A peek inside the heart of Delhi’s doorstep delivery scheme

It is 1.50pm, ten minutes before the end of lunch time, and the parking bay of building A-23 in Noida’s Sector-2 is buzzing with hushed chatter. Some of the 70 youngsters present there hurriedly eat lunch from tiffin boxes, carefully placed over car bonnets and motorcycle seats in the parking area.

A few others are spotted using the 30-minute lunch time to discuss the plot of a latest Bollywood movie, often breaking into laughter at the misadventures of the protagonist.

At first glance, one can easily assume the scene to be another one of the many coaching institutes that dot the area, till you spot a white board placed near the entrance which reads ‘walk-in interviews’ for jobs at a call centre. The building, tucked in a corner of a lane, hidden among commercial and residential structures in the area, is from where the ‘backend team’ of Delhi government’s doorstep delivery of services scheme operates.

Launched on September 10, the scheme offers 40 public services — including the issuance and renewal of driving licences, registration of marriages, new water connections, birth, death and caste certificates — to residents who dial the helpline number 1076. Once a request is registered and an appointment booked, a facilitator, ‘mobile sahayak’, visits the applicant’s residence to collect documents and fill their forms online. Till date, the Delhi government has deployed 300 such sahayaks, who visit 8-10 houses on an average daily.

“Every single call made for the DSD (doorstep delivery) service is answered by customer care executives sitting in this Noida office. There are three shifts in total that keeps this 24x7 service running. However, we keep the maximum number of executives (180) for the 9-6 pm shift as most calls come in during this period,” said Gopal Mohan, advisor to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and the brainchild behind the scheme, as he climbs a flight of stairs to a room on the third floor of the building.

Mohan then enters an air-conditioned room which has the words ‘transport department’ pasted on its blue walls. The tiny room had about five rows of computers squeezed into it. Neha Giri, 19, is sitting behind one of these computers looking perplexed as she politely tries explaining to a caller that reducing an inflated electricity bill was not covered under the scheme.

“Sir, I am telling you again that we cannot do anything about this issue,” she says in her headset. The mentor in the room spots her confused look and prompts her to ask the caller to contact the concerned Discom instead.

“Calls related to transport services are supposed to come here. But sometimes when other lines are busy, we have to take calls of other departments too,” Neha says after completing her 20th call of the day.

After completing her Class 12 from her hometown in Bihar, Neha came to Delhi to take coaching for medical exams. “A friend told me about this job and I wanted to give it a try. We just had to bring our resume and give an interview. They asked me if I could use a computer. We had two days of training where they taught us to use the software. Now, I have completed 10 days on this job so far and they have promised me a salary of Rs 8,000 a month,” she said.

From 25,000 calls it received on day one of the scheme, the number of calls for the service has now come down to a steady 14,000 per day, government data states. Varun, the manager of the DSD call centre, said executives now attend 30-40 calls a day.

“We operate from only four rooms in this building. The entire doorstep project runs because of these youngsters. The age of employees, both of executives and sahayaks, is between 18 and 30 years. They are mostly graduates or Class 12 pass,” he said.

For Deepak Mishra (28), working for the DSD service is ‘like working for the Delhi government’. “All my life I have been in Allahabad. This was my only chance to get into a metro city. I get paid Rs 11,000 here and tell my friends that I work for the government. Before this, I used to be a supervisor at an Allahabad waste processing plant,” he said.

While they are allowed to be bilingual in their calls, Mishra added they have to keep a watch on their telephone etiquettes as a separate quality team randomly picks five calls per day for monitoring. “To ensure quality of every call, we have one mentor per 10 operators and one team leader per 40 operators. We have nearly 500 operators working in different shifts now,” he said.

From September 10 till October 6, the call centre has received a total of 45,056 service requests. Of them, 2,737 requests have been junked so far because of incomplete documents.

“The call centre is run by a private company. Among other teams, we have also kept a dedicated team for mobile sahayaks,” said Mohan, who visits the call centre on a weekly basis to keep a tab on the operations.

On the second floor of the building, three girls and two boys are sitting with their resumes in hands. One of them has come from Rajasthan, another from Madhya Pradesh. As they wait outside a room, which has a steel plate with ‘HR’ written on top, a group of tired looking executives begin packing their bags, making way for the next batch of young foot soldiers to come in.

First Published: Oct 08, 2018 10:53 IST