Good idea

Prime Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai has made some good moves – populist in the eyes of critics – since his appointment to the highest executive post last month. He opted to first ride on home-made Mustang jeep and then immediately made public his private email address via the Facebook page of his personal aide in order to connect himself with the people and solicit their feedback. He then chose to fly economy class to New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting.



Now, he is all set to reach out to the public via a control room at the Office of Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM). Reportedly, such a control room will be operative within the next two weeks. The idea is to deal in a timely and effective manner with complaints, obstacles and concerns felt by the public. The said control room will take up and try to settle public grievances and other problems of public nature ranging from malpractices, delay in service delivery, any kind of criminal activities, and social incidents. It will remain open round the clock, take up matters of public concern and initiate steps to address and resolve as soon as possible any hurdles facing the people.



Interestingly, besides taking up public problems, another most important task of the control room will be receiving daily progress reports from all the ministries, compiling them and furnishing a compiled report to the prime minister. Such a mechanism, which would work under direct supervision of the PM himself, would indeed be very effective and fruitful. Such a system would be more than useful in a country like Nepal where public grievances are seldom taken seriously and where general public is frustrated by the snail pace of working style of the bureaucracy.



The conceived control room will promptly instruct the Ministry of Home Affairs, the police or any other government agency concerned based on the nature of the problems and the concerns expressed by the public. The prime minister will decide the nature of rewards and punishments to be given to government employees on the basis of daily reports.



The government should immediately implement this idea and help the people to solve their problems. The idea is a good one as it would bring greater accountability among the civil servants and would give the public a huge relief. It should, however, not impede on the mandate of security agencies. Also important would be to not make this body another bureaucratic menace as after all the office would be run by bureaucrats themselves. If the control room is run by a smaller group under the supervision of the PM, it would be a good step forward in public grievance redressal system in Nepal.

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