Hyderabad: Even after issuing showcause notices to more than 200 GHMC officials, the redressal system in the civic body has not improved.
The number of grievances against the corporation has only increased with 1,30,826 being registered through Prajavani, myGHMC app, on social media and the civic body’s call centre,
It is telling that 66,459 grievances have been reopened by citizens because GHMC staff has dismissed them without attending to them.
In order to curtail the practice of falsely declaring that the grievance has been addressed, a system of double checking has been started but that too has failed. This has been noticed even by municipal administration and urban development principal secretary Arvind Kumar who has asked the corporation to improve the redressal system.
Under the double-checking system detailed information has to be given on a daily basis about the grievance to the citizen who registered it.
The civic body has instructed GHMC officials to provide evidence like photographs in cases of road damage or sanitation works, after the complaint has been resolved and the same will be sent to the complainant.
To ensure that complainants have received the required feedback, the GHMC’s Centralised Grievance Redressal System (CGRS) wing will call them up on their mobile numbers to make sure that the complaint has been resolved.
Highly-placed sources claim that this double-check mechanism has been tampered with by lower rung officials.
The CGRS has been receiving about 1,000 grievances daily. Of this, more than 400 were claimed to have been redressed have in fact not been redressed.
In order to make officials accountable, the corporation has been providing an ID and the name and mobile number of the official who will address the issue. Besides this, third party verification has to be done to ensure the complaint has been attended to. This too has proved ineffective and remains on paper as the corporation wants to show that a great many complaints have been addressed.
In March this year, GHMC conducted a study and issued show-cause notices to more than 200 officials who closed the grievances without attending to them. So unmindful of their duties are GHMC officials that they have not been attending the weekly Prajavani on the excuse that they have to attend review meetings and field inspection.
The Prajavani programme, started in 2012, was to resolve grievances on the spot. The heads of departments were to be available to the public from 10 am to 1 pm every Monday. For the past several months neither the GHMC commissioner nor the additional commissioners have been attending.
A senior GHMC official admitted that in order to show that grievances in their respective departments have been attended to, false redressals are being resorted to. He said that the Corporation has been receiving many complaints from citizens through the various platforms including Prajavani. He said that the matter cannot be resolved without field level staff being sincere about resolving the complaints.
