Permits and licensing software takes an application for a permit online, such as permission to build a house or a licence to open a shop, sends it through the checks and inspections that the rules require, and issues the permit. In India, a building permit is usually called building plan approval or building permission, and a shop licence is often called a trade licence. Both are issued by the city's municipal corporation or its development authority.
On paper, getting a building permit meant visiting several offices, and nobody could tell the applicant where the file was. An online system makes each step visible. The applicant, usually through an architect, uploads the drawings and documents and pays the fee online. Many systems now check the drawings automatically. The architect draws the building in BIM software or another drawing program, and the system reads the drawing file. It checks the rules that can be measured. These include the setback, which is how far the building must stand from the edges of the plot; the height; and the floor area ratio (FAR), which is the total floor area of all floors divided by the area of the plot. Then the application moves to each department in turn, such as town planning and fire safety. An engineer inspects the site. Each officer has a fixed number of days to act, and the system shows the applicant who holds the file now.
Say a family in Mysuru wants to build a house with a ground floor and two upper floors on a plot of 1,200 square feet. Imagine that their city allows a FAR of 1.75 for this plot. That means a total floor area of up to 1,200 × 1.75 = 2,100 square feet. Their architect's drawing shows 2,250 square feet. The automatic check rejects it within minutes and highlights the top floor. The architect reduces the top floor by 150 square feet and uploads the drawing again, and this time it passes. The system calculates the fee from the floor area, and the family pays ₹38,000 online. An engineer inspects the plot on day 9. The permit is issued on day 21, with a QR code that anyone can scan to check that it is genuine.
After the permit, the builder records progress in construction management software, and the city inspects the finished building before it issues an occupancy certificate. The permit's details also go into the city's property records, so that the new house is taxed through its property tax system.
Online permits are part of a wider move to deliver services on shared digital public infrastructure, so that a citizen can apply without visiting an office. In America, cities usually buy permit software as a module of their government ERP. In India, most states and cities have it built by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) or by IT services firms.