PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government departments managed to resolve 21,768 complaints filed through the Pakistan Citizens Portal app since its inception.

Details available with Dawn show that a total of 36,006 complaints were filed from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of which 21,768 were resolved.

The government departments of Punjab managed to resolve 53 per cent complaints, while Sindh and Balochistan trail behind with complaint resolution ratio of 2.45 and 0.31 per cent.

On the other hand, the federal government departments resolved 40 per cent of the complaints and Gilgit-Baltistan 0.02 per cent while Azad Jammu and Kashmir departments failed to resolve even a single of 1,644 complaints filed through the system.

The citizen portal app was launched earlier in October, and a similar system has been working in the province since early days of the PTI’s last tenure.

PM Office asks departments to properly process all the cases

The details show that the system has a total of 677,278 registered users from all over the country.

Interestingly, the highest numbers of 258,129 users are registered from the KP, while Punjab follows with 256,760 users.

The highest number of 148,282 complaints was filed from Punjab and 40,653 from Sindh while KP stood third with 36,006. Also, 93,727 complaints were filed regarding the federal government, 3,454 from Balochistan, 1644 AJK and 176 from Gilgit-Baltistan.

The system has so far received 323,870 complaints of which 172,459 have been resolved. Punjab has seen resolution of over 75,000 complaints, which amounts to 53 per cent, while KP’s solution share comes to 12.62 per cent of the total.

Separately, the Prime Minister Office has also written to the federal departments and provincial chief secretaries, stating that quality of resolution reflects that the whole system has been left in the hands of subordinate staff with no supervision.

“The situation is alarming and thus calls for immediate intervention at your end,” the letter read.

It notes that resolved complaints are devoid of courtesy and lack in logical responses why a certain relief could not be granted and that also lacks evidence in case a complaint has been resolved or assigned to another office.

It also points to resolution of complaints in haste to show progress and marking complaints as resolved while it related to some other department.

The letter asks the government departments to reopen all resolved cases and properly process them under the rules and regulations and for any inconvenience caused or inability to grant a relief due, the citizen should be offered apology, if appropriate.

It also asked the officials to take strict action against those responsible for negligence.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2019