The Environmental Protection Agency is Now on oneGov

We are excited to announce that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now offering its services through oneGov.

You can now read about or apply for their services through our platform at your convenience.

To commemorate the EPA’s arrival to the platform, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the entity that plays a vital role in the protection and preservation of the local environment.

In this article, we will be taking a closer look at what the EPA is, what services they offer, and who can apply for these services. We will also cover how you can apply for their services through oneGov.

Let us begin our look at the EPA with the basics. Just what is the EPA and what does it do?

To Protect and Preserve

The Environment Protection Agency, also known as the EPA, is the governmental entity that is responsible for protecting and preserving the environment of the Maldives.

They work to ensure the safety and continued existence of protected species and areas, as defined by the Environment Protection and Preservation Act (4/93).

Some of these protected species include various species of sea turtles and various species of rays. Some protected areas might include areas such as marshes, mangrove forests, and turtle beaches.

The work done by the EPA usually falls under either the Environment Research and Conservation (ERC) department or the Environmental Compliance and Assessment (ECA) department.

Both of these departments play a different but equally key role in the functioning of the EPA.

Services of the EPA

The EPA provides a variety of services that relate to the environment and its preservation. The scope of these services are quite wide. They can range from research-related services to services that give authorisation for certain construction projects.

The Environment Research and Conservation (ERC) department is one of the key departments in the EPA. The services offered by the ERC are available to both citizens and businesses. Government entities can also apply.

It is mainly responsible for granting permits for environmental research and conservation efforts. If you want to conduct any research on any protected species or areas, you will need the approval of the ERC.

The following services of the ERC are now available on oneGov:

• Protected Species Research Application

• Protected Area Research Application

The other component of the EPA is the Environmental Compliance and Assessment (ECA). It offers services to citizens and businesses, along with government entities.

It is mainly responsible for assessing upcoming projects to check them for environmental compliance and assess their environmental impact. These can include projects such as dredging, vegetation removal, construction projects, repairing existing structures, and so on.

The ECA also issues permits to respond to emergency environmental disasters that affect people, places, or livelihoods. For example, if an island is being flooded due to heavy rain, you could get a temporary permit to use sandbags to stem the flooding.

Services of the ECA are currently being studied and re-engineered by our team. The fully re-engineered services will start becoming available on oneGov in the very near future.

At oneGov, we aim to make the service application and processing journey as convenient, consistent, and time-efficient as possible. Let’s take a brief look at how these re-engineered services work.

The oneGov Experience

The services of the EPA that are available on oneGov have been re-engineered to make them more efficient and effective. You can see this change on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the names of the services have been changed to better reflect their purpose. Additionally, the services also come with a short description that briefly explains what the service is about. The goal here is to make identifying the service as easy as possible.

The next area to look at is the application process itself. The use of eFaas to identify the applicant eliminates the collection of redundant or duplicated information from the entity’s side. We wanted to directly address the inconvenience of dealing with stacks of physical documents to prove the applicants identity.

Additionally, the service application form has also been redesigned to collect only the information that is necessary for the service. The application process for each service will take only about 10 minutes to complete.

Another key feature of the EPA services on oneGov are the Service Guides. These Service Guides are a detailed rundown of the service. They include a brief description of each service, who is eligible to apply, a detailed list of documents required, how to apply, and what to do after you apply.

The Service Guides also have an FAQ section detailing frequently asked questions and answers that are specific to each individual service. If you have a query that is not covered by the FAQ, you can also contact oneGov Support through these channels.

The EPA worked closely with the oneGov team to bring their services onto the platform. The service rollout is the culmination of close collaborative efforts.

Welcome, EPA!

The oneGov team would like to take this moment to welcome the EPA to the platform. We hope that both the applicants and service providers of the EPA will greatly benefit from the shift to our unified digital platform.

We would also like to thank the EPA team for their consistent communication and collaboration during the service study and service redesign processes. Their availability to clarify any doubts and their close collaborative efforts were instrumental in the successful rollout of EPA services on oneGov.

If you’d like to apply for the EPA’s services, just oneGov it!