Delhi: Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh today presented Excellence awards for Grievance disposal to the different Ministries and Departments of Government of India, which had registered meritorious performance in dealing with public grievances.
The Awards have been introduced by the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances (ARPG) under the union Ministry of Personnel and are given depending upon the performance in a given quarter of the year. The parameters for evaluating the performance are (a) total number of grievances disposed during the period (b) percentage reduction in the number of grievances pending for more than one year (c) number of disposal of grievances which had been pending for more than six months and (d) feedback received on grievance portal from complainants whose grievances have been disposed and closed.
Based on this criteria, Certificates of Appreciation based on performance and excellence for the last two quarters of the year 2017 were awarded to the Union Ministry of New & Renewable Energy, Department of Land Resources, Union Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Department of Justice, Department of Financial Services and Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT). The certificates for different award winning Ministries and Departments were presented by the Minister to the officers of the concerned Ministries and Departments.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Jitendra Singh congratulated the award winners and said that when this government came to power in 2014, the Grievance Cell was virtually inactive but, today, it is a vibrant organ of the Ministry of Personnel and is equipped with hi-tech Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) portal, Dashboard and real-time Mobile apps for any citizen to register his grievance from anywhere and any time. The result of this, he said, is that in 2014, the number of grievances per year was about 2 lakh, which has now increased to about 16 lakh per year because of the prompt and sensitive response by the officials running the Grievance Cell.
Dr Jitendra Singh called upon the State Governments to upgrade their Grievance Cells also and suggested that they could link State-level Grievance Cells with the CPGRAMS Grievance Cell in order to coordinate with the Department of ARPG at the Centre. He said, while the Grievance Cell in Government of India is working on real-time basis, he sometimes feels disappointed to note that in some States, the Grievance Cell website or portal is not visited by the concerned officials for several weeks or even months together.