By IANS
Pune : Out of 400 entries from across the world, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has bagged the World Leadership Forum’s award for using a special software to scrutinise building proposals that has led to better efficiency and a surge in its revenues.
The London-based forum, a NGO, has honoured the PMC in the architecture and civil engineering category for using the software called Auto DCR. The city beat Los Angeles and Lagos in the final round of the contest.
The PMC’s deputy city engineer Anirudh Pavaskar said the software has increased by three times the civic authority’s capacity to scrutinise and process building proposals.
“Earlier, we used to process two million sq ft of building plans annually. Now, in the past one and half years, we have cleared close to eight million sq feet of building plans,” Pavaskar told IANS.
“Earlier, it used to take three weeks to clear a drawing. Now the whole process is complete in less than two weeks,” he added.
The successful implementation of Auto DCR has not only reduced the PMC’s time and effort in dealing with building proposals but also raised its revenues significantly, said Pavaskar.
Auto DCR, developed by Softech Engineers Ltd, is based on drawings in the auto-CAD (computer-aided design) format.
All drawings submitted by architects have to pass through the software, which does not provide an approval till all errors are rectified.
It takes just 10 minutes for the software to process a design without manual interference, Pavaskar said.
The PMC has also given its inspection engineers hand-held devices called personal digital assistants (PDAs).
As soon as Auto DCR clears a drawing, it sends an SMS to the concerned inspection engineer on his PDA, requesting an inspection of the site.
It also simultaneously sends a report to the city engineer, who can then monitor the process and keep a tab on the number of inspections completed.
The PMC has cleared 6,300 cases till now with the software.
The forum also awarded Chennai in the category of communications.