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.