District administration conferred Skoch Award

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, December 27

The district administration has been awarded the precious Skoch Silver Award for improving service delivery through zero-pendency approach.

This award is the highest and national-level honour in the country conferred by an independent organisation. Due to the Covid pandemic, all six rounds of the competition were held virtually and Jalandhar district gave presentations in all rounds.

During the final round, the award was conferred on the administration. Lauding the entire administration team, Deputy Commissioner Ghanshyam Thori said: “The Skoch award is a recognition for each officer/officials, who made sincere and exemplary efforts to ensure delivery of services to people within a stipulated time frame.”

He said the administration had adopted Jalandhar’s ‘zero pendency’ approach for which nodal officers were appointed at the tehsil or sub-tehsil level to analyse all dealing hands’ performance processing a citizen application before the final approval. He said every office’s performance in processing applications was monitored daily through a management information system (MIS).

Thori said if an application is found pending, it gets immediately mapped to the official concerned. The nodal officers get alerted, who subsequently ensures that the application gets processed without any delay. The DC said the zero pendency approach was designed to encourage a two-way flow of information between line-department functionaries and the district administration.

He said with this, the administration identifies and alerts for pendency and shares and records the root cause of any such pendency with district heads of departments that ensure that structural bottlenecks get addressed by the departments to prevent any future pendency arising out of the same causes.

The officers/officials were honoured who ensures zero pendency, he said, adding that the step further motivated others to follow them.

The DC said a mechanism was evolved to get citizens’ grievance on the Facebook page of the administration, emails and helpline number and to resolve the issues within 24 hours of these being recorded. The administration is also personally calling citizens who have used the Sewa Kendra facilities within the last seven days for their valuable suggestions and feedback, he said. Jalandhar is a leading district in Punjab having 0.01 per cent pendency of applications in the Sewa Kendras and ensuring expeditious delivery of citizen-centric services to people.

Earlier, the district was the first and the only district from the state to emerge as a finalist for the Prime Minister’s awards to improve public service delivery.

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