Sudarsan Maharana
Post NewsNetwork
BHUBANESWAR: In what looks like a hopeless scenario, the state agriculture department has mostly ignored complaints from agriculturists — and that includes even those routed through the CM’s Grievance Cell to its consideration and immediate action. In the last five years, it has gone through and disposed of less than three per cent of the complaints sent from CMO, eight to be precise, which means too little.
They came through the e-Abhijoga cell, that was meant to speed up the case. Yet, the result is virtually nil. Farmers in the state have been taken for a ride. The state’s agriculture department is suffering due largely to the apathy of the officials, who have little interest in taking matters forward. Policies and programmes framed by the government for the benefit of farmers are scuttled either by inaction or by motivated action.
Still, the government has been claiming that it had speeded up the consideration and disposal of the complaints/grienvances in recent years. State agriculture department is for most part a white elephant, hardly doing a good job, and wasting time in unproductive ways. The department disposed of only 2.33 per cent of the complaints it received from the CM’s office since 2010.
Sources told Orissa Post that the agriculture department received a total 344 petitions from the the CM’s grievance cell – after first filtering — between September 2010 and May 2015 through e-Abhijoga. However, it disposed of just 8 petitions. As many as 336 petitions, about which the CM office prima facie found substance, have not been acted upon.
In 2010, between September and December, the department received 50 cases. Of this, it disposed of four complaints. The rest 46 are in cold storage. During January and December 2011, it received 52 petitions, of which two were attended to.
Likewise, in 2012, from January to December, it received around 71 petitions. Of this, no petition was seriously attended to or disposed of. During 2013 (January to December), only two cases were disposed of against 95 petitions it received.
In 2014 (January to December) and 2015 (January to May), the department received 47 and 24 appeals for redressal. However, no petition could be sorted out.
The department is drawing flack over the issue as the state government-formulated priority areas have adopted the major e-Governance initiative to bring transparency in public administration and grievance redressal. The e-Abhijoga is the outcome of this endeavor.
The objective of e-Abhijoga is to provide an online grievance redressal and monitoring mechanism. The state government has introduced this system in a collaborative effort with the Union Government’s department of administrative reforms, the national informatics centre and the administrative reforms department. The pension and public grievances department of the Orissa government was also involved. Petitions usually related to pension, irrigation, water supply, electrification, roads, atrocities and individual problems like sanction of funds from CMs Relief Fund. However, all the petitions sent though e-Abhijoga to the agriculture department for redressal and disposal are pending despite repeated reminders from the state government.
Sources said that in a recently-held review meeting of the agriculture department, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik came down heavily on officials for not taking up these issues seriously. He asked them to come out of their slumber and take adequate measures for redressal of people’s grievances.
A senior official said, “The agriculture department has been asked to expedite the process of disposal of these petitions and it has also been directed to expedite submission of the Action Taken Report (ATR) through e-Abhijoga portal.”
