The Ghaziabad district magistrate has directed officials of the district administration to stop the salary distribution of 35 officers present in different departments due to their inability to dispose of public complaints timely and in a qualitative manner, said officials familiar with the matter on Friday.
The officials of the district administration said that the list includes all officer-rank officials of different departments whose score in the chief minister’s Integrated Grievance Redressal System (IGRS) was found to have an unsatisfactory feedback score of zero for the month of September.
To be sure, IGRS is a centralized online platform for citizens, used for filing complaints related to various government departments, tracking of the complaint status and their disposal status in a transparent manner.
“Ravindra Mandar, district magistrate, during a review, has directed that the salaries of these 35 officers of their respective departments for the month of September will not be paid till they improve their rankings in the IGRS complaints disposal. The district during a state-level review overall secured 69th spot (out of 75 districts in Uttar Pradesh) in the month of August and 51st rank in the month of September. The ranking would have improved if these officials had worked upon the disposal of public complaints in a timely and qualitative manner,” said Vivek Mishra, additional district magistrate.
A list shared by the district administration includes the names of officials holding posts like district sports officer, district development officer, superintending engineer of UP Avas Vikas (Loni), divisional logging manager of the forest corporation, executive engineers of the electricity department from Ghaziabad and Loni, sub-registrar (stamps and registration) at Loni, zonal officer of the municipal corporation, officials of the transport department and UP Jal Nigam, among others.
“Due to these 35 officials, the ranking of the district was affected. We can say that their salaries for the month of September will not be paid till they improve performance, which is reviewed daily on the portal. If they fail to do so, they will not get a salary during the festival of Diwali,” said ADM Mishra.
“Two of our sub-registrars are facing the action by the district magistrate. To name a few, there are instances where people try to block the registry of a third party, and we cannot block it without any material facts and evidence. In other cases complainants want us to act as soon as their complaint is received. In such cases, there is a process which needs to be followed as per norms. So, in many such cases, the complainants leave adverse feedback,” said a senior officer from the stamps and registration department who wished not to be named.