The Citizen Service Centres and mobile apps are turning out to be the most effective means for citizens in 72 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) to register their complaints, get them redressed or seek any of the municipal services.
Thanks to the Citizen Services Monitoring System launched by the Department of Municipal Administration & Urban Development last year, close to 1.18 lakh civic complaints have been registered across the municipal bodies in the past eight months.
Of these, the most number of complaints registered or services sought have been through the Citizen Service Centres (CSCs) opened in all the ULBs. A total of 72,745 complaints have been registered through CSCs, followed by 22,279 complaints obtained through the mobile app – Citizen Buddy. Incidentally, 74,219 persons have downloaded the mobile app that helps access 23 municipal services that are being offered, said senior municipal officials.
The highest number of grievances, a total of 10,000 applications, pertains to birth certificates – either issuance, inclusion of names, corrections or non-availability. Property tax assessments, water connections, mutations, trade licences, death certificates and the likes follow suit, indicating that these are the services for which citizens run around municipal offices.
Accepting the same, senior officials point out that taking the services online have given citizens access to them round the clock, helping them receive messages and notifications through the mobile app and web, letting them know the status of their respective grievances.
“Earlier, citizens living in ULBs had no mechanism to get their complaints redressed and none of the municipal bodies had any means to lodge the grievance, to check for veracity and whether the problem has been addressed to at all,” pointed out senior officials, pleading anonymity. “Online services are helping us keep track of the disposal process and the number of grievances being registered, which was not available to us earlier,” they said and claimed to have disposed off about one lakh applications within the stipulated time and that the rest were in various stages of disposal.
