Almost one-and-a-half years after taking charge as Raichur in-charge Minister, Dr. Sharanprakash Patil held a day-long Jana Samparka Sabhe at the Zilla Panchayat Auditorium here on Thursday.
The event evoked a good response with nearly 70 applications submitted beforehand and people from across the district arriving to meet the Minister, hoping he would resolve their problems that ranged from individual grievances to public issues.
In most cases, the Minister was shocked to know how easily solvable problems had dragged on for years owing largely to the negligence of officials.
Time-bound target
The Minister reprimanded officials for almost each grievance raised in the meeting and set a time-bound target to resolve them.
A family from Raichur told the Minister that the issuance of BPL card to his family was being unnecessarily postponed time and again for the last several months despite fulfilling all the requirements including submission of biometrics.
Explanation
The explanation from Mr. Pashupathi, Deputy Director of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs, revealed that around 4,000 such families in the district were not yet provided with the ration cards, though the cards were printed and ready to be issued, because of lack of infrastructure and manpower for the final stage of biometrics matching.
The annoyed Minister directed the officer to make arrangements in coordination with the Deputy Commissioner and issue all the printed cards within a week.
The widespread mismanagement of high-voltage electric lines by the Gulbarga Electricity Supply Company Limited (Gescom) popped up when a villager complained that one of his family members was electrocuted in the electric field beneath a high-voltage transmission line that was too close to earth.
He said that the problem was not fixed even six months after it claimed a life. Raichur MLA Shivaraj Patil added some more such instances in the city, prompting the Minister to castigate Gescom engineers for their “utter negligence” in handling the power lines that were posing serious hazards. He ordered them to fix problem within three days. The parents of a nine-year-old girl, who was raped and murdered in September last year, complained that they had not yet received any compensation from the government. Representatives of slum dwellers, pourakarmikas, political party activists and functionaries of civil society organisations presented the grievances of the public.
