Centre receives 916 complaints from citizens

NEW DELHI: From groceries not being delivered in Goa to pleas from the UK and New York to evacuate stranded Indians, from frantic requests for garbage disposal to complaints about police harassment —these are some of the matters that have come to the Centre’s notice since the 21-day lockdown began on March 25.

Till April 1, the Department of Administrative Reform and Public Grievances (DARPG) received over 916 through various departments, ministries and states related to Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown. While many of these were registered through the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), others were filed on the department’s website after it launched a separate section for Covid-19 grievances on Wednesday. The DAPRG has sorted 336 complaints, received as of March 30, into 11 categories to “expeditiously address them.”

“Many of these grievances were filed through the Prime Minsiter’s Office on the PM’s website, now they are all being forward to the separate COVID-19

grievance portal,” a senior DARPG official said on condition of anonymity. “There is a 60-day period for the redressal of grievances filed with the PMO. But since these are urgent, and a huge data dump has taken place, a separate portal has been set up to monitor and address them.”

These complaints will be resolved in a period of three days.

A majority of the grievances are health-related, the official cited above added. These include overcrowding of isolation wards, lack of masks and sanitisers and not enough testing facilities or hospitals being ill-equipped to test patients. “We have also received requests from UK and New York to evacuate Indians stranded there,” he said.“People have also complained that essential services, like garbage collection, are not happening.”

There have also been requests from people to intervene with banks since the Reserve Bank of India has allowed a moratorium on EMIs but banks haven’t responded, leading to concerns about being penalised in case of non-payment of dues.

“In the general pipeline (PMO or CPGRAMS) we receive lakhs of grievances,” another official said. “The Covid-19 specific ones have been segregated for immediate attention.” CPGRAMS is short for Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System

THESE COMPLAINTS WILL BE RESOLVED IN A PERIOD OF THREE DAYS, SAY GOVT OFFICIALS