The Public Grievances Commission of Delhi (PGC), which was constituted as the last resort for the general public to seek redressal to grievances related to government bodies, is adopting novel methods to establish its presence in the minds of government officials. Till recently, the orders of the PGC were hardly acted upon by government officials due to the absence of fear of PGC. However, that seems to be changing now.
The panel which gets various types of complaints, ranging from non-payment of pension for decades, unauthorised construction to “fast running of electricity meters”, is now making sure that its orders are complied with rather than just remaining on the paper.
Former Delhi Joint Commissioner of Police, N. Dilip Kumar, who is a member of the body, said that because of non compliance of the orders of the PGC, he was forced to adopt newer methods. “When I joined the PGC, I noticed that even though the PGC was disposing of the cases with speed, most of the orders of the PGC were rarely complied with. The complainant, too, after witnessing that even the orders of the PGC were not being complied with, would hesitate to approach the commission again. To stop this and to make government officials aware that there is something called PGC, I started making sure that in case of non-compliance of PGC orders, a senior officer from the department against which the complainant had a grievance, was ordered to be present in the next hearing. As a result, now the junior officers are forced to act on the orders of PGC as non-compliance would lead to their seniors being summoned. Similarly, in many cases of encroachment of buildings found illegal after probe, I have ordered registration of criminal cases not just against the government engineer who passed the building map, but also the architect who approved and made the building plans. In some cases, I have also asked the parent body of the architects to cancel the licence of the particular architect who was found to be involved in helping the builders build illegal property,” Kumar said.