Defence min launches grievance mgmt app developed with help of IIT-K

Times News Network
Kanpur: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, on Thursday, launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered grievance management application in New Delhi, developed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) with the help of IIT-Kanpur.
Minister of State (Independent Charge) for personnel, public grievances & pensions Dr Jitendra Singh, defence secretary Dr Ajay Kumar, additional secretary, DARPG V Srinivas, additional secretary MoD Nivedita Shukla Verma, director, IIT-Kanpur Prof Abhay Karandikar, Professor Shalabh, Professor Nisheeth Srivastava and other senior officials of MoD were present on the occasion.
The web-based application has been jointly developed by the department of defence, MoD, department of administrative reforms and public grievances (DARPG) and a team of IIT-Kanpur comprising of Professors Shalabh, Nisheeth Srivastava, and Piyush Rai.
This is the first AI, data science, and machine learning-based system developed to improve grievance redressal in the government. The AI tool developed as a part of the initiative has the capability to understand the content of complaint and identify repeat complaints or spam automatically. It can categorize complaints of different categories even when if keywords are not present in the complaint. It also enables geographical analysis of complaints in category including analysis of whether the complaint was adequately addressed or not by the concerned office.
User-friendly search enables the user to formulate queries/categories depending on management requirements and seek performance results based on the query. Given that lakhs of complaints are received on the Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) portal of DARPG, this application will be of great use in understanding the nature of complaints, geographies they emanate from and policy changes that can be introduced to create systemic improvements to address these grievances.
Speaking on the occasion, Rajnath Singh described the application as a product of good governance, which reflects the growing synergy between the government and academia. He said that this initiative is another citizen-centric reform of the government that aims to empower the people at large.
The defence minister lauded the department of administrative reforms & public grievances (DARPG) for its role in the reform of the Public Grievances Redressal System, saying that resolving the grievances of people is a great service in itself. He added that the active involvement of reputed institutions like IIT-Kanpur will further bolster the system and resolve the grievances in a transparent and effective manner.
The success of this project in MoD will pave the way for extension of this application across other ministries. The MoD and IIT-Kanpur intend to drive their collaboration forward in the coming years, seeking to better leverage the use of AI for the disposal of citizens’ complaints. The application will be improved with more features in the next three years.
A tripartite MoU for the project was signed among the Department of Defence, MoD, Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) and IIT-Kanpur on August 4 in 2020.