Dear All,

After nearly 8 months of backbreaking Research and Analysis on how to solve the problems pertaining to civic services like water, elec, garbage, etc., of aam aadmi in his daily life (Research facility Courtesy: National Informatic Centre of the Min.of Infn.& Tech, Karnataka Center with space in their office with a computer with high end  technical back up andwith back end operation from their scientific pool, and Shri N.L.Narendra Babu, now sitting MLA, Mahalakshmi Layout Constituency) I was instrumental in web designing, content creation and launching a portal:  http://www.rajajinagara.kar.nic.in  (now being relaunched as Mahalakshmi Layout constitutency website,  for helping Mr.N.L.Narendra Babu, MLA of the then Rajajinagara constitutency now sitting MLA from Mahalakshmi Layout Constituency (due to delimitation of wards and redrawing boundaries) to be in touch with his tech savvy voters directly and other non-tech savvy aam aadmis through cyber cafes to solve their demands and grievances.  It was an OCMS - Online Complaints Management System, managed from the MLA's office.

In addition, the portal contained very useful information about the constituency and also information / downloading application forms and online submission etc., for  obtaining voter ID, driving license, passport, telephone / cell numbers of various officers of service providers, stake holders, IT/ITeS services in Rajajinagara etc. and a host of other information that are required by the citizens.

This OCMS enabled people, to lodge any complaint on demands and grievances with 5 clicks of mouse with the help of ready made menus and obtain instantly a computer generated ack.No. for follow up action and with facility for escalating the complaints to the next levels of responsibile officers.  

The common man was also enabled to lodge a complaint (free) by just getting into a cyber cafe, giving details of their complaint for uploading the same to the MLA of Rajajinagara  and obtain the automatically generated ack number.

The portal received, within one year of its launch, more than 50,000 hits (Rajajinagara voters: 2.5 lakhs) and about 350 online complaints, most of them solved and intimated to the complainants either through their email IDs / telephone numbers

The only difficulty we found was that the lower end officials of service providers, though very helpful, were not able to log on to the website and give a feedback on the successful redressal of the grievances of the citizens (they are used to paper work) to their higher ups who were the designated officials to respond to the MLA's office.  They were helpful in their responxes over phone/mobiles.

Kudos to Karnataka Center of National Informatics Center; they did a commendable job and the back end operation of OCMS is an identifiable package available with them for any elected representative who desires to adopt the OCMS with necessary checks, balances and by creating localised statistic content for embedding the same without much problem.

- NIC's OCMS is available for the asking by any elected representative/ government department.. 

- GO GET IT. Office of NIC is located in VI Floor, Visveswaraya Mini Towers, opp: coffee board building, Ambedkar Veedhi.  Mr.Venkateshan, State Informatics Officer, Cell No.9986731299.

- Is there a political will?  'Hittala gida maddalla' ?

- Is anybody listening? 

- Vasanthkumar Mysoremath    http://www.rajajinagara.kar.nic.in  

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Perhaps they need to outsource these kinds of jobs to competent professional organisations. I am not sure they have the in-house capacity, nor be able to build or sustain it.

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The wrong approach for BBMP will be to do all of this by themselves. The control room will become hand in glove with the officials and become dysfunctional very soon. In fact the control room itself should be hosted outside of any BBMP premises. Having a third party be accountable for raising, tracking and closing trouble tickets and publishing statistics directly to a public website will ensure they also escalate unresolved tickets in time. 

This is a chance to do it right. 

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What is more important is the action taken on the complaints, not just the concerned officer replying vaguely that 'action being taken ' or 'will be taken'.

Only if the problem pointed out by the complainant is resolved to his satisfaction the same should be closed.

K.V.Pathy

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An outsourced model seams to be the best way forward. Atleast it might solve the complaint recording issues, if not the actual problem itself.

It makes sense for us to ask BBMP how they plan to implement the propsed e-tracking system - like who will be handling the customer calls (whether it will be BBMP employees or is it being outsourced) and who is developing the software to run his system and ofcourse the costs involved. 

RTI or can somebody use their contacts?

I hope they will also consider SB's proposal for a toll free service with a easy to remember phone number.

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 who is developing the software to run his system

If you give it to a BPO outfit they can include the platform in the cost along with the inbound voice services and throw in a toll free number as well. Most COTS CRM tools provide portal, email and mobile interfaces to open tickets as a part of contact center apps. Imagine if you could snap a photo on your phone and use it as an attachment to open a trouble ticket via SMS. Technology is not an issue, but the key is for BBMP to have a vision, define all the requirements and open a single tender. 

It can be extended to be a single contact center for BBMP, BESCOM, BWSSB, BCP, BCTP as well. Tickets can be routed according to who will solve it, the departmental routing can be transparent to the citizen who will get a single window for all complaints related to the running of the city. Cost will go down if it is integrated and the interface and service level can remain standard.

The worst way will be for them to cross deploy a few disinterested folks from within, provide a single non working telephone line as the helpdesk number and then engage a 2 bit relatives firm to build from scratch a half baked application which wont work. There are already zonal contact  centers anyway who will want to keep troubles off records so they can goof off during work..

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Well said IDS - perhaps this is the route to follow

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 NIC's OCMS is available for the asking by any elected representative/ government department

I think we can be humble in accepting there are far more scalable solutions that may be appropriate for city wide multi agency implementations. This isnt about software or outsourcing. For all you know even a shoddy contract with a private player can screw it up as easily as BBMP themselves can.

This is about quality of the vision and core competence

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Chinese proverb:

"When you are looking down upon somebody, you cannot see eye to eye with him".

Even before evaluating something, if conclusions are drawn (the bane of one up manship), then it summarises something that cannot be fathomed. 

Some people believe in :

"Shankadindal bandidde theertha"  even if it contains 65 ppm of E-Coli or sewage mixed water or bacteria loaded Ganga Jal (over hyped outsourced solutions that have no transparency or accountability for which any number of government departments have fallen prey and are regretting).

I believe in curing my running nose by smelling a few crushed Thulasi yelegalu.

NIC's OCMS has been designed to suit demands and grievances of tropical nature that exists in the whole of India and the pull down menus cover a whole gamut of such daily problems.   Anyways, each one unto himself.

- Vasanth Mysoremath

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