Amartya Sen trust's survey praises Mamata govt's 'Duare Sarkar'
Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government has been praised by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's organisation set up to promote education and alleviate poverty — Pratichi (India) Trust — for addressing 95 percent of all grievances received through Public Grievance Redressal Cell (PGRC) and Duare Sarkar programme.
The inception report of the survey — Governance as 'Action-oriented' Listening: People's Voice and Policy Choice — stated that the PGRC that was set up in 2019 under the aegis of the Chief Minister's Office has emerged as a novel governance project in the country as a technology-based (ICT enabled) platform for public grievance redressal. At the same time, it has dealt with more than 10 lakh grievances received online and around 2.75 crore people submitted applications through Duare Sarkar "with an impressive record of 95 per cent grievance resolution rate" over a short span of one-and-a-half-years.
The preliminary findings have also revealed interest among women in claiming their rights and entitlements as "participation of women in airing their grievances is almost 45 percent despite the fact that most of the households are headed by men".
"A close analysis of the categories of grievances also reveals a large proportion of women respond and react to a plethora of schemes specially designed for women including programmes such as 'Kanyashree, 'Rupashree', and educational scholarships for specific social groups and widow pension schemes etc," the report states.
It further reads: "Speedy redressal of such grievances will likely improve girl's educational attainment and other core capabilities. We have also observed that a sizeable percentage of women have registered their grievances during the Covid-induced humanitarian crisis and the devastation caused by the natural disaster like Amphan."
Around 63 percent of the complainants were "of advanced age" that is aged above 50 years while about 16 percent youth had registered their complaints using phone calls and emails, the "inception report" revealed.
Besides filling the gaps "in reaching out to the hitherto unreachable sections of the people" through outreach drives like "Duare Sarkar" and "Parae Samadhan", the report found that the most important feature of this system "is its speedy and proactive way of action in resolving issues".
"People are much satisfied with its functioning mechanism. They said it is a speedy and responsible system," the report states.
Besides stating that West Midnapore (17 percent) tops the list in terms of the number of complaints, followed by East Midnapore (11 percent) and South 24-Parganas, the study has also stated that careful scrutiny of the data on grievances has spotted deteriorating road conditions as one of the top concerns among citizens and the 'Pathoshree' programme to reconstruct and repair at least 14,000 km roads was taken up.
