The Meghalaya government will soon launch the Chief Minister Helpline to reach out to citizens and redress their grievances through a call centre facility.
In order to address the concerns, issues and complaints of citizens of Meghalaya, the CM Helpline or ‘Citizen Connect’ project has been envisaged which can register the grievances faced by the citizens and can solve them through a systematic process.
The call centre will act on the grievances with features such as grievance logging, tracking and redressal, assigning grievances to the concerned department for providing solutions, and recording the feedback of citizens. The categories of calls covered under the helpline are complaints, information, feedback, suggestion, help or emergency.
The State government has already invited bids from IT firms to operate the Chief Minister Helpline.
Meghalaya with a population of 36 lakh population with almost 80 per cent of them living in rural areas have limited access to government machinery. The villages are situated unevenly in hilly terrains far flung from district administration.
There are 12 districts and 46 administrative blocks. This implies that there is one block office to serve around 70,000 people. Due to the absence of Panchayati Raj institutions, each block administrative unit covers around 140 villages for delivering administrative services.
Citizens face a lot of challenges not only in accessing basic services of the government but also raise concerns and grievances to public authorities. Among the majority of citizens, there is a lack of awareness and knowledge about the channels and the platforms through which the complaints have to be made to the concerned authorities.
There is also a gender divide evident, as women may not have the requisite resources and opportunities to voice their grievances. The majority of grievance portals are online and also not available in all languages which make it difficult for many people to register complaints.
Because of this digital illiteracy and the digital divide, people have little or no access to opportunities to express their grievances. There is no adequate digital infrastructure available and it also lacks digital skill training for disposal of complaints and redressal of grievances.
Further, there is a high level of pendency, delays, lack of information dissemination from the authorities, and inaccuracies present, which makes it difficult to resolve the grievances.
Currently, citizens have to raise their grievance through multiple channels such as CPGRAMS, MEGGRAMS, CM Whatsapp Helpline which leads to inordinate delays in getting favourable replies from the concerned department.
To address this issue of citizen’s grievance, a 24 X 7 toll free citizen helpline call centre is planned to be established. The call centre will be operational throughout the year except for important national holidays. Through this system, citizens can raise their grievances easily simply by calling a toll-free number and register their grievance.
The CM Helpline will be integrated with the eProposal System. The system will have complaint/grievance registration and redressal, escalation to concerned officials for timely resolution, capturing the suggestion and feedback from citizens, and explaining citizens about government schemes and their benefits.
