The Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh chaired a review meeting with the senior officers of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Grievances (DARPG), Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, here today. During the meeting, he discussed various ongoing and upcoming activities of the Department.Dr Jitendra Singh expressed happiness over the fact that the average response time to the grievances by the department has been reduced, e.g. it Department of Revenue, it has reduced from 108 days in 2014 to 25 days this year and similarly in Department of Telecom, it has reduced from 19 days in 2014 to 12 days this year. He also said that the number of grievances lodged by the people have increased 7 fold since 2014, from about 2 lakh grievances to about 14 lakh this year. This is due to the prompt response given by the Department to their grievances, he added. The Minister also expressed satisfaction that now about 99% grievances are being disposed by the Department now.
The Minister said that the Department has adopted the practice of calling up the complainants chosen on random basis, who had registered their grievances in the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG). The Minister himself has called the complainants five times. The senior officers and the representatives of the Grievance Cell also make calls to the complainants to take feedback on their satisfaction level. He said that there is a difference between the ‘disposal’ and ‘redressal’ of the grievance and the DARPG will launch an awareness campaign on social media about disposal of public grievances.Dr Jitendra Singh said that the DARPG is writing letters to the Chief Secretaries of the states to link their Grievance Cells to the CPGRAMS Portal of the Union Government. It will bring uniformity and ease of disposal, the Minister said. It will also provide a comprehensive view of the grievances. Dr Jitendra Singh said that these initiatives are in uniformity with the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s vision of transparency, accountability and citizen-centricity. The Minister appealed to the states to make efforts to live up to the Prime Minister’s vision. The Minister also said that a national workshop on Implementation of Right to Services was held in Jammu and was attended by senior officers from 17 States/UTs.During the meeting, it was also informed that the Department will soon launch a dashboard for the ministries/departments, where they can identify the focus areas and root cause of the grievances related to their respective ministries/departments. A grievance analysis study was conducted earlier for top 20 Ministries/Departments, receiving large number of grievances. A Project Management Unit (PMU) has been set up in the DARPG for monitoring the reforms being undertaken by these Ministries/Departments.The DARPG has also launched Twitter Sewa on February 04, 2017, for facilitating people to tweet on pending Grievances and also on other issues relating to this Department. It was also discussed that a new Mobile App with more user friendly features has been developed and has been integrated with the Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance (UM