Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, Mar 22: Setting a new precedence, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh today formally launched a ”telephonic feedback mechanism” for grievance redressal of citizens.
Dr Jitendra Singh personally called up three complainants chosen on random basis, who had registered their grievances in the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) and their grievances had been disposed off. The Minister sought their feedback regarding the response given by the Government to their grievances. These complainants included Vijay V Lambat (Nagpur, Maharashtra) who had complained regarding the refund of money from Income Tax Department. The second person contacted by the Minister was Aravindbabu Pormar from Bangalore. He had complained against Railways and sought refund of money from the Ministry of Railways. The third person contacted was Paladugu Samba Siva Rao from Odisha, who had grievance related to Provident fund with the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The citizens contacted thanked the Minister and the department. They also suggested that the citizens should be contacted once over phone before closing the grievance. The Minister assured that the department is committed to take steps in this direction.
The Minister said that this direct citizen contact through telephone will not only enable us to assess the level of satisfaction received by the complaints after the redressal of grievance, it will also help in offering us valuable inputs required to improve the grievance redressal mechanism. He said, this is in line with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dictum of minimum government, maximum governance with citizen centric approach. In the current age of social media and web portal, this approach will also give the citizens a feeling of direct involvement in the Government’s grievance redressal mechanism, he added.
In future, Dr Jitendra Singh said, he himself will be calling up citizens at random and verify whether their complaints have been disposed off. He said that Secretary or some other senior official from the department will also make call to the citizens to verify the status of grievance. He further informed that during the last one year, ending December 2015, the grievance cell has received nearly 9 lakh complaints as compared to the average of 2-3 lakh yearly complaints earlier. He also expressed satisfaction over the fact that over 90% complaints are redressed now.
Dr Jitendra Singh said, rising number of grievances being registered by the citizens are an indication of the increasing faith of public in the personal interest in the redressal of grievances of the public by engaging with them over phone. The social media will also be used in the grievance redressal, he added.
Devendra Chaudhry, Union Secretary, DARPG said that now on an average 1,500 grievances are disposed off in a day .
The Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monito-ring System (CPGRAMS) Portal, a web based portal, has been designed and implemented in all the Ministries / Departments of Government of India. The state module of CPGRAMS has been implemented in 9 States/Union Territory namely Haryana, Odisha, Rajathan, Puducherry, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Uttrak-hand, Jharkhand and Punjab.
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