Hyderabad: Digital door numbering project gathers dust

Hyderabad: The GHMC’s digital door-numbering project has gone for a toss and hardly few companies have come forward to take up the project under which a unique  number will be allotted to households in the city. The project has been gathering dust since two years. 

The digital house numbering is planned under the Unique Smart Addressing Solution for Urban Dwellings programme in the public-private partnership. A pilot project, was taken up in Gaganmahal  and Domalguda in 2016. However, the project was stuck as few private firms participated in the bidding in 2016. 

A senior GHMC official, on condition of anonymity, said that only two companies took part in the tender process in 2016 and one of them was found ineligible. The official added that the as per the norms the corporation cannot award the tender to the lone bidder. 

The digital initiative with geospatial location would have made easy to spot a house through a mobile app. This would have made the work easy for the authorities to reach out to 21 lakh houses in the city in case of an untoward incident. Currently, the houses in the city follow a different numbering pattern and there is no uniformity. 

In the past, the corporation had tested different projects to bring the houses under a uniform numbering pattern. The corporation floated tenders again in June last year but it was not finalised. The official said that new tenders will be issued to kick start the project.