Daily Times

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) while practicing their traditional negligence on solving public complaints, failed to respond over public complaints lodged online thereby putting issues under the carpet-despite launching their online portal in January 2017-as per the copy of the document available with this scribe.

According to the available documents, the Civic Agency back in January 2017 launched its in-house online Complaint Management System (CMS) with an objective to receive and redress public grievances/complaints through singular system under one umbrella, including a couple of issues linked with CDA and its adjacent departments. However, more than 1,000 complaints of various contours are pending in different directorates of the Capital Body awaiting to be attended and responded over.

“However it has been observed with great concerns that the complaints on CDA & CMS are not being attended/ responded by a majority of directorates despite providing login IDs to many directorates- as thousands of complaints still remain pending on online web portal,” the documents added.

It is pertinent to mention here that Senate Standing Committee in last meeting lamented CDA over its poor progress regarding solving public complaints pending on their web portal. The committee further issued strict directives to redress the public complaints and solve them as soon as possible, but the Civic Agency till yet didn’t act on directives of the committee.

Officials complain over limited resources terming the swarming complaints-an ‘additional burden and a ‘headache’

Daily Times contacted various directorates about who is the focal person redressing the online complaints of general public, but no directorate nominated a focal person not only to redress public complaints of general public on Prime Minister Citizen portal but CDA owned CMS system as well. When CMS system was installed in January 2017, it was made necessary that every directorate will nominate its focal person to redress public issues. However, the matter of nominating focal persons has still not been taken seriously by CDA.

A source in CDA told Daily Times that most of directorates have lack of expertise on human resource to address the issues professionally and technically. Most of the directorates are of the view that the online complaint system is a ‘headache’ and additional ‘burden’ on them.

The source added that applications regarding land grabbing, encroachment, violations and other issues are pending in different directorates and even some of the directorates didn’t log in their IDs provided by the concerned for redressing the public issues.

Another source added that different directorates of CDA even didn’t take actions to redress the complaints lodged online on Pakistan Citizen Portal established by Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan. Most of the directorates respond that issues have been solved but many issues still await due attention.

A complainer who sent their issue regarding the encroachment in a crowded sector of Islamabad, told that he forwarded two complains to the citizen portal regarding the encroachment in their area- they have forwarded it to CDA but the matter is still pending with a DG of CDA despite the fact that three months have passed and still no action has been taken against the violators.

An official of the Encroachment Wing at CDA told Daily Times that when they get complaints through citizen portal, it isn’t that much simple to go direct to the file and take action; under CDA laws, they observe various officials’ directives on the issue. When asked whether Encroachment Wing ever takes action on complaints received on CDA’s CMS web portal, he replied that he didn’t know about that process. Another official of the Wing expressed the same response on the issue.

Daily Times sent text messages and made various calls to DG Administration Nadeem Akbar Malik regarding the issue but he remained unavailable for comments.

Published in Daily Times, January 29^th 2019.