Almost one-and-a-half years after taking charge as Raichur In-charge Minister, Dr. Sharan Prakash Patil held a day-long ‘Jan Samparka Sabhe’ at the Zilla Panchayat Auditorium here on Thursday.
The event evoked good response with nearly 70 applications submitted beforehand and people from across the district arriving to meet the minister hoping resolutions of their problems that ranged from individual grievances to the public issues.
In most of the cases, the minister was shocked to know easily solvable problems being dragged for years owing to negligence and carelessness of officials. The minister reprimanded officials on almost each grievance that the people raised in the meeting and set a time-bound target to resolve them.
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A family from Raichur city told the minister that the issuance of BPL card to his family was being unnecessarily postponed for the last several months despite fulfilling all the requirements including submission of biometrics. The explanation from Mr. Pashupathi, Deputy Director of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs, revealed that around 4000 such families in the district were not yet provided with ration cards, though the cards are already printed and ready to be issued, because of lack of infrastructure and manpower for final stage of biometrics-matching. Enraged, the Minister directed the officer to make arrangements in coordination with Deputy Commissioner and issue all the printed cards within a week to the concerned families.
In another case, parents of a nine-year-old girl, who was raped and murdered in September last year, said that they were yet to receive compensation from the government. The Minister asked the DC to look into the matter and resolve it at the earliest possible.
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 by a field of high voltage transmission line that was too close to earth. He said that the problem was not fixed, six months after it claimed a life. Raichur MLA, Dr. Shivaraj Patil added some more such instances in the city prompting the Minister to castigate the Gescom engineers for their “utter negligence” in handling the high-voltage power lines that were posing serious hazards and ordered them to fix them within three days.
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Representatives of slum dwellers, pourakarmikas, political party activists and functionaries of civil society organisations presented the grievances of general public and received redressal assurances from the Minister.
Deputy Commissioner, Sasikanth S. Senthil, Chief Executive Officer, Vasireddi Vijaya Jyothsna, Tungabhadra Command Area Development Authority Chairman, A. Vasanth Kumar and others were present.