Grievances and poll promises
The Assembly elections are months away, and major parties in Tamil Nadu are yet to formally release their manifestos and declare their poll promises. Yet, one early-bird assurance by both Dravidian majors has already hit the headlines—to have a centralised grievance redressal mechanism in the state.
Largely inspired by the Tamil flick Mudhalvan in which the highly scrupulous chief minister sets out to clean up the state based on grievance petitions he receives in the complaints boxes installed across towns—DMK president M K Stalin has decided to visit every Assembly constituency and receive grievance petitions from the public in a box.
If he wins, Stalin has promised that all the grievances submitted to him would be resolved in the first 100 days of his government. Not to be left out, the ruling AIADMK went ahead and started its own version of the programme. CM Edappadi K Palaniswami launched a helpline number last week for accelerated redressal of grievances. In both these cases, the idea is to centralise the mechanism, and bring it under the direct purview of the CM.
While the concept packs a punch akin to those in political thriller movies, the state already has a pragmatic decentralised system in place. Every week, grievance redressal meetings are held at each and every District Collectorate office in TN. The public get to air their complaints and issues at these meetings, and the Collector and his team are expected to resolve them through appropriate channels. However, over time, this has become an exercise in futility.
Public participation has been stymied due to various reasons—official apathy, lack of amenities in public office spaces, and, the most important of all, inaction. The breakdown in this system has resulted in a number of suicide attempts by the public being reported inside Collectorate complexes. In such a situation, it’s a highly welcome move by both parties to put the attention on the subject. However, instead of creating a new system, the focus must be on improving the existing channels—sensitising government officials, cracking down on official apathy, and providing enough funds to create public-friendly spaces and infrastructure to open a mutually beneficial communication channel with the people.