The Udaipur Municipal Council updated its website (www.udaipurmc.org) yesterday with some very welcome additions including downloading of important forms.

The newly added features include applying for tenders, downloading application forms that include marriage registration, birth and death registration, BPL registration etc.

Users can now also check the BPL list, Hoarding allotments and various other information. Another useful addition on the website is the provision of all the Help Line telephone numbers of Udaipur.

In a Bhawan Anumati Samiti Meeting held yesterday, Kiran Jain, the President of the Samiti said, “It is a first of its kind initiative by UMC to maintain transparency of work. We also request people to make us aware about the problems so that they can be sorted out.”

A Complaint and Suggestion page has also been added to the website. In this section, one can file a complaint against the municipal council and later track the response by the complaint number provided. The complainer’s name is assured to be kept anonymous. The complain page is very well defined and is a fair attempt to acknowledge the opinion of people.

This new initiative taken by the municipal council is an appreciable idea, as a large number of people now have access to Internet. This idea is an attempt to bridge the gap between the views of masses and that of officials.

Though the website is similar to the official municipal corporation website of Jaipur (www.jaipurmc.org), but it does not follow the same standard of user-friendly layout and design. Udaipurmc.org still lacks basic differentiation. Certain links on the left hand side of the page coincide with each other and are not well aligned.

It also has a major font issue and though the Hindi language fonts have been provided for everyone to download from the website itself, there are still a lot of pages where half the content is in Hindi and half in English, which is very confusing.

The Birth and Death record detail form has certain blocks to be filled in English, including the name and registration number while the hospital name and gender columns are in Hindi. The site map of the website also shows a runtime error. All this faulty user experience can be improved on.

The site lacks the basic interactive features of Web 2.0. The website can have a better organization and design.

This recent step to take all the day-to-day processes online gives a very convenient way to the masses to interact with the officials, but the missing user friendliness of the site still leaves room for improvement.