Hyderabad: It has been brought to the notice of Arvind Kumar, the Principal Secretary of the Department of Municipal Administration and Urban Development, that officials of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) are marking grievances as “closed” without attending to them. At a recent review meeting, Mr Kumar asked officials to improve their grievance-redressal mechanism.
About 600 new grievances are registered every day in the Centralised Grievance Redressal System (CGRS) through the GHMC’s call centre, the MyGHMC App, and representations made to authorities at the headquarters and circle and zonal offices. In addition to this, over 6,300 grievances have been registered this year through Prajavani, a weekly interaction held every Monday.
In order to increase accountability, the corporation decided to provide each complainant a complaint ID and the name and contact number of the official who was supposed to address the issue. It also decided to implement a third-party verification system to ensure that complaints were resolved. However, those plans are yet to be implemented.
Meanwhile, officials have been marking complaints as closed without attending to them, in order to impress the higher authorities. In a study conducted in March, 170 officials were found indulging in this practice, and they were served show-cause notices.
However, the action seems to have had no effect. There has been no improvement in the GHMC’s grievance-redressal mechanism due to the apathy of the field-level staff. When asked about the inefficiency of the grievance-redressal mechanism, a senior GHMC official, on condition of anonymity, said that he had held a review meeting with officials and instructed them to give written explanations for their failure to respond to complaints. He added that citizens often continued to file complaints even after an issue had been resolved.
Another matter of concern is that GHMC Commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy and additional commissioners have not been attending the weekly Prajavani sessions saying that they have review meetings and field-level inspections to conduct due to which citizens end up having to run from pillar to post to have their problems resolved.
The Prajavani programme was launched in 2012 with the aim of allowing citizens to meet with the heads of departments and have their grievances addressed on the spot. Prajavani sessions are held between 10 and 1 pm every Monday. However, higher officials of the GHMC have not been attending them for the past several months.
