NEW DELHI: One year of the NDA rule has brought significant changes in the redressal of public grievances, with pending cases coming down to just 3,300, a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) told Express on Friday.
He explained that the number of pending public grievances during the erstwhile UPA dispensation was much higher and in certain years it had crossed the 14,000 mark.
“On January 1, 2013, when the UPA Government was in power, approximately 20,491 public grievances were pending with the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, which comes directly under the Prime Minister.
“However, in January this year, when we finalised the file, only 3,377 cases were pending. When Narendra Modi Government took over at the Centre, over 16,000 cases were pending,” said the official, adding that majority of the cases were disposed of by May. Modi, it is learnt, has told the Secretary incharge to directly coordinate with the Secretary of the Ministry concerned to address the grievances.
This has helped to cut down the bureaucratic red tape and ensure timely and effective response mechanism within the government. Moreover, the Secretary-level interaction has increased during the follow-up of cases.
“We have also given priority to the grievances related to pension. There are a total of 55 pensioners under the Central government and our aim is to reach out to each one of them through a scheme for pensioners’ facility. We have installed 4,000 biometric software in government offices across the country for registration and identification of retired personnel.
Our goal is to install one such software in each Panchayat for enrolment. We have already registered three lakh pensioners and linked them to our database,” he further said.
The Centre has already launched ‘Jeevan Pramaan’, an Aadhar-based digital life certificate which would do away with the requirement of a pensioner having to submit a physical life certificate in November every year, in order, to ensure continuity of pension.