News: MCG portal to cut response time to complaints-28-06-2021
Redressal of complaints pertaining to civic issues is set to get faster for Gurugram residents, with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) planning to take the entire process online and create a portal for the same. The online portal will allow residents to file complaints and help with scheduling appointments with senior officials, including the MCG commissioner, according to a release issued by the civic body on Monday.
Redressal of complaints pertaining to civic issues is set to get faster for Gurugram residents, with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) planning to take the entire process online and create a portal for the same. The online portal will allow residents to file complaints and help with scheduling appointments with senior officials, including the MCG commissioner, according to a release issued by the civic body on Monday.
The MCG commissioner, Mukesh Kumar Ahuja, has proposed the name of MCGsamadhan.com for the same.
“The portal is being developed in a simple manner. Citizens will have to fill the column of his or her name, address, mobile number, e-mail and write the reason for requesting a meeting. The time of meeting with me (MCG commissioner) will be fixed through the portal and the complaint received will be forwarded to the officer concerned. Depending on the severity of the issue, category wise, three, five or seven days will be fixed for resolution of the complaint,” said Ahuja.
The MCG commissioner held a meeting with the IT wing officials at the civic body’s Sector 34 office on Monday in this regard, to provide necessary guidelines and suggestions for creating the portal. In addition, MCG officials also revealed that a dashboard is being prepared to monitor all civic works taken up by the MCG.
A senior MCG official who attended the meeting, requesting anonymity, said, “The special feature of this portal will be that the complaint will be sent directly to the officer concerned resolving the grievance and a copy of it will be forwarded to the monitoring officer. For example, if a complaint is related to property tax, it will be directly forwarded by the MCG commissioner to the taxation officer concerned. This will eliminate various stages of bureaucratic paperwork.”
Currently, if a complaint related to taxation is sent to the MCG commissioner, it is passed on to the additional municipal commissioner and subsequently, down the ladder to the joint commissioner, zonal taxation officer (ZTO), and finally, the taxation officer in charge of the task concerned. Due to the different stages involved, it can take up to a month for the complaint to reach the official concerned for resolution of the problem.
According to MCG officials, the portal is being prepared by the civic body’s IT wing and it will be accessible to the general public soon after it is finalised. It was informed in the meeting that after the introduction of this system, any citizen will be able to meet the MCG commissioner through this online medium, at the appointed time.
Officials said the if a complaint is not resolved within the stipulated time, it will be automatically forwarded to the pending section, following which the officials concerned would be asked for an explanation for the delay.
The MCG official cited above said that it will be the responsibility of the officer concerned to send an action-taken report, after resolving the complaint within the stipulated time, to the supervisory officer concerned. All the steps will have a digital record in the portal. Apart from this, the records of those who meet with the MCG commissioner will also be maintained.
Besides developing the portal, MCG is also in the process of developing a dashboard to monitor civic projects.
According to MCG officials, a dashboard is being created by the IT wing in such a manner that any development work being done by MCG can be monitored by the MCG commissioner through the same. “On this dashboard, the junior engineer concerned will have to upload the progress of the works going on in his or her area with photos every 15 days. It will be the responsibility of the assistant engineer (AE) to prepare a flow chart for each project. The AE will have to monitor if the works are going on as per the schedule, and check if their quality is of a high standard,” said SS Rohilla, public relations officer, MCG.
MCG officials said that in the first phase, the engineering wing will be linked to the dashboard and subsequently, other branches will also be included.
