Info watchdog for faster redressal

In a recent order, Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi asked the Delhi government to tell the Right To Information (RTI) applicant Ram Bhaj the time frame within which the public grievances are redressed.

Updated on: Apr 26, 2010, 24:26:47 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Bureaucrats will now be made more accountable to citizens.

The transparency watchdog Central Information Commission in its orders has asked the government to tell people in how much time their grievances will be redressed. In several cases, citizens have to wait endlessly or visit government offices several times before their complaints are redressed.

In a recent order, Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi asked the Delhi government to tell the Right To Information (RTI) applicant Ram Bhaj the time frame within which the public grievances are redressed.

Bhaj, secretary of a Resident Welfare Association, had asked whether Delhi government had implemented the guidelines of Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances which stipulated a time frame within for response to people’s grievances.

According to Bhaj, the time period for interim response was three days and redressal maximum of 30 days but the state government had failed to notify the guidelines.

The department’s guidelines also state that action should be taken against officials who fail to redress citizens grievances within a limited time frame and has asked governments to stipulate two hours on every Wednesday to hearing public complaints.

But, Bhaj’s RTI application on number of grievances related to his locality Raja Garden in west Delhi did not evoke satisfactory response from the Delhi government.

While allowing his second appeal, Gandhi said the information related to whether the guidelines had been notified or not should be provided to Bhaj.

The CIC in many cases found that citizens tried to redress their grievance through RTI mode, as the government fail to respond in time.

In one such case, the CIC observed that the government should ensure that citizens can monitor their complaints on-line. “RTI is for transparency in public interest but it was being used extensively for individual’s grievance redressal,” Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah said in an order.

To this, the administrative reforms department told CIC that it had started an online complaint monitoring system for 20 central government ministries, which eventually would cover the central government.

The service is available through the website pgportal.nic.in, which has online monitotring for both citizens and government employees.

Earlier, the Rashtrapati Bhawan had introduced an online monitoring system for grievances submitted to the president. Through this system, the complaint could track his application and know its status.

Admitting that grievance redressal was poor in the government, the Planning Commission, in its mid-term appraisal, had recommended that timely service to citizens and their grievance redressal should be mandated through a law.

It also said that the law should prescribe punishment for an official who fails to comply with the time limit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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