Nagpur: In a major step towards digitising civic education records, NMC launched an ambitious e-Prashasan initiative to scan and digitise decades-old school registers, including transfer certificates (TC), bonafide certificates and admission-withdrawal records, some dating back to the 1950s. Additional municipal commissioner Vaishnavi B said the project aimed to preserve fragile records and make them accessible online. “Old records like TC and bonafide certificates are being scanned. Even records from 1950-1960 will be made available. Every record will be digitised. This will save time and ensure authenticity. The work for online generation of certificates is progressing,” she said.
The project, executed jointly by NMC’s IT and Education departments, was awarded through a tender to Techsync Innovations Pvt Ltd (e-Prashasan). NMC’s IT officer Swapnil Lokhande is coordinating the initiative at the civic level. For years, NMC schools struggled with deteriorating admission-withdrawal registers stacked in storerooms. With many schools shut due to falling enrolment, their records were merged into operational schools, creating an administrative nightmare. In some cases, a single school was forced to preserve records of 30 to 40 closed institutions, making retrieval of certificates a tiring process. The problem became acute as former students required documents for caste validity verification, govt schemes and employment. Officials noted that delays in locating physical registers often resulted in prolonged pendency of cases at the district caste scrutiny office. Municipal commissioner Abhijeet Chaudhari, Vaishnavi B, senior IT officials and the education department laid the groundwork for the digital transformation. The scale of the project is unprecedented. Within just 30 days, 20 representatives equipped with 15 scanning devices digitised registers from 496 schools, both operational and closed. A total of 1,829 registers were scanned, generating over 1.48 lakh scanned images.Over 180 data entry operators are now feeding student details into a centralised system, linking each digital entry with a scanned image of the original record to ensure verification and authenticity. Out of the 496 schools covered, 105 are operational while 391 are closed. The project digitised over 13.69 lakh student records, 6.25 lakh from functional schools and 7.44 lakh from closed ones. The e-Prashasan school management system will allow issuance of transfer certificates, bonafide certificates and admission-extract documents with a single click. Attendance monitoring, digital result sheets and centralised oversight at the NMC level are also part of the system. Vaishnavi B said the move will eliminate dependence on fragile paper registers, reduce turnaround time and allow former students to request documents online from anywhere in the world.
