Requesting a Service from your Government Agency





With support from numerous NGO’s, government officials and IT companies in Pune, the Office of the CIO has designed and deployed a Service Request System developed by Persistent at the Pune Municipal Corporation. They still prefer to call it as the Grievance Redressal System (GRS). Hopefully a look at the best practices will help them to move ahead enlarging the scope of services and renaming it to Service Request System.



Hopefully this application will become part of a shared Service Request System for Pune, not just a SRS for one government agency. The Pune resident should be able to request a service without needing to think about which agencies job it is to provide the service. So if there is a parking request, traffic control request the shared system should be able to let the appropriate agencies- the municipal body, the police, the RTO, the PMPML or the Collectorate know right away.

This system can help identify the functional areas where the agencies need to allocate budget. It can help identify the priorities in each electoral ward across the city. It can even help the agencies to coordinate the development and service delivery works across multiple departments.

This system will work best if it can also provide a visual feedback of:

  • How many services were attended to in each geographical and functional (health, waste management, licenses, certifications, permissions etc) area every day, week, month and year to date
  • How many services are pending in each geographical and functional area for one week, one month or longer
  • Services repeating themselves in a geographical area
  • Most requested services for each functional areas of service
  • Department/officials processing most services and least services per day and year to date

The software provides for such a display and hopefully the government agencies who deploy the system will enable it on their websites soon.

It is good to see the global best-practice enabling citizens to request a service from their government agency come to Pune. Here are some of the best-of-the breed websites enabling online service requests from citizens and organizations:
Hopefully we can do Pune proud by learning and improving these best practices in the versions of the GRS to come!

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