Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has devised a method of surprise checks to ensure that officials do not brush aside genuine public complaints by labeling them as “not resolvable”.

Suspecting official laxity for delays in resolving public complaints, the Chief Minister has ordered a special pan-department review of grievances marked as “not resolvable” by officials.

The focus of the review would be on how many grievances out of the total number received “have exceeded the time limit”.

If the percentage of resolved grievances  is low “the department needs to explain why this percentage is low and what steps the department intends to take to improve the situation in a defined time frame”, according to a note issued to all departments.

In the review meetings proposed by Kejriwal, the head of a department would have to tell whether his or her subordinates have correctly marked a particular complaint as “non resolvable” before deciding to stop pursuing it.

The initiative, which is a part of the Public Grievance Management System (PGMS), is aimed at prompting department heads to improve their monitoring of resolution of complaints received in the department, with special focus on ensuring that the subordinates do not use frivolous reasons to keep complaints pending.

The government is also pressing the officials to switch to a mechanism in which each complaint received under the PGMS is further subcategories for future review.
 
Systemic decisions
Chief Minister’s Principal Secretary Rajendra Kumar has also advised all departments that: “The PGMS has functionality in which the grievances assigned to a particular department can be further sub-categorised. Most of the departments have not worked on this functionality, which is very useful for later analysis of the problems and taking systemic decisions on resolution of such grievances.”

Kejriwal’s office has also alerted all HoDs that they would be required to come up with the list of further sub-categorisation of the grievances relating to them and their categorisation would be approved in the review meeting.

As per the delivery of service to citizen legislation, awaiting Home Ministry’s nod, the AAP government has set timelines for attending to each complaint received under the PGMS.

All non-graft related complaints have to be resolved within 30 days.

Some emergent issues have a timeline of two-three days.

Sources said it had been observed in PGMS review meetings that lax officials tend to dismiss a number of complaints as “not resolvable” even in cases where there are clear visible means to offer.

The complaints received under the PGMS are sorted and only genuince complaints are attended to by the departments. Most other applications are ignored as these are in the form of suggestion or request or issues beyond the purview of the Delhi government.