Failure of Online Public Complaint Filing Systems in India
Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System
Since the grievances of citizens are not addressed properly, they are left with no other option but to go to courts.
By Rakesh Raman
While Indian bureaucrats are supposed to be civil servants, they behave like uncivil masters. With their unruly behavior, these bureaucrats simply ignore public grievances that they receive through post or through the online complaint filing systems.
As a journalist and social activist, I file dozens of complaints through government’s online interfaces. But the careless government officials simply close the cases that I file by giving some perfunctory response or by sending my complaint to some other random department. In the past couple of years, they could not resolve even a single complaint that I have filed.
Worse, after arbitrarily closing an unresolved case, the dishonest government officials show it as a resolved case in their records and the government shamelessly claims that the case is resolved.
On the Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) of the Government of India, for example, the government shows that it had received 14,03,324 complaints as on 29.09.2019 and disposed of 12,33,460 of them. This is an utter falsehood. The government has not addressed even a fraction of the complaints that it received.
The same type of fraud is happening on the other online complaint filing and monitoring systems of the government while there is no accountability for the government officials for their dereliction of duty. As they are extremely careless, some of the officials do not even write their names, designation, and contact details while closing the cases. You can click here to see an example.
Since the grievances of citizens are not addressed properly, they are left with no other option but to go to courts. But most of them do not get justice in courts which are buried under millions of cases that are pending. As administration has collapsed and courts give haphazard judgments, the lawlessness is increasing rapidly in India.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society. He also creates and publishes a number of digital publications on different subjects.
