Reduce pendency of public grievances, official work: Centre to secretaries

In a move aimed at furthering ease of governance, the Centre has asked secretaries of all its departments to reduce pendency of public grievances and government works to the minimum.

It has also asked them to devote at least three hours a week for ensuring that pendency of work is at its lowest level.

Pendency of work includes references from members of Parliament, parliamentary assurances, inter-ministerial and state government references, files to be weeded out by them, public grievances and their appeals, and pending swachhata campaign sites where cleanliness activities need to be intensified and office space freed from unwanted material or scrap.

The move is inspired by the success of the country's largest cleanliness drive, spearheaded by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), undertaken in October last year.

"Government has decided to institutionalise the special campaign 2.0 activities of 'swachhata' and reduce pendency on a continuing basis with monthly monitoring of activities. This is being done to bring pending matters to minimum in the government," DARPG Secretary V Srinivas told PTI.

The "special campaign 2.0" was implemented in 1.01 lakh central government offices from October 2 to October 31 last year.

During the campaign, 89.5 lakh square feet of office space was freed and Rs 370 crore of revenue was earned, Srinivas said.

He said pendency levels were significantly reduced during the campaign with five lakh public grievance cases being redressed and 37 lakh files being weeded out.

The online Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) allows people to raise complaints against central and state government departments.

Till November 30 last year, 18,19,104 grievances were received by all ministries and departments of which 15,68,097 were redressed, according to official data.

The time limit for redressing public grievances raised on CPGRAMS is a maximum of 30 days.

Srinivas had recently issued an office memorandum to the secretaries of all the central government departments and asked them to ensure that the cleanliness campaign continues to be implemented in their outstation offices and autonomous organisations, subordinate or attached offices.

"It has been decided that as a sequel to the month-long special campaign 2.0 for the disposal of pending matters conducted from 2nd October, 2022, to 31st October, 2022... actions may be taken up by ministries or departments on a regular basis in order to keep the pendency's to minimum possible," he said in the latest missive citing the plan of action.

The ministries and departments can dedicate three hours every week for continuation of activities related to the special campaign 2.0, said Srinivas, a 1989-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the Rajasthan cadre.

He said the secretaries would monitor progress of this initiative on a monthly basis.

Nodal officers have been asked to upload data of the activities undertaken by the ministries concerned on a dedicated portal by the first Monday of every month.