KATHMANDU, SEPTEMBER 3
Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal today directed government employees managing hello sarkar - a public grievances redressal mechanism - to provide service to the public round-the-clock.
The PM unveiled the work plan to expand hello sarkar services into three shifts at hello sarkar cell at the Prime Minister's Office and Council of Ministers, Singha Durbar.
Addressing the programme at Singha Durbar attended by the chief secretary, secretaries, department chiefs and government staff managing hello sarkar, the PM said government employees must make the public feel the presence of the government by addressing their grievances.
From now on, the public can use Ncell network besides Nepal Telecom network to lodge their complaints at hello sarkar. They can also lodge their complaint using phone, email and social networking sites - Facebook, twitter, viber and WhatsApp. Hello Sarkar has also been directed to address the public's grievances and inform the public about the redressal of their grievances.
The government has deployed 25 staffers, including three under-secretaries at hello sarkar.
Hello sarkar forwards the complaints to the concerned agencies.
The government also directed hello sarkar officials to directly address complaints related to the Prime Minister's Office and Council of Ministers.
Chief Secretary Baikuntha Aryal said that a rapid response team was also formed to address people's grievances. The rapid response team will monitor the redressal of people's grievances.
The PM told government employees to take the public's grievances seriously and try to resolve them immediately. The PM said that people held the grudge that their grievances had not been addressed.
The PM said that public institutions needed to win people's confidence by ensuring transparency and accountability. He said that hello sarkar would gradually recruit university students as interns. The PM said that hello sarkar needed to be expanded to provincial and local governments as well. Hello sarkar also needs to be developed as crowdsource governance to receive excellent ideas from the public. He added that unless the government made the public feel its presence, good governance would be meaningless.
Under-secretary at hello sarkar Raju Khanal told THT that on average, his office received almost 100 complaints from the public, mostly about good governance issues, including complaints about delay in service delivery and government officials not being present in their offices, citizenship problems and Tribhuvan University not issuing equivalence certificates.
Complaints are related to all three tiers of the government - federal, provincial and local. As regards complaints against provincial government agencies, many people complained about not getting driving licence. Most of the callers' complained about corruption in local governments.
As far as the provincial government is concerned, many people complain about not getting driving licence.
Hello sarkar staff phone government officials telling them to address people's grievances.
In the case of policy issues, hello sarkar sends notes to the concerned public institutions telling them to address those issues.
Khanal said that redressal in federal government offices were encouraging but redressal rate in provincial and local governments were not satisfactory.
"Sometimes we find issues of jurisdiction about certain development work," Khanal said and added that since service delivery was being done mostly by the local governments, the latter should have a robust system to address public grievances.
After Dashain festival, hello sarkar will launch orientation programmes for local governments where hello sarkar officials will orient local governments about how they could best address people's complaints.
The government had launched hello sarkar 12 years ago.
A version of this article appears in the print on September 04, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
