The Indian Express 14.09.2009
Soon, you can just dial to get civic problems solved
Instead of the usual running from pillar to post to follow up their civic complaints, citizens living in the jurisdiction of the Pune Municipal Corporation will now have at their disposal a grievance call centre that promises to take up their problems earnestly.
The PMC has decided start a call centre service for registering complaints and providing updates on the status of each application. It is likely to start in less than a month.
As part of the Grievance Redressal System (GRS), the civic administration has put in the facility of collecting applications at ward offices and at its main building in Shivajinagar area. In addition, the complaints can also be filed online through the facility available on the official website of the PMC.
“Not everyone is internet savvy or have continuous access to internet. There are very few complaints registered online and most are still filed in the PMC offices,” Rajendra Erande, in-charge of the PMC IT department, said. He said the present facility does not provide updates of the status of the application and citizens have to make rounds of the departments.
Many citizens still continue to either call up or personally visit civic offices to file complaints, Erande said.
“The entire process leads to wastage of time and energy of citizens as well as the civic officers.” To speed up the redressal system, Erande said the PMC has decided to make available round-the-clock call centre service wherein the citizens can call and register their complaint.
“The complaints would be either manually entered in the computerised grievance redressal system or automatically through voice operating system. Citizens can check the status of their complaints through the online service or through the call centre,” he said adding discussions are on for setting up the call centre on PPP basis.
The computerised system will also bring in more accountability as senior officers would continuously monitor the action taken on each complaint, Erande said. Amit Kadam of Perstistent Systems said the PMC website will soon be made more active by addition of new features.
“Work to upgrade the PMC website is on. Citizens can get birth, death and marriage certificates through internet. Also, the property tax facility that had been facing technical problems will be fully operational for online payment,” he said.
