Tag Archives: delhi

“Where is Teja?” & “When Will He Fix Our Roads?”

Three kids are arguing as to whose father is the fastest.

One says,
“My father is the fastest, he can overtake the arrow that he shoots with his bow.”

The second one,
“My father is even faster – when he hunts, he can shoot an animal with his gun and run up to the animal before it falls down.”

The third,

“You actually don’t understand what speed is. My father works in municipality. He finishes work at 4:30 pm, but he’s back home by 3:45 pm already.”

Jokes aside, let me begin the article with all due respect to the municipal authorities who have been going all out to resolve citizen complaints. Most of them do. And then there are the others. There is this super annoying thing which is incredibly common in the case of certain municipal corporations.

Frequent Employee Transfers.

Last time when we were so confused about ‘transfers’, we were watching Mr.Bajaj and Teja getting transferred in Andaz Apna Apna.

teja

For the uninitiated, ChangeBhai maintains an extensive employee database of all parties it works with. Needless to say, the database is updated frequently (weekly). Mostly, the moment a citizen issue comes in, we first forward it to the right ground level employee (junior-most) and then work our way up, if not resolved. But, one could have never speculated about the frequency with which the junior most employees are being transferred for certain cities. It is like the guy sitting on top is getting sadistic pleasure in doing so. No kidding. This does happen in India. Read about this case where MD of J&K’s Road Transport Corporation was frequently transferring class iv employees ‘just for a li’l fun’.

Refer to issue #A0561 “Road hasn’t been made for decades”. After visiting the issue site and being assured of resolving the issue by a certain Mr.Safif, nothing happens! Why? Because the gentleman got transferred without any hint or information about his replacement. Seriously, eh?

Now, one has to just wait to hear from the replacement while the road lies in tattered condition. Sheesh. We so wish the new guy comes in and identifies himself like Teja as soon as the confusion begins.

*drumbeats*

TEJA MAIN HOON. MARK IDHAR HAI.

 

Where there’s a will…there’s a ‘ROAD’ !

Q: When is the right time to do the right thing?
A: Who can say, but it’s usually most wise to start today.”

Here’s an interesting case study from ChangeBhai’s stable which saw a very active citizen upload a long pending issue of her neighbourhood, minutes after we launched the ChangeBhai portal officially. She thought it was most wise to start immediately. Here’s the story:

It so happened that minutes after we launched ChangeBhai, one of our early users uploaded this particular issue (Issue No. A0003) titled ‘Bad Road in Rohini’.  The issue was put into process by the ChangeBhai team within a few days. It seemed that this road in question was a major source of grief for the residents of this area. Even the most active ones had given up when it came to taking it up with the authorities. It has been like this since the last 3 years now. You can say that that delay had indeed turned out to be the worst form of denial here.

A short note on why getting this road fixed was critical:

rohini sector 9

20130928_150356

This road connects around 30 housing societies of Sector 9, Rohini to a busy commercial area housing, amongst other things, three shopping malls: City Centre, Metro walk & Shopper’s Stop. The condition of the road was beyond pathetic and yet, the citizens were widely using it, as it was the quickest way to reach the commercial area.

While most of the other issues we were receiving were getting resolved with minor delays (if any), this one stuck out like a sore thumb! After a lot of follow-ups (read escalations, verbal threats, giving up, getting-a-grip-again, sticking-daily-motivational-quotes-post-its etc.), we managed to get the authorities to approve the construction of this road early this year! A lot of follow ups later, the work finally started in February. Uff.

One of our newly hired management trainees has depicted the history of this case graphically as below:

delhi issue timeline

Have a look at the images below and we are sure, you will be motivated to report a similar long pending issue of your area:

20140220_130447 delhi-4