Indian Express 17.12.2009
Punjab gets country’s first toll-free helpline to register water supply complaints
The inhabitants of 12,102 villages in Punjab will no longer have to waste time by visiting the complaint centre to register their grievances about water supply.
Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal launched the country’s first-of-its-kind toll free telephone service — 1800-180-2468 — to register, redress and report back to the caller, the complaints of rural water supply from across the state, in Mohali on Wednesday. Touted as one of the major outcomes of the administrative reforms initiated by Sukhbir to empower citizens to monitor the quality of public services, the round-the-clock ‘Shikayat Nivaran Kendra’ would register and redress the complaints pertaining to not only erratic water supply but also against the staff of the Rural Water Supply department.Addressing the inaugural ceremony at the waterworks in Phase II here, the Deputy CM said his government was committed to provide potable drinking water to every home of Punjab by March 2012 and Rs 471 crore was being spent to augment the water supply to over 2,000 villages in the first phase. Sukhbir said with the launch of the new service, Punjab would be able to monitor the water supply in all remote villages from a single centralised location.
All calls made from any location in Punjab will land at the centralised round-the-clock call centre in Mohali.
An advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system would help customers easily retrieve the required information, lodge complaints and place other customer service requests at the call centre. A caller would be able to speak to the operator between 6 am to 10 pm while complaints could be registered anytime through the IVR system.
All complaints would be forwarded to the officials concerned, who would report back to complaint centre to further update the complainant.The Deputy CM would get a monthly audit of this system, especially on the areas from where maximum complaints are generated, from an international auditing agency to check the effectiveness of the system.
“My dream is to replicate this consumer satisfaction model in every public service department of the state,” Sukhbir asserted. Besides checking absenteeism among lower ranks of employees in remote villages and ensuing time-bound delivery of services, Sukhbir said, the scheme would enable him to assess the performance of the department on a daily basis.It was also announced to recruit 80 junior engineers and 50 SDOs in the Rural Water Supply department. Earlier, P S Aujla, secretary, Rural Water Supply, Punjab, gave a presentation on the supervisory control and data acquisition system under the new scheme.
