BENGALURU: Kalyan Kendra — a control room to address concerns of social welfare ministry’s beneficiaries — looks nothing like a government office. A young team outsourced from a private company is catering to the needs of some two crore beneficiaries of the department round-the-clock throughout the year in a never-before-attempted manner.
An initiative of the previous Siddaramaiah government, but now revamped by Social Welfare Minister Priyank Kharge, the control room that includes a call centre, CCTV monitoring room, data compilation desk is now paving the way to address grievances, assist beneficiaries, cull middlemen — but most importantly, provide fresh data on performance of Social Welfare Department officials in every district.
The control room — a one-stop solution for all queries regarding the department — was inaugurated on August 7, and in 10 days it has received 6,046 calls.
“For now, we have 19 staff working in three shifts round-the-clock. Average call rate per day is about 600- 650. We are missing many calls since our phones keep ringing. We plan to expand the team soon,” said Srinivasulu, MD, Ambedkar Nigam, which manages the control room. Currently, three people have been assigned to monitor the feed from over 800 government-run hostels. The staff — none from the government — have been resourced from a private agency on a two-year contract. At a cost of about 15 lakhs per month, the department has been successful in setting up a centre that not just responds to queries and helps filling up forms but also sets anomalies right.
“A ticket is raised for every call we attend and we follow it up. If the matter isn’t resolved at the call-centre level, it can be escalated to the minister himself,” Srinivasulu added. The call centre has one person assigned specifically to manage queries raised on WhatsApp.
The total number of queries the control room has received so far on WhatsApp is 455. With the number of calls exceeding capacity in comparison to staff, about 2,782 calls were abandoned but the centre also has a ‘callback’ policy. At least 2,514 tickets raised since august 7 have been closed so far. “Why should a person have to travel from Kalaburagi or Vijayapura to file a complaint? They can stay anonymous and get assistance with a phone call,” Kharge said.
Apart from making the department, its schemes and a grievance cell accessible to the target group under the Social Welfare Department, the control room also acts as an unconventional data collection method. “Calls we receive are analysed issue- and region-wise. If there are more complaints from a particular district, it means that out officials aren’t working effectively,” Kharge said. The ministry is now looking to use the data collated by the centre for policy decisions, especially on the allocation of funds based on the number of beneficiaries.
The Kendra has a centralised system to keep a tab on biometric entries of students in hostels, giving the department access to actual figures on the number of students in each hostel. The department hopes to utilise this data to eliminate anomalies and allocate funds and ration accordingly.