Bengaluru contractor payments will move to a unified digital system across the city’s five municipal corporations, with the Greater Bengaluru Authority saying the reform will reduce delays, make officials accountable and allow residents to track public works online.
Greater Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda said the new process would apply uniformly to works funded by the state government as well as projects financed from the municipal corporations’ own funds. The stated objective is to end prolonged and uncertain delays in the submission, verification and payment of bills for public works.
Under the new system, bills will be processed through the Integrated Financial Management System, or IFMS. Each bill will first be examined by a project management consultant. Local engineers will then inspect and certify the work before the chief engineer conducts a pre-audit and grants approval. Payments will subsequently be processed according to seniority.
The authority said the revised workflow would reduce unnecessary approval stages and create a defined responsibility at each point in the process. It also includes time limits for bill verification and quality checks. Local engineers, for example, will have seven days to inspect a project and submit their report.
If officials fail to act within the prescribed period, the bill will be treated as automatically approved and moved to the next stage, according to the announcement. At the same time, officials will be held directly responsible if they fail to conduct a required inspection and defects are later found in the work.
Payments will be deposited directly into contractors’ registered bank accounts through IFMS after one-time-password-based authentication. The system is intended to replace the existing manual RTGS process and reduce the scope for intermediary intervention. Contractors will also be able to see the location and status of their bills through the software.
Any bill that is withheld or rejected must carry a recorded reason in the IFMS platform. This is intended to give contractors clear information about why a payment has been delayed or refused, rather than leaving them dependent on manual follow-up with multiple offices.
The authority is also bringing the process from tender allocation to final payment onto the IFMS platform. It said information on each stage of a public project would be available digitally. The name of the responsible engineer and contractor will have to be displayed at every worksite.
An online dashboard is being released for the public to view the status of ongoing and completed projects in the city. The authority said the system would support better monitoring of construction quality, contract management and financial discipline, while reducing unnecessary visits for contractors who complete their work properly.
The Greater Bengaluru Authority said its broader objective is to ensure that public works are completed on time and to an improved standard across the five municipal corporations. The announcement did not specify a single launch date for every feature of the system, but stated that the digital process would be implemented in phases through IFMS.
