Officials to face action for delay in grievance redressal

In order to fast-track its public grievance management mechanism, the AAP government has reportedly decided to act against officials who are not able to redress grievances in set time frame in the national capital. Already on the directions of chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, a series of reviews of settlement of grievances under the public grievance management mechanism has been initiated to ensure the complaints are not kept pending for a long period in any of the government agencies.

The focus of the review meetings is on the number of grievances received by individual departments and the total number of cases that have not been redressed within the set time limit. The department heads have been categorically told to provide details and not only about the grievances they had received, but also about the satisfactory feedback they had received. A circular to this effect, issued by the chief minister’s principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, said if the percentage of the satisfactory feedback was low, the concerned department needed to explain reasons with the steps it intended to take to improve the situation in a defined time frame.

The circular said a select few grievances marked as “not resolved” would be randomly picked up in the review meetings to see whether their marking as “non resolvable” has been appropriately done by the department concerned. It said: “The PGMS has functionality in which the grievances assigned to a particular department can be further sub-categorised. Most of the departments have not worked on this functionality, which is very useful for later analysis of the problems and taking systemic decisions on resolution of such grievances. The departments would be required to come up with the list of further sub-categorisation of the grievances relating to them and their categorisation would be approved in the review meeting.”

Earlier, the chief minister’s office had issued orders to all departments, DDA, DJB and civic corporations, setting out clear timelines for resolution of grievances. Citizens get SMS alerts on the status of their complaint and they are also asked to send their feedback.

Mr Kejriwal had also started a tri-weekly janta darbar earlier at his residence. Following the meetings, the PGMS was modified to ensure time-bound grievance resolution and monitoring of results.

The PGMS also provides provisions to receive online complaints. Complaints received verbally at public meetings by the CM are uploaded in the system. All grievances are subsequently forwarded to heads of departments by the PGMS cell. The CMO has given standing instructions to all the departments to expeditiously dispose of all pending grievances.

Complaints which pertain to corruption are forwarded to the vigilance department and anti-corruption branch. The rest of the petitions are categorized into five categories—grievances, suggestions, requests, service matters and those belonging to other state governments.

The grievances have to be resolved within a set timeframe. A maximum period of 30 days has been set up for resolving grievances. Grievances of an urgent nature are categorized as SOS and assigned a shorter deadline of 2-3 days.

The CMO has time and again made it clear that redressal of grievances by the department must be of “high quality” as adequate care will be taken by the PGMS cell to forward only those grievances which can be resolved by respective departments.

In case of complaints that need to be handled by multiple departments, the department which needs to take action first will do its job and forward the case to the next department. Grievances resolved unsatisfactorily are reopened.

If a grievance cannot be resolved, the reasons have to be uploaded in the system along with relevant documents. “Citizens’ feedback on grievance resolution and satisfaction level in dealing with the state machinery are reportedly obtained through call centre services. The centre is learnt to be responsible for forwarding information on any delay in resolution of grievances to the departmental head concerned.