IT-backed solutions are emerging as effective tools to expedite routine works. Today, all the major municipal bodies and city administrations are using mobile applications and online tools to address the problem faced by citizens in their day-to-day affairs. Recently, union urban development (UD) ministry lead by M Venkaiah Naidu launched Swachhata (Cleanliness) App, a mobile application on Android and iOS for addressing complaints related to civic issues.
So, if your municipal sweeper regularly fails to turn up to clear the garbage from your locality or repeated attempt to address the issue has gone in vain, you can now turn to this mobile application for help. All you need to do is click a picture of the garbage dump or overflowing dustbins and post it on the Swachhata App, rest will be taken care, claims the government.
According to the government officials, the citizens only need to take a picture of the complaint they see on the ground and post it through the Swachhata app. The posted picture will automatically get forwarded to the concerned municipal authority. All urban local bodies have been mapped to this app and solution is for all the 4041 towns and cities across India. The app will pinpoint the exact location of the area of the complaint using the geo-location of the pictures.
In order to ensure timely redressal of complaints, government has fixed timeframe for redressing different categories of complaints received through the app. For instance, overflowing dustbins, garbage dumps and sweeping has to done within 12 hours of lodging of a compliant. If there is no water supply or electricity in public toilets or there is a blockage, it will have to be fixed within 12 hours. A dead animal lying on the road will have to be removed within 48 hours. Also, there is a detailed escalation process built in the application so that complaints that are not resolved at the lower level are moved to higher levels for action and resolution.
Most of the municipal corporation have started using the application. In fact, few of them including Surat Municipal Corporation have started giving training to their staffs in order to meet the time-line prescribed by the urban development ministry to resolve the complaints. “We are already on the board with the application. This is basically one more medium for citizens to get their civic issues addressed,” Milind Torawane, municipal commissioner, Surat told EC, adding that his corporation already has a mobile application since 2013 aimed at addressing the day to day civic issues of citizens.
The flow of the app is so smooth that once a complaint is registered, the complainant will get regular updates on its status. They will get a push notification with the ‘resolved’ image uploaded by the sanitary inspector or engineer when they change the status to resolved. Citizens can reopen the complaint if they are not satisfied with the resolution.
Basically, Swachhata App platform has three interfaces addressing the needs of citizen, engineers, and municipal administration. The citizen interface has a mobile application on Android and iOS for citizens to file complaints. For engineers who are working on the project in the back-end, there is a mobile application in Android for the ULBs to see the complaints uploaded by the citizen and take action. For municipal administrator, there is a website for municipal commissioners and their digital teams to monitor the complaints received in their cities and towns.
An official said that the broader goal of the project was to foster large scale citizen participation. This participation may wary from cities to cities depending on the preparedness of it and how public react to the application. “In addition, we should also consider the challenge of network, everywhere you don’t have same type of connectivity,” said Torawane.