Government to get rid of spammers from depts’ mailboxes

NEW DELHI:  As the Centre gets down to reduce the pendency of public grievances by setting up a mechanism for a regular review of such cases, there are complainants who are “spamming” mailboxes of ministries and departments.

The department of administrative reform and public grievances (DARPG) has flagged 10 ‘habitual complainants’ who file 3,000 complaints individually per annum. The department has decided to get rid of these 10 spammers. It is likely to issue a notice to all ministries and departments to transfer grievances being mailed by them to ‘spam’.

Considering the enormity of the number of complaint mails, the issue was discussed in an interactive session under the chairmanship of the department’s secretary held earlier this month. Representatives of at least 78 departments and ministries were also present.

“The identified mailers file thousands of complaints on a variety of issues. Sometimes they are repetitive. Some are frivolous also. There are disgruntled persons who just want to clog the system. The department has identified 10 mailers who were sending 30,000 complaints annually,” said a senior government official. As per the monthly report of December, there were 67,629 grievance cases pending in all ministries in December.