The government, on the instructions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has further reduced the maximum time needed for addressing a grievance from a citizen to 21 days, down from 60 days during the UPA tenure. News18 has a copy of the government’s directive to all secretaries.
So far, the deadline for addressing a public grievance was 30 days. In 2020, the Modi government reduced the timeline to 45 days, and to 30 days in 2022. The new deadline of 21 days now brings the timeline to almost one-third of what it was 10 years ago. The government receives over 30 lakh public grievances each year on the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS).
“The 10-step reforms initiated in CPGRAMS have significantly brought down the average resolution time. Keeping this in view, the maximum redressal time advised by DARPG for cases in CPGRAMS is further reduced to 21 days,” the government directive says. This year, so far, the Centre has been able to dispose of a grievance in an average of just 13 days, News18 has learnt.
The new directive dated August 23 adds that this follows a review after the directions of the prime minister during his interaction with the secretaries on June 29 to make existing processes more sensitive, accessible and meaningful to citizens. In July 2024, for the 25th month in a row, the monthly disposal crossed one lakh cases in the Central Secretariat. The pendency has decreased in the Central Secretariat to 66,060 grievances, of which 69 per cent of the grievances have been pending for less than 30 days, officials said.
More Directives
Grievances shall be redressed under ‘whole of the government approach’, the new directives say. “This means that in no case grievance shall be closed by stating ‘Does not pertain to this Ministry/ Department/Office’ or its equivalent language. Efforts shall be made to transfer the same to the right authority if the subject of the grievance does not pertain to the receiving Ministry,” the directives say.
Also, no grievance will be closed if additional documents are not available. “There is an existing mechanism in CPGRAMS to ask additional documentation from the citizen…Grievance officers may also call the citizen and get the additional papers, if needed,” the directives have mentioned.
The Centre has also asked for an integrated user-friendly grievance filing platform. Currently, CPGRAMS is the common open platform for registration of complains by citizens on any issue against any public authority in Union government or states/UT. But ministries and departments, apart from states, also have their own public grievance platforms for services rendered by them.
“Integration of all these platforms is important to provide citizen a single window experience and wider accessibility to various PG platforms. This will help deduplication and save time and efforts of officials from resolving same grievances on multiple portals. Hence, integration of all PG portals of central government offices and state/ UTs through API shall be a priority to optimise operational efficiency of all PG portals,” the new directives say.
The government has also advised appointing a dedicated nodal officer with independent charge on sufficient rank so as to ensure timely and qualitative disposal of public grievances. A dedicated grievance cell shall also be set up in every ministry. On the resolution of a grievance, an SMS/email is sent on the registered mobile number and email address of the citizen.
“If the citizen is not satisfied with the resolution, they can provide feedback on the portal and raise appeal on the portal itself. DARPG has also set up a call centre to survey the citizen response on disposal of grievances,” the directive says.
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