Ten years have passed since the heads of various countries,
including India adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
which emerged out of a commitment made at the UN Millennium Summit
in 2000. The MDGs are eight international development goals that
all the signatories have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. At a
broad level, these include eradicating extreme poverty, reducing
child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics and developing a
global partnership for development.
As seen in most ambitious initiatives, a review of the past
decade of MDGs indicated that there was a need to improve essential
services at the local level, while policies and strategies in
support were well in place in many countries. There was an urgent
need for more accountability and transparency throughout the
service delivery systems. Accordingly, a pilot project on Real-Time
Citizen Monitoring services was initiated in two districts; Sehore
in Madhya Pradesh and Koraput in Orissa. IT firm, Tangere, built a
strong open source platform for real-time monitoring of citizen
complaints in close collaboration with Samarthan, United Nations
Millenium Campaign and the District Administration of Sehore and
Koraput.
Complaints can be registered through SMSes, and their status
can be tracked online, which keeps the citizens updated on the
progress
Apurva Sharan, Co-founder and Director, Technology, Tangere
Tangere developed a solution called ‘Samadhan,’
which provides a comprehensive system to gather information and
respond to grievances. “Complainants can register their
problems easily through SMSes or by calling up the call center. The
status of complaints can be tracked online, which keeps the
citizens updated on the progress. The district administration gets
a bird’s eye view and can drill down to details of all filed
complaints. The complaint map can be seen visually on a Google
map,” explains Apurva Sharan, Co-founder and Director,
Technology, Tangere.
Real-time updates
When a citizen files a complaint, he immediately gets an
acknowledgment number. The citizen monitoring hub, comprising of
citizen representatives, then gets in touch with the complainant
and seeks more details. At this stage, respective line departments
of the government get automatic notifications through an SMS. The
complainant is always kept in the loop through SMS
notification.
“Samadhan provides an opportunity for engaging media, civil
society groups, elected representatives and other interested
stakeholders in policy advocacy using the results coming out of the
system,” explains Sharan. It ensures access to governance
response systems, which is typically weak for most communities.
“At times, there are drop boxes kept in panchayats, but there
is typically no loop closure of how these are redressed. Follow up
and closure is more driven by the complainant’s urge and
officer’s zeal rather than a systematic process of handling
this,” points out Sharan.
The citizen monitoring hub grievance redressal system is a
significant attempt in solving these perennial problems. Firstly,
it engages citizens, local organizations and local government
bodies into an involved process of issue monitoring and resolution,
while ensuring complete transparency of the entire process.
Secondly, the system automatically generates a large amount of data
to carry out future planning exercise.
The system also helps in bringing administrative continuity in
event of transfers and other changes. This analysis is available at
finger tips for taking proactive action and helps build a
citizen-centric system. The hope is that this would generate
sufficient objective detail to impact even the political process
towards delivering meaningful governance. While the platform is in
the early stage, it shows the potential of the benefits of ushering
in transparency in government-citizen communications.