The Hindu 27.03.2013
Send a short message; redress your grievance
For the city’s residents the Coimbatore Corporation has something new to offer – a grievance redress mechanism.
By punching a few keys on their mobile phone, the residents can send their grievance to the civic body, which will address it in a time-bound manner.
Corporation Commissioner G. Latha told The Hindu that with the help of Deputy Commissioner S. Sivarasu and a few other officials, she was in the process of putting in place a mechanism to launch the SMS-based service.
The residents will have to send through short message service their ward number, the street or locality where the problem is and the nature of the problem to the mobile phone number the Corporation will announce.
The Corporation will receive the message in a computer at its head office in Town Hall.
The computer will process the message and send it to the engineer or officer concerned and to her supervisory staff.
Ms. Latha said that she would get a copy of the message.
Based on the message, the officer concerned will act in a time-bound manner and report the same to the superior officers, who will monitor the same.
Time frame
“For every complaint, there will be a timeframe. Those complaints that can be attended to immediately, shall be attended to at the earliest. For those that require planning and allocation of funds, the Corporation will do the needful but again within a timeframe,” she said.
The Corporation already has a grievance redress mechanism in its information centre. City’s residents by dialling 2334455 will be put onto a interactive voice response system and from there to a person who will take down the complaint and pass on the same to the engineer or ward officer concerned for follow up action.
The Corporation launched this facility in June 2011 towards the fag end of Commissioner Anshul Mishra’s tenure. But it did not take off as expected.
Sources in the civic body say that on an average the information centre gets between five and 10 calls a week.
