VIPs come first for Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation too

HYDERABAD: If you want the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) to address your grievance within 24 hours, you have to be a VIP or else be prepared to wait for months.

An internal note has been issued to various departments a week ago by the administration wing to dispose all pending VIP grievances immediately as the GHMC commissioner Somesh Kumar wants to hold a status meeting soon.

Over the past one year, the corporation has received 1,200 petitions and recommendations from VIPs, including those from corporators, MLAs, ministers and several from the chief minister's office.

These grievances, which include road works, patch work or any developmental activity in VIP areas, are all quickly disposed of without any hitch.

For instance, the CMO and minister for municipal administration regularly forward petitions from their respective peshis.

Investigations showed how GHMC has been maintaining a separate cell ready to monitor and solve VIP grievances within hours.

While the administration wing monitors them under the file monitoring system (FMS), the GHMC commissioner himself reviews the pending VIP grievances with various departments.

"The GHMC prepared an estimate for laying a separate road at LB Nagar to benefit some people on the request of an MLA within 24 hours whereas it takes several months for the aam aadmi. In some instances, the officers are compelled to even violate the tender procedures to complete the work," an official of GHMC admitted privately.

While the VIPs are happy with the GHMC response, the aam aadmi are the ones who suffer as authorities take their own sweet time to resolve the crisis and on some occasions they choose to ignore.

Generally, the municipal corporation receives grievances from citizens on various issues pertaining to laying and repairing roads, building permissions, complaint on unauthorized constructions, water logging and issues related to property tax assessment among a host of other problems.

The grievances are received either at weekly prajavani programme (held every Monday), or monthly face to face programme (every first Saturday of the month) other than the GHMC call centre.

As per official records, as many as 63,780 petitions were received by the GHMC through various channels in the past one-and-a-half years, related to the woes of the aam aadmi.

While officials claim, 60,934 were disposed of, actually only 37,400 petitions have been disposed (58%) within a reasonable time frame as per the Citizen Service Charter.

Some issues like rectifying water stagnation during rainy season and street light problems are supposed to be solved within 48 hours, but it hardly happens.

Crucial wings like property tax wing, disposed only 48.61% problems of the common man, while the engineering wing took care of 50.59% of cases and town planning 50.34% among others.

Some wings recorded worst performance when it came to disposal of grievances. When feedback was sought from people, nearly 2,000 citizens said they were not satisfied with the response from the corporation.