Bengaluru: City residents who approach the BBMP’s public complaint forum are a disgruntled lot. They claim the complaints registered are not resolved until they persist for a period of time.
They are unhappy with BBMP’s online forum Sahaya and its mobile app Fix My Street, which is meant for the public to register complaints regarding civic issues. The residents claim that registering any complaint on Sahaya or Fix My Street is of no use, as no official responds to it.
Manoj Gowda, a social media manager in a event management company, recently lodged a complaint of water logging in front of his house during a downpour that happened a couple of days ago.
“I tried calling the jurisdictional officials from BBMP, but in vain. They were not answering the calls and at times their phones were switched off. Later, I registered a complaint on Sahaya and even Fix My Street and got an acknowledgement number, but after that there is no response. I tried raising the issue but it was of no use. Only after making several trips to the local BBMP office, the officials came and directed the workers to clear the drain,” Gowda said.
He further added that these help lines or online complaint forum is useless if no action is taken. “Our city is known to be developing at rapid pace and it is high time that the BBMP gets an effective complaint cell in place. We need a platform where our complaints are resolved immediately without hassles. During the monsoon season, we need the BBMP to be effective,” Gowda mentioned.
Several of them mentioned that they post their complaints on the BBMP’s commissioner Twitter handle only to get the same reply by assigning a docket number. After which there is no action against except in rare cases.
Muniraju Swamy, a landscape artist also tried registering complaint about stray dogs near his residence in Ejipura, but no action was taken and yet the complaint was closed.
“After it was reported that stray dogs were attacking the public, I found that there were so many dogs in our area and registered a complaint on the Sahaya, till now no action has been taken. I tried calling the officials but they never respond. Such is the state of our civic agency. Their call centre records the complaints, but no action is taken. It is time a city like Benagluru developed a state of art mechanism to address civic issues,” Swamy said.
When contacted a senior officer in BBMP managing the complaint cell said, “We get numerous complaints and will take at least a day or two to look into it. We first need to inspect and assign the work to the department concerned and only then the work will be carried out. We agree at times, we take longer time to resolve the complaint and this is due to shortage of manpower. But there are plans to upgrade the existing complaint forum.”
