Following large scale reports of officers not responding to grievances of the common public in Jammu and Kashmir, Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha on Friday revamped the system by launching the Integrated Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (JK-IGRAMS).

The system is being launched on pilot basis in Jammu, Srinagar and Reasi districts.

Sinha has been receiving complaints that the online complaints on government’s grievance cell were not being attended by the concerned officers and at times they totally failed to respond to such complaints as a result of which there was disillusionment among the aggrieved people.

Sinha announced the new system in a press conference in Srinagar. In a significant step towards making the existing grievance redress mechanism more robust and efficient, Sinha said the revamped system shall decentralize the handling and redressal of public grievances by making District Collectors / Deputy Commissioners as the primary level of receiving, disposing and monitoring grievances. As such, the existing portal has now been integrated downwards to the district level by mapping another nearly 1500 public offices in 20 districts of the Union Territory (UT).

From existing 250 to proposed 1500 offices, which is the widest possible coverage that has been conceived and enabled in the online management of public grievances in J&K making it the first online grievance management system in the country that is linked with central government (at the top) and districts and even further downwards to the tehsils and blocks (at the bottom). Besides, the administrative secretaries of various departments figuring in the middle of the flow-chain are also linked to the mechanism.

Sinha said that the government is committed to undertake all radical reforms to put in place people-centric good governance structure that has an institutionalized grievance redressal mechanism, which he observed as the most important component of a well governed responsive administration and an indicator of efficiency and effectiveness of administrative processes.

Terming it as a step towards gaining the Peoples’ trust, the Lt Governor remarked that an effective grievance redressal mechanism is the lifeblood of any good governance system and is the top priority for the Government of Jammu and Kashmir.

Secretary, Public Grievances, Simrandeep Singh underscored that the new system will involve setting up dedicated Grievance handling teams in each of the 20 districts of J&K to handle seamless flow of grievances up and down the chain.