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Ajay Joshi
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, January 16
Swachhata App, launched with much fanfare by the Centre in August 2016, seems to have lost favour with city residents. A majority of them have reportedly uninstalled the app, as their complaints remained unresolved for a long time.
At present, 45 complaints are lying unresolved, some of them for a month. And 38 complaints have been “re-opened”, which means the users have registered their complaints again on the app as these were not resolved.
Ask Municipal Corporation (MC) officials about the state of affairs and they are happy to boast about achieving the target of 20,000 downloads. But when asked about the list of persons using the app, they drew a blank.
Dimple, who handles the process of the app in the MC office, said: “At present, 1,014 persons are using Swachhata App. In the past two years, 1,796 complaints registered through the app have been resolved.”
When asked about the number of complaints registered in the past two years, she failed to provide an answer.
During the launch of the app, the Union Urban Development Ministry had fixed a time frame to redress complaints. For instance, complaints relating to overflowing dustbins, garbage dumps, stinking toilets should be resolved within 12 hours of lodging a complaint. And complaints pertaining to stray cattle and dogs should be resolved within 48 hours.
But the ground situation is different. City residents claimed sanitation officers took more than a week, and sometimes a month, in resolving their grievances.
Gurpreet Singh, a resident of Guru Tegh Bahadur here, said he had filed a complaint last month about an open garbage dump near his house. “No action was taken, but the status of my complaint on the app shows ‘resolved’.”
Another resident, Manpreet Singh, said: “A sewerage line was clogged for many weeks in Raj Nagar area. I had uploaded the images and registered a complaint on the app 10 days ago. To this day, MC staff has not bothered to repair the sewerage line.”
Sri Krishan, MC health officer, admitted that most of the complaints remained either unresolved or the action was delayed and, for this, he cited two reasons — shortage of sanitation workers and inability to enter narrow streets.
He, though, pointed out another problem. “Most of the times, fake complaints are received on the app,” Krishan added.