After a gap of almost two years, the Coimbatore Corporation is likely to revive the weekly grievance redress meeting.
Prior to abandoning the meeting, the Coimbatore Corporation commissioner used to receive petitions from the public on Tuesday evenings. Now the Corporation plans to revive weekly grievance redress meetings, possibly on Tuesday, and this exercise may commence in the next fortnight, say sources familiar with the development.
The petitions the Corporation commissioner receives or other senior officials will be numbered or coded for easy follow-up action.
It will then feed the petition number to the grievance software and then forward the petition to the officer concerned for action.
After a period of time, the software will ensure that the petition is escalated to the next higher official in the hierarchy, next to the department heads and then the deputy commissioner and commissioner.
The software will categorise the petitions into various categories – waste collection, street light, water supply, roads, etc. It will show category-wise petitions and their status on a dashboard for the commissioner to monitor.
In addition to reviving the weekly grievance redress system, the Corporation is also planning to integrate the complaints or grievances received through call centre, social networking platforms, emails and posts into software so that that senior officials have a tab on how much and quickly the officials redress the grievances.
The sources say that the time frame for officials to work on complaints will start from seven working days and three working days thereafter for department heads and another three days for deputy commissioner or commissioner.
To ensure that the officials close the complaints only after properly attending to those, the Corporation will engage with the petitioners or complainants by asking them to confirm if the civic body has executed the work to their satisfaction.
This may be by way of an OTP (one-time password) or message that the software will generate, the sources say and add that the civic body does want to things to improve on the ground.
As part of the efforts to improve efficiency in work, the Corporation is also reviving the walkie-talkie system, where it will give handsets to officials.
The civic body had introduced the system sometime in 2015-16 and was functioning until about a year-and-half ago.
This is to ensure that field-level officials are available at the touch of a button for senior officers, the sources add.