Lethargy slows down digital thrust

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 13

Inexperience cuts both ways and the Manohar Lal Khattar-led BJP government in Haryana understands this more than anybody else.

On one hand, inexperience has brought in fresh ideas in the first year of BJP’s rule and, on the other, it has slowed the pace of progress with the government taking its time to learn as it moved on.

A number of initiatives, primarily IT based — including the CM Window to register grievances, Harsamay (the police portal for all kinds of complaints and clearances) and the disbursement of old-age and other pensions to nearly 16 lakh people through banks — got thumbs up from the public.

E-registration, e-stamping and e-tendering were introduced in keeping with the government’s proposed crusade to minimise corruption, while Khattar evinced interest in setting up women’s police stations which met with success, barring a few teething troubles.

Khattar, admitting that his is an “inexperienced” government, said his effort in the first year was essentially to put systems in place. “When we took over, to our horror, we found the systems completely missing. On priority, I took it upon myself to go digital and use technology to weed out corruption and create time-bound systems that function on their own, easing inconvenience to the public. We have managed that to some extent, though there is scope for improvement,” he said.

Some ideas, however, got off the ground only to nosedive right back. The Chief Minister was keen on a night stay of district administration officials at the sub-division level to take the government to the people. Resistance from the bureaucracy, however, led to the idea fizzling out. It has since been forgotten.

As for adopting a village each by officers and legislators, the idea has been a virtual non-starter with “adoption” remaining primarily on paper in most cases.

Let’s track government’s initiatives in one year.

CM Window

Launched on December 25 last year, the CM Window — the Chief Minister’s web portal — was set up to ensure time-bound response to citizens’ complaints. Logging into the system generates a unique registration number of a complaint and it is forwarded to the DC concerned or the administrative secretary. With the help of an online tracking number, the applicant can track the status of the complaint and alerts on the SMS are sent periodically.

Harsamay

A part of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTS), Harsamay — the citizen portal of the Haryana Police — offers three primary services: online registration of complaints, reporting lost property, community liason groups and filing online RTI applications. It was launched in January. Of 41,370 complaints received so far, 36,734 have been disposed of and 1,757 are pending for more than a week.

In all, 7,915 RTI requests were received online and 7,232 were dealt with, while 68,073 matters of lost property have been filed online. Eight services will be added soon.

Women’s police stations

With the idea of encouraging women to come out and report crime against them, women’s police stations were opened in all 21 districts. Opened on “rakhi”, the stations have become popular even though they face staff shortage and have begun to overflow with complaints.

Since their opening in August-end, the police stations have received 5,636 complaints, of which 1,518 are pending. In the last week alone, the police claim they have brought down the pendency from 2,200 to 1,500.

E-registration

This project was rolled out in December last year to reduce corruption in the tehsil office, given the arbitrariness involved as also easing cumbersome, time-consuming processes of getting a property registered. The results speak for themselves. Of 3.5 applications for registries received in 120 tehsil and sub-tehsils of Haryana, 3.1 lakh registries were issued on the day they were applied for, while 25,000 are pending collections by the applicants who have been repeatedly sent messages in the SMS.

The government has tried to bring about IT-enabled changes in its working, but the lack of experience reflects in the slow pace of decision making, reflecting the Opposition’s point of view the government has nothing much to write home about.