The Telegraph

Fed up with the piled up garbage in your locality? Feeling unsafe because the streetlight has conked off in your area? Angry over sanitation workers not visiting your locality to collect garbage from households or due to overflowing drains? Worry not, help is at hand, says the Patna Municipal Corporation.

All you need to do, the civic body says, is click a picture of the civic issue you want addressed and post it on the City of Patna, a mobile application launched by the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC).

Though the civic body had launched the application in October this year, but it was mostly languishing because of some technical problems.

The civic body claims it has fixed the problems of the app now and wants to encourage residents to use it to address their day-to-day problems. One can download the application by logging onto the PMC’s website, `www.pmc.bihar.gov.in`. You can find the link of the app on the site. Download it and install it on your smartphone to register your complaint.

“We were not popularising this app because there was some problem in its functioning in the initial stage,” said deputy municipal commissioner Vishal

Anand. “We have fixed the problem and now it is working. Residents can get their grievances addressed with the help of this app.”

Vishal said that the civic body has fixed 24 hours as the deadline to address each civic problem.

“The Swachh Survekshan being conducted by the Union ministry of urban development talks about getting people’s civic grievances addressed with the help of such type of mobile application. As per the norm, the civic body can either popularise the Swachhata Application (launched by the Union government for the Swachh Survekshan) or the urban local body can come up with their own mobile application for it. We chose to come up with our own mobile application to address civic issues. Our mobile app has been tagged with the Swachhata App. As per norm, we will be getting more points on the basis of the number of complaints put up by residents on the app and also if we resolve those complaints in the minimum span of time,” Vishal said.

To ensure that there is no laxity on the part of the officials concerned, senior civic officials will directly monitor the complaint and see whether officials have solved the complaint within the specified time or not, Vishal added.