With the ever-increasing Internet penetration after the high-speed mobile Internet coming in handy for the public, reaching out to the lakhs of active citizens on the social media platforms became essential for government organisations.
The district administration, the Vijayawada Municipal Corporation and the City Police are taking baby steps on popular social media platforms Facebook and Twitter to create digital communication and grievance redressal channels.
The offices are going all out to publicise their achievements, government schemes, awareness programmes and others along with taking up grievances posted by the social media users.
All the three offices have the official (not verified) social media handles that are growing big in terms of follower count.
The district administration led by the the Collector has become the most active public office on Twitter where its handle ‘Collector & District Magistrate-Krishna’ updates every activity being tracked and attended by Collector B. Lakshmikantham. The handle, having about 1,400 followers, also live-streams most of the government programmes on a daily basis. It also has more than 5,000 followers on Facebook.
The official Twitter handle of the VMC has become a quick service delivery and response platform as the problems of taxpayers and citizens are being addressed in real time.
Quick response
In one such incident, a taxpayer Thota Sudha requested the VMC to address the grievance she had already mentioned almost eight months ago at the grievance cell, on Twitter on December 29.
In a few hours, theVMC responded to her Tweet and provided the required details. It has over 1,300 followers on Twitter and 4,900 followers of Facebook.
“The civic chief goes through the accounts every day and picks up complaints and forwards them to the officials concerned. Also, an administrator constantly watches out user complaints besides providing necessary updates for public,” said an official of VMC.
Cops a step ahead
The city police are a step ahead of the rest in terms of popularity on Facebook, where more than 12,000 people follow its page.
“Recently, we became active on social media reaching out to the public on various platforms. The response was good and productive. Every day we receive complaints, suggestions and inputs from genuine users and all of them are passed on to respective ACPs for action and higher ups for supervision,” ACP (North) K. Sravani, who looks after the social media initiatives, told The Hindu .
“There is no scope for pranks on social media as the user identity can be found by us. We also inform the users after their suggestions are implemented,” Ms. Sravani said.
The city police’s accounts on both the platforms are constantly educating citizens of various services.
One of them was the recently launched Know Your Police Station, a digital campaign through which all the details of a police station and its head are posted online.
