Electronic grievance redressal system in NREGS soon

In a bid to bring in transparency in the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the Orissa government plans introduce the electronic grievance redressal system (EGRS) for the NREGS job seekers in the state.

It has identified 10 potential areas of complain pertaining to NREGS which include complains related to not getting job cards, not being registered for work, not getting work after registration, getting work after 15 days, delay in payments among others.

As part of the e-governance programme, this system will be executed through automatic tracking and escalation till a complain is resolved, highly placed official sources said.

Since the citizens have no knowledge of specific responsibility of the government officials, different departments have taken different initiatives to address grievances, leaving the citizens to locate different contact points.

Due to absence of any standardised system of grievance registration, the citizens have lost interest to lodge complains. Besides, the administrators at the state, district, block and gram panchayat levels have no mechanism to track the complains due to lack of real time MIS.

Under the new grievance redressal system, there will be a call centre at the state head quarter. A toll free number will be introduced in the Panchayatiraj department where the beneficiaries can complain from any part of the state. The antecedents of the persons complaining will be kept secret and he will be provided with a complain number.

Meanwhile, the department has designed a software where the complains booked through the toll free number will be routed to the concerned Block Development Officer (BDO) using the digital signature.

As all the blocks are connected with Virtual Private Network (VPN), there will not be any problem in sending the complains through internet. The BDO will have to take action on the complains within 7 days, failing which the complain will be forwarded to the project director, District Rural Development Agency (DRDA).

The project director, DRDA will have to solve the issue within a week failing which it will be automatically transferred to the Collector of the concerned district.

In case of delay on part of the collector to attend to the complain, it will be referred to the director, special projects, who happens to be the director of NREGS. Even then, if the complain is not attended to, a twenty member state level monitoring team will be sent to the site and report directly to the government.

Failure to report on the part of the state level monitoring team will bring the matter to the secretary of the Panchayatiraj department. He will ensure that the problem is resolved and will initiate action if necessary.

“We plan to introduce this citizen centric grievance redressal system and have identified 10 common areas of complain associated with NREGS. This is going to benefit about 5 million NREGS job seekers in the state”, R N Dash, secretary, Panchayatiraj told Business Standard.