inspectors. But these figures are dynamic and would keep changing,” Commissioner of Revenue Administration M.A. Siddique told The Hindu.
At present, an online application for a certificate is initially sent to the Village Administrative Officer, who is required to make field inquiries and verify the documents submitted and record recommendations on the e-Sevai portal. Then the application is sent to the Revenue Inspector concerned.
The Revenue Inspector would have to act as the field re-verification officer who verifies all the applications in the field yet again. “The new system is set to bring down the time considerably for the applicants to receive their certificates,” Mr. Siddique said. Every year, about 30 lakh applications for income certificates and over eight lakh applications for legal heir certificates are received.
