New Delhi, Apr 23 (PTI) India's public grievance redressal system CPGRAMS was on Tuesday touted as a monumental reform at a key Commonwealth meeting in London involving representatives of over 50 member nations, a top government official said.

V Srinivas, Secretary of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), made a presentation on the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) at the third biennial Pan-Commonwealth meeting for heads of public service at the Commonwealth Secretariat headquarters in London.

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CPGRAMS allows citizens to raise grievances online against government departments.

"Secretary General of Commonwealth, Patricia Scotland KC said 'CPGRAMS is a state of the art grievance redressal system in the 56 commonwealth countries and a best practice of SMART government. The Commonwealth's 1.2 billion citizens can benefit from the adoption of the technology platform in the same way India's 1.4 billion citizens have benefited'," Srinivas said.

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The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 56 independent and equal countries.

Srinivas said CPGRAMS as an effective grievance redressal platform was appreciated by Ambassador Anthony Muchiri, chairman of the Public Service Commission of Kenya, and as a monumental reform, by Zena Syed Ahmad, Permanent Secretary (Services), Tanzania, Patrick Kangwa, Cabinet Secretary of Zambia, Geoff Gare, Permanent Secretary Botswana, and other Cabinet Secretaries/Permanent Secretaries of Uganda, the Maldives, and Grenada amongst others.

The theme of the three-day conference that began on April 22 is 'Institutionalization of SMART Government for Improving Service Delivery' with a focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) in governance.

"Technology has immense potential to bring citizens and government closer and has become a powerful tool to empower citizens and a medium to optimise transparency and accountability in day-to-day functioning," Srinivas said while giving a presentation on one of the key governance reforms.

He said effective redressal of public grievances is one of the most important aspects of Indian democracy and the government has accorded the highest priority to the subject with a focus on citizen engagement.

"The implementation of CPGRAMS 10-step reforms has resulted in a linear increase in the number of public grievances being redressed every month to over 1,50,000 cases and reduction in timelines for disposal to 16 days in central ministries/departments with improved quality of disposal," Srinivas added.

As many as 21,07,832 grievances were raised in 2023. A total of 9,58,805 complaints have been raised till March this year.

He said the next steps for CPGRAMS are to deepen the use of AI in grievance redressal to adopt policy, process and people-related changes as well as operationalisation of CPGRAMS mobile app and adoption of CPGRAMS 7.0 version in all states and Union Territories.

"The Government of India has this year approved a scheme and granted Rs 128 crore for effective redressal of public grievances which envisages a CPGRAMS version 8.0 for developing a new source code and adoption of latest technologies," Srinivas said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)