Amitabh
Shukla | in Oped
A
personal experience of the Modi regime’s excellent public grievance redressal
system
As
the Narendra Modi Government completed two years in office and is now
approaching its mid- term, it will be fair to analyse its omissions and
commissions as is being done extensively. While some will hail the BJP’s
achievements as ‘unprecedented’, others will try to downplay what the
Government has done in the past two years. They may even target it for various
reasons.
Here,
the discussion is limited to only one micro scheme of the Government which
shows how the penetration of information technology has changed the grievance
redressal system in our country. I’m talking about the public grievance portal
of the Union Government — the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and
Monitoring System (CPGRAMS). Some of the cases can be hailed as
‘revolutionary’. My personal experience with the system too reinforced my
belief that indeed, Government departments work and they work very fast. I have
two experiences to share and both are related to the postal department.
In
the first instance, my father, who left for his heavenly abode two and a half
years ago, left a very old post office savings bank account in his files. When
I sent someone on Friday to Bettiah, a small district headquarter in north
Bihar, to the Naya Bazar post office at the end of 2013, they came out with a
plea that there was no nominee in the account and that one has to go through a
lengthy process to claim the amount. Though the amount was only Rs35,000, there
was a sentimental value attached to it as it belonged to my doctor father.
Then,
in December 2015, at my home address in Bettiah, my mother got a registered
post saying that the account of my father had been transferred from Hazaribagh
and it indeed had a nominee — my mother. The letter said that they would
enquire it from Hazaribagh and get the original nominee form there. We thought
that the ordeal was over and soon my mother would get the cheque. However, that
was not to be. After the last post, the postal department simply forgot to
follow it up. The post master would continue to feign ignorance and refuse to
process the matter. I felt it's better to forego the amount instead of putting
someone to so much harassment and make him run from pillar to post for this.
It
was then that someone told me about the public grievances portal —
pgportal.gov.in — and how it is meant exactly for cases like this. I opened it
one fine morning and gave the account details in the complaint section and
wrote a brief description about the problem and the harassment I went through.
It took me all of five minutes to seven minutes to lodge a complaint with my
e-mail ID and mobile number given. Soon after lodging the complaint, I got a
docket number which was to be used for future reference.
I
logged into the portal again using the number sent to my mobile phone and
e-mail after two hours. It had the details and said that the complaint is lying
with the public grievance officer of the postal department, with an office at
Parliament Street, New Delhi. Next day, in the morning, when I again opened the
portal to see the status of the complaint, it had been sent to the public
grievance officer at Patna General Post Office. In the next three hours, the
complaint had reached the Superintendent of the West Champaran postal circle in
whose jurisdiction the account existed. It was actually so fast.
In
the evening, I got a call from the Superintendent of Posts that the matter has
been processed and my mother is welcome to visit the post office the next day
for signature and collecting the cheque which now totaled to Rs39, 480 after
adding the interest. I was elated, the system had actually worked. The cheque
was collected by my mother the next day. For the first time, I saw how this
system cut through all sorts of hierarchies, paper work and obstacles put up by
the babus and delivered to the common man who had hitherto been condemned to
grease the palms of these very babus and treat them as sahibs all these years.
The
second matter also pertained to the postal department. This time, it was the
National Savings Certificate (NSC) of my father. The NSC matured at the end of
March and I was the nominee in these papers. The agent, through whom my father
used to invest in small savings scheme of the post office, got the paperwork
done like depositing the death certificate and forms relating to the claim. He
assured me that my presence was not required to claim the money. But when I was
in Bettiah during the summer vacation, I signed the papers and got it deposited
in the Lal Bazar post office from where the NSC was purchased.
But
the post master of Lal Bazar post office would have none of it. He simply sat
on the papers and did nothing. When I enquired from the agent, he said that the
post master was playing truant. It was then that I rang up the Superintendent
of the West Champaran Postal Circle, Manoj Sharma, who had processed the first
case and who had talked to me regarding it a few days back. He talked to the
Lal Bazar post master and asked me to send a scanned copy of my signature. I
did that. But this post master was taught in the old school of bureaucracy and
kept dilly dallying the payment to me. He consistently claimed that his office
did not have the original NSC papers even though I had personally deposited it
there. I had enough of it. Lodging a complaint with the public grievances
portal was a click away. This time, in three days flat, the cheque was given to
my representative in Bettiah.
CPGRAMS
is the new hope for redressal of any grievance-related either to the Central or
the State Government. While grievances related to departments of Central
Government are handled quite efficiently, those pertaining to the States are
passed on to the respective State Governments. An officer of the Indian Revenue
Service said, “The monitoring of the system is done at the highest level and no
laxity on the part of the officials tolerated. It is a new terror amongst the
lazy officials of the Government”.
As
monitoring is done at various levels, there is an unusual hurry on the part of
the officials to dispose the complaints as everyone would now know at which end
the problem exists. That to me is indeed a revelation and my personal
experience with the CPGRAMS has been a pleasant exercise. (July 1, 2016
