Questions/Answers

Prior to June 2016 manual systems existed in Kerala Chief Ministers office (CMO) for processing and disposal of grievances and distress-relief petitions. Initiative: The Kerala Governments’ Straight-forward suite is a comprehensive fully electronic, transparent and accountable grievance-redressal platform and a humane normative system for emergency distress-relief for the needy which is systematically monitored by the CMO for responsiveness and efficiency. Donations portal a component of the suite mobilises resources from the public. Issues addressed 1. Delay in taking decisions on grievance petitions and distress applications which are forwarded from the CMO for enquiry to a field office and taking decisions based on them. 2. Inability in undertaking a detailed analysis of the petitions received, grouping them suitably and arriving at common decisions for the benefit of all as well as normative decisions in genuine individual cases. Objectives: • Establish a result-oriented system based on service benchmarks and metrics for efficiency and effectiveness of grievance-handling and relief-disbursement implemented based on improvements in the four pillars-systems, processes, people and citizens • Based on analysis of grievances and relief requests, to formulate policy decisions and special programs to wipe out the tears of masses initiated. • Based on an analysis of grievances and relief requests, devise systems for normative and specialised handling. • Establish a system built on brand loyalty, credibility and trust of the highest political office; reinforced with the pride, passion and commitment of the polity, accountability of public servants and whistle-blower rights of civil-society using a technology-platform which is centrally monitored for ensuring normative fair, efficient and transparent service delivery for the needy and unheard. • Based on learning of content, develop systems for intelligent routing and setting up of causality driven disposal based on intelligent systems modeling. • Establish a donations portal for mobilising resources from the public for distress-relief.

Straight-forward suite is a mechanism to provide redressal of grievances and speedy distress-relief. The grievance volumes have grown substantively. In 2016, 38710 applications were processed which grew to 147294 in 2017. The grievances handled during 2018 and 2019 were respectively 1,23,236 and 1,28,796. The amount disbursed as relief grew form Rs.35.62 Cr. to Rs.142.54 Cr. in 2017 Rs.133.78 Cr in 2018 and Rs.65.45 Cr in 2019. The growth in volumes reflect an inclusive growth. Coverage of Straight-forward services were also good in backward districts. Distress disbursement was good among women and significant among marginalised communities.

SDG16: The average turn-around- time(TAT) for grievances decreased from 152 days to 21 days and 140 days to 55 days in relief. The proportion of closures of grievances during 2016-2019 increased from 6.88% to 45.94% Proportion of disbursed relief applications increased from 36.37% to 58.09%. SDG10: Addressed inequalities by providing opportunities for free and fair grievance-redressal. 11.10% of grievances where from the back-ward districts which is higher than their proportion by population (9.69%) The distress- relief coverage was 11.90% in the backward-districts which is more than the proportion of the population. The vulnerability reduction through CMDRF among marginalised groups like Scheduled-castes and Scheduled- tribes was also substantive.CMDRF covered support to people under distress. 88.99% of the applications covered were for medical support 48.67% of the assistance distributed was for chronic-diseases. SDG3: CMDRF covered support to people under distress. 88.99% applications covered were for medical support 48.67% assistance distributed was for chronic-diseases. SDG1: Kerala was affected by a deluge in August 2018, one of its kind in the past hundred years. This affected a large portion of the population especially the poor and marginalised. CMDRF under took a campaign for mobilisation of resources from well-wishers through a campaign. The resources mobilised so far comes to Rs.4663.77 Crores.

The decision for establishing Straight-forward originated from the commitment of the highest political office which declared that functionaries in government have to consider the decisions they make on their files could impact the lives of many. The outcomes of the new system for normative decisions in contrast to arbitrary decisions have started manifesting in improved responsiveness and transparency. The demand for quality service-delivery and responsible public -service could sustain this initiative in the long-term. It is financially sustainable since running costs are lower, socially sustainable since it addresses vulnerabilities of the deprived and environmentally sustainable because it is green.

Prior to implementation of the initiative, processing of applications received was manual and there was no mechanism for escalating pendency .This has been replaced. A fully electronic-system with clearly defined benchmarks for processing has been established with clear role definitions for district officers and state level officers on closure of petitions and for submitting reports on field enquiries conducted. A dashboard reflecting the progress and a system for automatic escalation of pendencies is in place. This has resulted in improvements in time of processing and the proportion of petitions reaching a logical conclusion. In distress relief a rudimentary manual system with no customer feedback, tracking and time limits for processing existed. This has been replaced by a workflow with automatic routing to the village for to ascertaining genuineness of the application. Delegations were increased at various levels and processes simplified. A system of notifications on status of the request to the customers and an electronic mechanism for pendency escalation have been established. Improvements in the quantum of disbursement and the proportion of distress relief requests disbursed has been achieved. Access through customer touch points available throughout the state ensures leaving no one behind.

Over time policy approaches in the state to women have changed, from 'welfare' to 'development', 'empowerment' and 'inclusion', towards more gender-favourable outcomes.. Kerala is one among the places world over where access to internet is a right. Mobile-penetration among women in Kerala and access to community service-centres for web-services for is high. The system for electronic-processing of grievances and distress-relief have given women an opportunity for airing their grievances to the highest political office directly and fearlessly. In distress-relief the proportion of distribution of benefits for women applicants was (54%) above their population representation (52%).

Persons aggrieved following unresponsive administrative actions, delay in administrative processing and inadequate policy decisions are the target groups in grievance-redressal. In distress-relief the persons distressed due to illness, accident, natural calamities, trauma etc. are the beneficiaries. It has emerged as an emergency medical assistance for the vulnerable in stark contrast to the failing market-based insurance based model. The initiative has catered to disintermediation, enhanced the processing efficiencies, reduced the delays in decision making leading to an improvement in transparency and responsiveness outcomes for the public at large. The average turn-around-time of a petition was 152 days in 2016 reduced to 115 days in 2017, 25 days in 2018 and 21 days in 2019. The proportion of petitions closed was 6.88% in 2017, 21.31% in 2018 and 61.12% in 2019.The average turn-around-time of relief petitions at the state level was 140 days in 2017, 82 days in 2018, 63 days in 2019. At the district level this was 55 days in 2017, 42 days in in 2018 and 37 days in 2019. The closing of distress-relief petitions trended as follows 14% in 2016, 76% in 2017, 78% in 2018 and 80% in 2019.

The major milestones in the Straight-forward were as follows 1. Proof of Concept (PoC) (8th June 2016-3rd October 2016) Digitizing inwards in the grievance-redressal, issuing acknowledgement, recording minutes in the Chief Minister’s Computer Cell-(CMCC), summarizing the petition, routing the petition to field offices forwarding the investigation report back to the CMO, search function were the features. The PoC model for distress-relief involved digitization of the application, routing for field enquiry, the workflow, revision of delegation of powers and a dashboard for examining pendencies were the outcome of this phase. 2. Pilot implementation (3rd October 2016-31st March 2019) Routing a petition to multiple offices, re-routing a petition to a new office, integration of SMS-gateway, expansion of office network, creation of a dashboard with drill-down for pendencies, tweaking of processing of petitions by field offices, streamlining systems of user management, pushing petitions from grievance-redressal to the secretariat workflow was done during the period. The role definitions of district level and state level officers, guidelines for follow-up action on the petitions including time limits were spelt-out. Streamlining the distress-relief application, module for elected representatives, electronic-transfer of funds were additions during the process. The integration of community databases for beneficiary identification, the provision for grading of petitions based on vulnerability index and health status index, mobile system for forwarding medical certificates were done during the phase. 3. Donation portal (18 August 2018 – 31st March 2019) The deluge of unpreceded proportions which struck the Kerala State was the background for developing a crowd funding companion for distress-relief. 19 gateways,16 banks,7 payment modes were integrated in sixty days. 4. Integration (April 2019 onwards) Integration of the grievance and distress was done in Straight Forward. Through this the workflow component was stabilized and user interfaces fine-tuned.20 virtual-machines hosted with a 100mbps bandwidth covers the Java-MySQL platform.

Building the trust at the user level during the PoC and pilot were major challenges. It took fifteen months for dispensing of the system of forwarding of the physical petitions with the instructions for processing to the field along with the electronic system. Departments which were technically strong like the police created models emerging as beacons. Stabilising the Indian-language-interface in the plethora of operating systems versions was a technical challenge. The CMCC taking full control of the situation by arriving at a full set of guidelines for processing of petitions and establishing monitoring and control also took time.

Building involvement of user-departments through nodal-officers was an institutional-innovation. The outcomes of a grievance system is the capacity of the authority to analyse spirit of grievances . The ability of a distress-relief system is the capacity to adapt to the context of the beneficiary. The Straight-forward has been able to achieve the above innovations through insights gained through analysis of the applications. Distinct petitions posing complex or prolonged issues are analysed to identify systemic-failures. Innovative-solutions are attempted within the available legal-framework. In handful of such cases strategic-decisions for general benefit of beneficiaries at large were also taken.

The source of inspiration was the Lakhina pattern– the path breaking model of administrative reforms such as enhancement of office environment, simplification of procedures and betterment of customer relations tried out in Ahmednagar district in Maharashtra which has emerged as an inspiration model for public administrators within the country and abroad.

The application for handling grievances at the Chief Minister’s Office was replicated at the district-level in two districts and in one minister’s office. The adaptation in district-collectorates started in December 2017 and the Industry Minister’s Office in February 2019. 5549 petitions have been processed. The average closure of petitions was 42.57%. The Industry Minister’s application covered 1680 petitions with closure of 48.69%. The adaptation of the application to the new context was done by the original development team at the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT). Subsequently migration of the application to Java technology has also been completed. The application has been shrink-wrapped into a configurable-product ready for deployment.

Not Applicable.

The implementation team is the Chief Minister’s Computer Cell with 29 functionaries headed by a deputy secretary. The application development, testing and field support was done by a team Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT). A private partner of C-DIT has replace the application migration to Java. Costs of application development and implementation by C-DIT comes to Rs.4.98crores. Costs for Java migration comes to Rs.4.58 crores.

Implementation of Straight-forward has been institutionalised. The supervision and monitoring is handled by the Chief Minister’s Computer-Cell(CMCC). A helpdesk and a call-centre has been established. A nodal-officer has been identified in each department for co-ordination and another officer for handling user-administration. Application migration has been assigned to an IT company in Technopark jointly with C-DIT which originally developed the application.IT-infrastructure, training and support at the field-level is organised by C-DIT. An analytics facility has been established for developing deep-learning based decision-making. Savings by way of opportunity-cost of beneficiaries comes to Rs 293.53 crores so far which justifies the project.

Yes

The initiative was evaluated internally.The evaluation was done by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Thiruvananthapuram.

The tool used was usability evaluation method. The indicators used included i.) Recording the technology stack ii.) Application feedback through response of users iii.) Assessment of usability based on walkthrough iv.) Additional features demanded by customers.

The evaluation reported that basic functionalities required to perform the task/objectives are available already. A few issues of functionality of the application, additional features demanded by customers have been recorded. An action plan for fixing the problems was prepared. Some specific issues at the Indian language interface were identified as issues to be sorted out. Based on the evaluation report all the shortcomings in the application were rectified systematically.

Straight-forward grievance-handling connects 2650 community-Service-Centres, 5556 Grassroot-level offices, 799 block-level offices, Taluk-level offices 804, district level 973 and state-level offices 1442. Distress relief connects 2650 Community-Service-Centres 1669 village office, 77 Taluk-Offices, 14 District-Collectorates, Revenue-Secretariat and 140 offices of Members of the legislative assembly and 20 offices of Members of Parliament. The grievance redressal system is linked electronically with the secretariat workflow facilitating seamless pushing of petitions to the workflow. The application is also linked with iAPPs the workflow application of the police department. The distress relief system is electronically linked to the Aadhar database of the Unique Identity Authority of India, ration card database of the civil supplies department for improved user experience. Distress-relief is linked with the treasury application for direct-transfer of funds to beneficiaries. Single sign-on in the portal is linked to the Central Authentication System maintained by NIC through LDAP for seamless login for Central Service Officers. Straight-forward runs on a data centre at Bangalore with 20 virtual machines and a band width of 100 mbps. The solution is Java based with MySQL as database. The donation portal crowd-sourcing application links 18 banks, 8 aggregators and 21 gateways.

Beneficiaries, users and stakeholders at customer-touch-points were involved in design and implementation. The preliminary product design emerged from field visits, direct interaction with beneficiaries at the secretariat front office and intense initial consultations with users. Retired government functionaries provided inputs for business process re-engineering. Video conferencing with field officers, field visits to follow up pendencies and interaction with nodal officers helped in tweaking the application and arriving at guidelines for implementation. Interactions with Members of the Legislative Assembly and orientation /training of field functionaries/users provided meaningful feedback on application features, processes and guidelines. Continuous collaboration of the user team , development and testing teams resulted in improvement of the application and addition of new features. Critical responses from individual beneficiaries, well-wishers and whistle-blowers at the CMO was a regular source of inspiration and improvement. Partnerships were established with the network of Community -Service-Centres in the state and the District e-governance Societies of the Kerala State IT Mission. Migration to a new platform was done by an industry partner. Segregation of some petitions as priority-petitions, intense interaction with the petitioners and analysis of system failures resulted in innovative solutions and strategic interventions through policy decisions for wider benefit.

i) In Grievance-handling, a categorisation was made in to petitions which could be acted up on at the district-level and reply would be generated and passed on to the citizen at that level and petitions which require reports to be received in CM’s office. This delegation has reduced the number of hierarchies traversed reducing the turnaround time. ii) In distress-relief delegation to sanction financial assistance was additionally given to Revenue Special Secretary. The delegations of the District collector, Revenue Minister and Chief Minister have been enhanced. The delegation of powers and enhancement of slabs of relief has improved the turnaround. iii) In Straight-forward a mechanism of gap in data rectification through a helpdesk and call-centre support reducing petitions which require re-submissions. iv) In both Straight Forward a mechanism of alerts and escalation based on pendency in a seat has helped improving timely clearance of petitions. v) Grievance handling application has been integrated with iApps in Police department and e-office to make routing of files cross-platform speeding up turnaround time. vi) Single sign-on for central service officers through NIC LDAP and with local-government log-in has improved user experience. vii) User involvement and informed consensus on processes improves ownership,participation and performance.