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
MUMBAI: A 56-year-old resident of Mumbai’s Dharavi, with no travel history, died on Wednesday hours after he tested positive for coronavirus (Covid-19), civic officials said. The Maharashtra health department had not confirmed that he died of Covid-19 till late Wednesday evening.
The officials said the man’s death is the first such case in one of Asia’s largest slums and that eight of his family members have been quarantined and will undergo tests on Thursday. Local ward officials were tracing his contacts after it was found that he visited a nearby mosque daily.
The Slum Rehabilitation Authority colony, where the 56-year-old lived, has been sealed. Kiran Dighavkar, a local ward officer, said the person owned a garment shop and they do not know how he got infected. “We have sealed 300 flats along with 90 shops in the area. All senior citizens’ samples will be tested for the virus. We will provide rations to the building. No one will be allowed to come out until the people test negative for the virus,” he said.
A Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official separately confirmed that two people from Dharavi, who attended a gathering in March at the Tablighi Jamaat’s centre in Delhi that later emerged as an infection hotspot, have been home quarantined. “We are now checking if those two visited the same mosque (like the 56-year-old).”
THESE COMPLAINTS WILL BE RESOLVED IN A PERIOD OF THREE DAYS, SAY GOVT OFFICIALS
THE SLUM COLONY WHERE THE MAN LIVED HAS BEEN SEALED AND EIGHT MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY QUARANTINED