Meekosam Team receiving the Award from R K Bajaj, Senior Fellow, Skoch Development Foundation on behalf of Sundar Balakrishna, Director – ESD, GoAP

It’s been Andhra Pradesh government’s vision to see to it that people living at the last mile or bottom of the pyramid have enhanced standards of living and are able to avail the benefits of the schemes and programmes implemented by the government uniformly, transparently, seamlessly and instantly without any hassle.

Meekosam is designed by the Office of Director, Electronics Services Delivery, Government of Andhra Pradesh, as a single window new Integrated Public Grievance Redressal System. Under this system, all the grievance petitions would be received at the Chief Ministers’ Office (CMO) / Secretary / HoDs / District Collectorates, District / Mandal level offices; registered, tracked and redressed on a common platform, linked to the Aadhaar of the petitioner to ensure proper accountability.

Challenges

• ‘Prajavani’ software developed by NIC was being used in 9 districts.
• A separate application was being used in CMO with no linkage with Prajavani.
• Different protocols being followed in different districts.
• Different database schemas / masters.
• No linkage with Secretary / HoDs.
• No facility to register grievances over phone.
• History of the petition’s / petitioner’s earlier endorsements not available.

Solution

The project ‘Meekosam’ was initiated in October 2014, conceived at the highest level. It was soft launched in February 2015 in Krishna and Anantapuram districts and formally rolled out across the State by the Chief Minister on 26 May 2015 covering all of 13 districts. It immediately facilitated the horizontal and vertical integration of all government departments across the State enabling them to work together in a seamless manner using specially designed dashboards.

The grievances are identified for each department and classified into various Categories and Sub-categories for redressal, which are about 1,000 pertaining to 33 State Departments. Citizens can submit petitions at any of the government offices in the Mandal, District or State headquarters. SMS alerts are sent to the petitioner at every stage of escalation / closure.

Presently, it covers 30 departments and has 25,000 departmental logins. The application has been equipped with features to include a penalty on erring officials who delay services beyond the service level agreement. It has become a single window for grievance petitions for all government petitions. The applications can also be made online by netizens.

Outcome

Under the new system, all the grievance petitions received are tracked and redressed to ensure proper accountability. A comprehensive 24×7 Call Centre facility is there to address all kinds of grievances. Specialists like agriculture officers have also been appointed to address farmers’ queries. Out-bound feedback-cum-audit system is one of the further refinements of the system.

Up to October 2016, 60,87,223 grievances were registered with Meekosam, out of which 58,87,072 were redressed—clocking a 90.39 per cent resolution rate. As on date, the satisfaction level of the citizenry is around 59 per cent. For instance, between May 2015-October 2016, Krishna District received 912,850 grievances out of which 94 per cent were resolved. Similarly, West Godavari received 405,773, wherein 99.64 per cent were resolved.

The Meekosam project is replicable, as the office of the electronic services delivery—MeeSeva—is the owner of the source code. State Data Centre (SDC) and State Wide Area Network (APSWAN) are integrated with the system.