Push for ‘Benayat’ portal upgrade after service delays

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

Complaints that Benayat’s English-only, plot-number-based portal is slowing down basic municipal services have pushed the Northern Municipal Council to approve an upgrade of the system.

Councillors took the urgent decision during the council’s meeting yesterday, after Abdulla Ashoor warned that residents were running into trouble from the moment they tried to sign up, through to entering property details and lodging applications for building permits and other services.

He said the current set-up was holding up procedures such as renovation licences, additions to properties and service connections.

Gateway

Speaking to The Daily Tribune, Ashoor said Benayat had become the main gateway for municipal and construction requests, used by both citizens and engineering offices.

However, many people in the Northern Governorate “struggle even to reach the Benayat platform in the first place,” as they must create a username and password and activate notification services on Bahrain.bh before being allowed to log in.

“Once they manage to enter, they find that the entire site is in English, with technical terms that are not clear to everyone. People know their address, not their plot number, yet the system insists on the plot number. Citizens tell us the site is neither simple nor user-friendly, and their municipal services are being held up as a result, which is why I submitted this proposal,” he said.

Calls

Ashoor said he had received a stream of calls from residents who were told that their municipal procedures now had to go through Benayat, only to find that they could not even complete the registration stage or work out where on the site to file the request they needed.

Some, he added, complained that electricity and water hook-ups were delayed, and that there were cases of emergency crews struggling to reach properties, because of problems with locating addresses or entering the right data on the current system.