On Thursday, after reading in newspapers that the Coimbatore Corporation had launched a short message service (SMS)-based grievance redress system, Maniakarampalayam resident S. Nallasivam sent a message to 92822 02422.
He had mentioned his ward number, area and the street name to say that the light at the lamp post near his house was faulty.
The Coimbatore Corporation, which received the message, forwarded the same to the to the ward engineer concerned. The engineer by Friday morning had attended to the complaint.
Kannappan Salai Third Street resident D. Nandhakumar sent a message on Friday morning to the Coimbatore Corporation.
His grievance had to do with sewage stagnation in his area, which was a part of Ward 100.
The Corporation forwarded his message to the ward engineer concerned, who had attended to the complaint within a couple of hours by sending a lorry to pump out the drainage and clean the locality.
The two are among the hundreds of complaints the Corporation has started attending to on a priority basis after Mayor S.M. Velusamy and Commissioner G. Latha launched the SMS-based grievance system on Tuesday last.
Good response
Ms. Latha said that the response had been so good that the civic body was flooded with messages. By Friday afternoon her count stood at a little over 1,000 messages.
The Corporation had evolved a mechanism wherein it treated every complaint it received as a file. The information technology or the Information Centre personnel handling SMS-based grievance redress system forwarded the SMSes to the officials as e-mails. The engineers would act on them and then post updates.
If the engineers or sanitary officers or officials had redressed the grievances, the Corporation would close the files and the staff handling grievance redress system would send the completion messages to the complainants.
If not, the Corporation would keep open the files but send to the senders the status updates on what action the officers had initiated.
Commissioner Ms. Latha said that the civic body was still fine tuning the redress system in that it was attempting automation at every level and that senior officials were able to monitor the mechanism.
The officials would immediately redress those complaints that could be easily attended to. For those that involved planning or budgeting, they would initiate the process at the earliest.
Objective
The objective behind the purpose was to assure the people that the Corporation was responsive to their grievances.
Resident Mr. Nallasivam said that by launching the services, residents like him were relieved in that they could just send the message and wait for the work to be completed, without having to worry about issues like to who to contact to get the grievance redressed and going to the civic body.
