Govt to come up with Grievance Redressal Bill to check graft

Minister says the bill will have in its ambit officials at the level of Tehsildar and Block Development Officer and also address the complaints on the functioning of Public Distribution System

PTI | August 25, 2011



Amid a demand that Parliament should pass a strong Lokpal Bill, the Government on Monday said it will soon come up with a draft Grievance Redressal Bill that will also address the issue of corruption at local level.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said the issue of grievance redressal has been "under discussion for a long time" with his cabinet colleagues Kapil Sibal and Salman Khurshid.

"Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also agrees that we must do something on grievance redressal mechanism," Ramesh told reporters in the Capital.

"The bill I am working on now, and I hope to make a draft public by the end of this week will address the problems of grievance redressal at local level," he said.

Ramesh said his Ministry can use MGNREGA's experience and it is one government programme with "the most elaborate system of institutionalised mechanism through social audit”.

"I have tried to extrapolate from that and see whether we can have legislation that addresses the concerns that many people have been raising that what do you do about corruption at cutting edge levels," the Minister said.

"So what we are working on is a grievance redressal bill that will take the NREGA experience and make it applicable across the board. So anybody who has a grievance as part of an entitlement programme can take recourse to this legislation that we are proposing," he said.

The Minister said the bill will have in its ambit officials at the level of Tehsildar and Block Development Officer and also address the complaints on the functioning of Public Distribution System (PDS).

"We need a multi-layered mechanism (to check corruption)-- central level, state level and local level," he said.

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