CCTV cameras have been installed in all departments of the Margao Municipality as a means of bringing about discipline among civic employees, the office of the Chairperson has also not been excluded. Hopefully the earlier practice of employees going missing to attend to personal work after marking their attendance shall be curbed. The electronic surveillance shall also check cases of files going mysteriously missing from tables of the ' dealing hands' , an issue that has led to allegations of corruption at several council meetings. A file tracking software was introduced in the MMC almost a decade ago but but civic functionaries chucked the digital mode preferring to use the manual route instead which facilitated ' grease money'. In fact every file created at the corporation should be affixed with an RFID chip / barcode so that it's location can be tracked in real time. That way sarkari babus can't claim that no file is pending at their end. Further, digitized copies of every public document/ application circulating in MMC should be hosted on the cloud so that even if they are destroyed in ' mysterious' fires ( the 'inconvenient ' ones mostly are ) information can be retrieved in a jiffy. These small and doable measures in addition to cameras would lead to much greater accountability by government servants. Last but not the least the MMC should consider adaptive reuse of the old building, redesign the musty interiors keeping in view the heritage aspect so that there are waiting areas available for the public who presently have to stand in queues in the arcade to pay house tax and other bills.
