E-remittance of water and sewerage tax has come to a near halt in Chennai Metro Water (CMWSSB). The official CMWSSB website that facilitates e-remittance crashed early this week.
Senior CMWSSB source preferring anonymity admitted to the site going down and attributed it to problems encountered by NIC (National Informatics Centre) while uploading data pertaining to the added areas of CMWSSB to its server.
“The data uploading has been done in our intra-net connecting headquarters and depot offices, but networking it with the NIC server remains undone owing to uploading problems,” a senior CMWSSB official said.
Prior to city’s expansion, there were 14,000 streets in 155 metro water divisions, but it has increased to 20,000 streets in an enlarged Chennai metropolitan area comprising 200 metro divisions now, officials pointed out adding that Shenoy Nagar division had only 100 and odd streets earlier, but now it covers nearly 500 streets.
NIC officials complain that the additional data consumes too much of memory and chokes their server, CMWSSB officials explained noting that they pay `80,000 per annum to the NIC for hiring their server.
Ironically, the contract of the private firm that developed and maintains the software for metro water was terminated long back.
CMWSSB top brass have specially requested the firm to rectify the error temporarily and floated fresh tenders for the work.
Even information relating to water level of the city reservoirs is currently not accessible through metro water website.
However, officials, who claimed that already registered taxpayers were able to remit taxes, exuded confidence that the website would be back and services restored possibly by Monday.