BMC takes 19 days to respond to your complaints, says report

If you complain to the BMC about overflowing drains, don’t expect much to happen for the next 20 days. Reason: That is how much time your civic body takes, on an average, to fix the problem, according to a report on civic issues in Mumbai by the NGO Praja Foundation, which was released on Tuesday

According to the report, the BMC takes an average of 19 days to resolve complaints about contaminated water supply and 17 days to resolve overflowing garbage issues.

Overall, the BMC took 19 days on an average to address the city’s civic complaints in 2016, the report reveals.

According to the BMC'S citizen charter 1999 (a joint charter by BMC and Praja), the civic body should fix complaints related to drainage, water-supply and solid waste management (SWM) within 1-8 days. However, in the past three years, the BMC has taken more than 10 days to resolve any of these issues, the data reveals. In the M/east ward (Shivaji Nagar Govandi), for instance, the BMC took 54 days to treat contami nated water and 62 days to remove dead animals in 2016.

Milind Mhaske, project co-or dinator at Praja, said, "The BMC needs to make its complaint-re dressal mechanism more effec tive, time-bound and user friendly to provide better servi ces to citizens. The civic body should also undertake an audit system for complaints to better the entire procedure."

The total number of civic com plaints, however, have reduced on an average between 2012 to 2016. From 92,829 cases regis tered in 2012, the numbers came down to 81,555 in 2016. The com plaints on potholes also reduced drastically from 38,279 in 2013 to 5,841 in 2016.