Chhattisgarh student develops app for tribals to register grievances with administration

Chhattisgarh
28 Aug, 2020

Ankur Sinha, an engineering student of a government engineering college in the Communist Party of India (CPI-) (Maoist)-hit Bastar district in Chhattisgarh, has developed a mobile application �Guhaar� for the local administration through which the tribals will be able to directly lodge their complaints or get any help in their dialects such as Halbi and Gondi.

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The complaints can be lodged via a short message service (SMS) or a voice message in their own dialects that will be registered with the district authorities following a translation.

Over 500 complaints, primarily in Hindi, have been filed and resolved by the Bastar district administration to date.

Commonplace problems include an apathetic public distribution system (PDS), water woes, errors in caste and birth certificates. Social issues like ill-treatment of ageing parents also find a mention among the complaints with the district authorities.

The app allows a complainant to update the complaint and the person can also give ratings whether h/she is satisfied with the grievance redressal mechanism.

�Last year, my team members and I had met the district administration. We had held talks on Guhaar that seeks to redress complaints. The basic concept is to redress the issues that might have escaped the state government�s attention or have been unattended for long,� said Sinha.

Sinha said that Guhaar would be offered in multiple languages and dialects soon.

�At present, the app provides support in Hindi and English. But come September, it will be offered in Gondi and Halbi dialects for which we taken help from the experts,� he added.

�Guhaar is a blockchain-based app, where all the complaints are immutable and traceable. Every complaint carries a fingerprint. Complaints can be lodged via a smartphone and a feature phone. Soon, a WhatsApp feature will be introduced. Guhaar also has an additional feature of recording a voice message along with the complainant�s photograph in a bid to put a face to a name,� Sinha said.

The district administration is all praise for the app.

�We are trying to bridge the communication gap between the local tribals and the district administration, thanks to this app. We plan to aggregate all complaints in one place shortly,� said Rajat Bansal, district collector (DC), Bastar.

�Guhaar is a strong public grievance redressal system launched by the district administration. It empowers local tribals to file a complaint, which is now at their fingertip,� said Abinash Misra , a probationary Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer posted in Bastar district.

Misra waxed eloquent about Guhaar�s ability to fix accountability on state government officials.

�Guhaar takes a dispassionate view as far as accountability is concerned. Each complaint will be forwarded to the respective state government department, where officials need to resolve it in a timely manner. The district collector will monitor the grievances on a weekly basis. Pendency will attract a penalty and its modalities are in the works,� said Misra.

Shubhrashu Chaudhary, an activist and writer, who is also working on this project by providing transcripts of local dialects, said Guhaar in its current avatar helps only the privileged few.

�We are trying to make it more inclusive. Work is in progress for a two-way linkage with the Bultoo app, where people living on the wrong side of the digital divide can also participate. We want to ensure that they can report the complaints in their own dialects such as Gondi and Halbi. We are also using songs in local dialects in a bid to break the vicious cycle of hopelessness, the main ingredient of violence and violent ideology in the region,� said Chaudhary, who has developed the Bultoo app that is inspired by bluetooth, a wireless technology.