After nudge from PM Modi, CIC to hear public complaints

NEW DELHI: Central Information Commission ( CIC) has thrown its weight behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for a unified grievance redressal system driven by the transparency watchdog at the centre and information commissions at the state level.

A year after turning down the government’s move to add hearing public grievances to CIC’s scope of work, the Commission has revised its own views and accepted the proposal.

The Commission has written to department of administrative reforms and public grievances (DARPG) that it would be willing to drive a unified national public grievances system.

A senior CIC official told ET, “Almost 90% of the RTI applications are grievances. We are already stretching the RTI Act and converting grievances into RTIs so that the problems are addressed. We don’t see any reason why we cannot drive the unified system.”

At present, there are multiple windows to accept public grievances. The grievances are sent to President, VP, PM and filed at the central public grievances portal. These are forwarded and handled at different levels, generating duplicate complaints.

The government has been considering a unified single window system. While the PM was opposed to the idea of creating another statutory body in the form of public grievances commissions at the Centre and the states and had suggested this role be given to CIC.

The transparency watchdog, however, had told the government in June last year that it was already saddled with huge pendency of RTI appeals and would not be willing to handle the workload. CIC has now discussed the matter afresh with the information commissioners and reversed its earlier stance.

“The workload would obviously go up. The government would then expand the commission. After an expansion, maybe a few information commissioners would be hearing public grievances dedicatedly.

It depends on the system the government works out. But we also feel that there is no need to handle public grievances at multiple level,” the official told ET.

RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak said, “The idea of having a nodal agency at the central level and the state level to redress grievances is a welcome move. A lot of work of the information commissions is in relation to RTI appeals whose basis lies in public grievances.

However, given the pendency levels across the country and the fact that redressal of grievances would be a long drawn out process, the commissions would not be able to perform unless provided adequate infrastructure and additional commissioners.”