CHENNAI: A45-day technical snag in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ Swachhata App has prevented the Chennai Corporation from processing complaints registered through the app and also hampered efforts to boost its citizen feedback scores for the Swachh Survekshan rankings.
Corporation officials said that the snag has made it impossible to open complaints and alert conservancy supervisors to follow up complaints from their respective zones. It is learnt that there is a backlog of at least 300 complaints because of the extended snag.
The Swachhata App, which exclusively receives complaints pertaining to solid waste management, is maintained by a third party called Janaagraha. Corporation officials said that their repeated requests for a quick fix are yet to be addressed.
“We ensure complaints are resolved if there is a technical snag for 2-3 days but this snag which has extended over a month has left us helpless,” said a Corporation official, overseeing the complaint redressal for the civic body.
When contacted on Wednesday, Janaagraha engineers claimed that the snag had been resolved. However, Corporation officials were still unable to access the complaints registered. “We had some backend issues but it has been sorted out,” said a Janaagraha official.
In addition to hampering the civic body from resolving various issues such as overflowing dustbins and door-to-door collection shortcomings, the snag is also hampering the city corporation’s attempts to improve its feedback scores.
Citizen feedback accounts for 25 per cent of the total 5,000 ranking points and proper redressal of complaints through Swachhata App accounts for 100 points. “We have been toiling to improve the complaint redressal system and increase downloads but the snag has halted progress,” said another corporation official, explaining that the linking of the solid waste management complaints received on Namma Chennai App to the Swachhata App will have to wait till the snag is resolved.