Hyderabad: The GHMC has closed nearly 25,000 complaints in a span of 60 days though residents say these have not been addressed. The corporation, in its report, stated that it has closed 24,849 grievances in April and May, 5,080 are pending, 1,177 have been re-opened and 575 are under process.
The centralised grievance redressal system receives about 1,000 grievances daily basis. Sources claimed more than 600 are fake or wrong when checked on the ground.
In order make officials accountable, the corporation provides the name and mobile number of the official who will address the issue. Besides, a third party verification has to be done to ensure redressal. This has remained on paper and the corporation is not attending to the issue. In order to increase the number of redressals and impress their higher authorities that they have been closing the complaint.
The civic body in March last year conducted a study and issued show cause notices to more than 200 officials who closed grievances without attending to them. Another area of concern is that the authorities at the headquarters have been not attending the weekly Prajavani in the name of review meetings and field level inspections.
The Prajavani programme which was started during 2012 aims at resolving grievances on the spot where the head of the departments are available from 10 am to 1 pm every Monday. But for several months, neither the GHMC commissioner nor the additional commissioners have been attending the programme. Asked about redressals, a senior official said that officials are in a hurry to clear grievances so they indulge in fake redressals. He said that the corporation has been receiving multiple complaints from citizens. In order to curb fake redressals by civic body staff, the corporation has now decided to double check the complaint and give detailed information on a daily basis to the citizen who registered the complaint.
He said that civic body has also instructed GHMC officials to collect evidence like photographs from the spots (in cases of road damage, sanitation works) after resolving the complaint and this will be sent to the citizens.
“In addition, the GHMC CGRS wing will call citizens on their mobile numbers to ensure that the complaint has been resolved,” he added. However, highly placed sources claim that the double checking mechanism has been tampered with by lower rung officials.
