new delhi, Aug. 27 -- The Centre is set to launch a dedicated portal, SAMARTH Panchayat, to help the country's rural local bodies track and manage their tax and non-tax revenues and bring transparency and efficiency to local finance and targeted policy framing. "To digitize the OSR (own source of revenue) collection of the panchayats, we have developed the SAMARTH Panchayat portal, a dedicated digital platform that facilitates the generation of tax and non-tax demands, maintenance of tax registers, and online tracking of revenue," said Vivek Bharadwaj, secretary at the panchayati raj ministry. The portal, already piloted in Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, will digitize OSR collections and also enable online payments and asset management to enhance financial self-reliance. With 42% of India's gram panchayats collecting less than Rs.1 lakh annually and 11 states yet to frame their OSR rules, SAMARTH is expected to provide the first comprehensive database on Panchayat revenues, helping state and central governments design targeted policies for grassroots development. The best practices and features of various state portals had been studied appropriately integrated into SAMARTH, a senior ministry official said. Panchayats, act as grassroot-level bodies to implement government schemes and for achieving the sustainable development goals, get grants from the Centre, state governments, as well as raise their own revenue in a limited way through internal sources like local-tax revenues and user charges. Panchayat are authorized to levy and collect certain taxes, duties, tolls and fees. Since panchayats are governed by state governments, so the data collection, recording and sharing is not standardized. There was, thus, a need for a central digital platform to bring in transparency, efficiency, and scalability. The secretary said there is currently no centralized, publicly accessible database for granular panchayat revenue data across India. The proposed portal is expected to fill this gap to help the state and central governments in devising targeted policy interventions as per the needs of individual panchayats. In FY22, the average per capita OSR collected by panchayat at an all-India level was Rs.100, while the average annual OSR for gram panchayats was Rs.2.3 lakh, with 42% of them garnering less than Rs.1 lakh revenue a year. "Once the revenue data is in place, it will bring transparency in the system and assist the state and centre government for better planning of developmental projects. But it may also bring strict monitoring that may act as a hinderance at times to panchayats in executing projects," said Jitendra Meena, a professor of History in Delhi University. Many states do not have their OSR rules, and the digitization would encourage them to formulate their own set....