Govt cuts down public grievances resolution time
Snehashish Roy
The Centre has cut down the maximum period for resolving public grievances to 30 days from the existing 45 with the department of administrative reforms and public grievances (DARPG) introducing measures to empower its centralised public grievances and monitoring system ( CPGRAMS), a government statement said on Friday.
It said that ministries and departments are likely to monitor grievances raised in print and electronic media.
“The endeavour of the government is that the individual citizen’s voice must be heard, and the citizen must be empowered adequately to repose trust in the system. In this regard, DARPG has introduced several measures for strengthening CPGRAMS,” the Union ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions said in the statement.
The department has revamped the monitoring dashboard of the CPGRAMS to enable deeper analysis of grievances, capacity building of stakeholders for effective grievance redressal, auto-routing of grievances to the last mile, integration of state portals with the CPGRAMS, operationalisation of feedback call centres, developing an inclusive system by using common service centres, an effective regional language interface into all languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution, and introduction of a grievance redressal index for ranking ministries/ departments, according to the statement.
The ministry added that an “interim/appropriate reply” will be given to the citizen if the grievances are not resolved within the 30-day time frame for instances such as sub-judice matters or cases facing policy issues.
“The disposed grievance will be treated as closed unless the citizen has filed the appeal. lf the appeal is received from the citizen against the disposed grievance, the grievance will be treated as closed only after disposal of appeal,” the statement said.
Applicants can submit their feedback and file an appeal after their grievance is closed. DARPG has started outbound call centres to receive feedback from applicants on the quality of the grievance redressal. The feedback will be shared with the ministries and departments to make systemic improvements internally.
Remedial measures will be taken on procedures, policy and people to reduce grievances based on a regular root-cause analysis conducted by the ministry or department. The statement said nodal grievance resolution officers will be appointed to resolve public grievances. Similarly, an officer senior to them will be appointed as a nodal appellate authority to ensure the timely disposal of public grievances.