Union Government issues new guidelines for effective grievance redressal

The Union Government issued comprehensive guidelines for handling public grievances on Monday. The guidelines aim to empower citizens, streamline the process, and bring greater clarity and focus to the redressal of public grievances. According to a statement by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, a set of guidelines have been issued under the 2024 Policy Guidelines to reiterate the government's commitment to effective grievance redressal and manifest the technological improvements undertaken with the 10-step reform process.

The statement mentions some of the key highlights to address the goals, with an integrated platform for grievance filing with the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS). "An integrated user-friendly grievance filing platform with CPGRAMS being the common open platform on which grievances can be registered by citizens which will operate as a single window experience", read the press release.

The timeline for effective redressal has been reduced to 21 days, reduced from the earlier guideline of 30 days. In the cases where the redressal is likely to take longer than the timeline, citizens are to be given an interim reply informing them of the same. Additionally, Nodal officers for public grievances will be appointed in all ministries and departments who will address the grievances 'promptly, fairly, and efficiently.

Ministries or Departments with 'high grievance loads' will be getting dedicated nodal officers. "The Role of the Nodal Officer is effective categorization, monitoring pendency, examine the feedback for process and policy improvements, undertaking root cause analysis, collation of monthly data sets, and supervisory oversight of the Grievance Redressal Officers of the Ministry/ Department.", added the press release.

The government is also planning to analyze the feedback of the citizens using AI-powered analytical tools, namely the tree dashboard and the intelligent grievance monitoring dashboard. All ministries and departments are encouraged to review these redressals periodically in Senior Officers meetings. Additionally, a 'grievance redressal assessment index' will be issued each month for ranking various ministries and departments.

According to the press release, the CPGRAMS portal has redressed nearly 60 lakh Public Grievances in the period 2022-2024 and has mapped 1.01 lakh Grievance Redressal officers of Ministries/ Departments and States/Union Territories.