An integral part of people's lives is their inexorable dealings with governmental departments, sometimes in a multitude of areas - be they taxes, residential registrations or marriage registrations.

Sometimes when a case involves different departments, they have to run the gamut of bureaucracy, traipsing across the city and tramping from building to building and office to office, lugging around all sorts of documents, so they can talk with different people about the same thing.

The obvious solution - which all too often remains a fantasy for those who dream of logical systems in a world overrun by red tape and chaos - is a one-stop, one size fits all, government portal.

In 2014, the district launched its "one-gate" services platform, which enables local citizens to access more than 600 services at one window in the district-level services hall. Besides less legwork, the average waiting time for people there has been reduced from up to 15 minutes to around five minutes. People now need to take appreciably less paperwork with them because the same documents are used repeatedly at the services window.

More added services are also realized in the self-help area. People can fill in forms, pay their car fines, redo their identity cards and apply for visas to Hong Kong and Macao on machines by themselves. "I plan to visit Hong Kong next month so I came here. The machine only took 30 seconds to get my visa ready," said Wu Qiaoqiao, a 55-year-old Chancheng resident.

According to a satisfaction poll released by the services hall, 99.93 percent of the people who used the one-gate service at the window thought it satisfactory.

Couples can also get their marriage registrations there in a special prepared hall, which caters for wedding pictures. To date, six one-gate service halls have been set up in the district.

Since September 2014, the platform has received a total of 5.79 million cases and more than half of them were completed on the spot. It takes only 10 minutes on average to successfully process a case, according to one official.

"The motto of the platform is not to let the information run," said Liu Donghao, Party secretary of Chancheng district.

"The core value underlying the platform is to streamline administration and to delegate power, which is realized through the information system."

The service platform also performs as a data collector of all the statistics recorded on the customers.

Based on the statistics, a rich data base of residents and companies in the district has taken form, which involves more than 300 million pieces of information.

The one-gate service platform won the award as a best example of innovative society management in 2015 and has been recognized nationally elsewhere.

(China Daily 12/07/2017 page20)