[Mustang Sammy]

After complaining and listening to others complain about how bad our cities are, how no one follow traffic rules, and how infrastructure is allowed to break down without response, one day I had enough.

A traffic light in my Mumbai locality had not been working for 2 weeks, and it was a free-for-all at that junction. All I did was tweet about it with a pic of the locality, tagging the Mumbai police. To my utter surprise, they tweeted a response within an hour that the local traffic police had been asked to look into it. The signal was fixed within 3 days.
As we know, the existence of a traffic signal does not mean people will actually follow it. Sure enough, people still drive past the red light, 2, 3, 4 and more-wheeled alike. Another tweet followed, again responded to within a couple of hours, and lo and behold a traffic warden was standing there this evening.

Another traffic signal in Pune Cantonment has not been working properly (incorrectly programmed) for the past 2+ years!! People just drive past it like it doesn't exist. Another tweet, this time to the Pune Municipal corporation, and an online complaint filed on the Cantonment board website, which is a textbook example of how NOT to design online forms by the way.
The Cantonment authorities assigned, reassigned, and then again reassigned the complaint, helpfully updating me via SMS. It was finally resolved and closed in 1 week.
Upon driving past that area, hoping to see the signal working properly, I was shocked (or maybe not, it is Pune after all) to see nothing had changed.
Logging onto the Cantonment portal, it was observed that the complaint had been closed with the helpful message "this will be resolved as part of the smart city project in some time".
After an hour of deep breathing and mindfulness meditation, I re-filed the complaint, and tweeted a screenshot of the offending message that has caused my BP to shoot up 100 points, hoping to shame the authorities into acting. This seems to have worked, as the complaint is now closed with a message that the traffic light has been reprogrammed. This time, it was indeed fixed.

The system is far from perfect, but if we work within it and escalate these kinds of civic issues, we CAN make a difference. At any rate, it is better than impotent groaning and moaning.

How have the experiences of others on this forum been in this regard?

[racer_sk]

It is shocking (in a happy way) to see authorities starting to respond. We have already heard about examples from Railways where they also resolve many complaints on time.

I would also appreciate the Upgrades done to Indian Passport Department. In many cases we have seen that it has become a seamless process to apply for new Passport or get Passport renewed provided you have correct documents in place.

[GTO]

Have first-hand seen results from PGPortal (Heard of pgportal.gov.in? About time you do) & Twitter.

We live right on the beach and the lane ends on the beach side. Every night, people come down there to party. Cars, couples, noise, fights, booze and sometimes, drugs. It's been a perpetual problem since ages. Recently, a neighbour started tweeting about the problem and tagging the Mumbai Police.

What do you know?! Since 4 - 5 months now, a police van arrives at 10 PM dot & tells the revellers to scoot! By 1015, the lane is now deserted .

[Dodge_Viper]

I was using the grievances portal to highlight issues specially with Pune Satara highway. Always got a response with proper explanation. Latest was in October last year when Khandala ghat had developed massive and dangerous potholes. Raised a grievance on 27th and got a response on 29th mentioning the fix is already in progress. They even sent a pdf file having photos of the work going on.



Satara Sectio_Maintenance works.pdf

For highways, grievance portal does work and they do respond.

[anjan_c2007]

It's a hit or miss chance and very much depends on the morality of the people at the destination point who are viewing your tweet.

So where human beings are still seeing your tweets we can expect action, else if robot like people view them, it's a miss.

[vkivaturi]

Responsiveness of the government agencies varies from state to state. Central government departments are little more helpful (not making any political statement here). I have got many grievances resolved by following some basic steps:

- If the issue is related to an agency run by Central Govt, use http://pgportal.gov.in to file the grievance.
- Do not hesitate to file RTIs. For Central Govt, it is https://rtionline.gov.in. You do not have to be some activist or fear for your life. RTI is a very common and effective tool.
- State Government story depends on the state you are in. I am in Telangana.
- Traffic police (at least West Hyderabad) has a very effective Twitter handle (@CYBTRAFFIC) and WhatsApp number. Click a picture of violation and send it to them. Call them directly in case of traffic jams. Traffic signal lights not working - just message them. I am not saying resolution is 100% of the time, but I have a decent success rate in addressing issues.
- Like any other state, Telangana also has different departments managing infra projects. Roads & Building department (similar to PWD), TSIIC (industrial infra), GHMC (municipal corp), CRMP (privatised maintenance of roads) etc. Some respond and others dont. But what is important is to keep trying, file RTIs, give news bites to local journalists, email higher officials, tweet, write letters to department heads, meet local engineers etc.

Many of us have simply given up on infra issue resolutions. But there are many avenues that we can keep trying. Yes, success rate is max 10%. So what? 10% is much greater that 0%.