Chief minister Nitish Kumar peruses an application in the new format at his janata darbar in Patna on Monday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, May 9: Chief minister Nitish Kumar has decided to exorcise his janata darbar ghosts, err, ghost-writers. He has introduced an application format which the complainants have to adhere to while presenting their plea before the chief minister.

The format includes details like the name of the applicant, place of residence, district, block, village, nearest police station, landline number and mobile number. The format also asks the applicant to write their problem in brief so that the chief minister does not need to go through the entire application.

Sources said the decision was taken after The Telegraph reported, in its April 19, 2011 edition, how an unidentified man was writing misleading applications on behalf of the complainants. The man used to charge Rs 20 per application.

At a previous janata darbar, Nitish was stumped when he discovered that seven applications were written in the same format. The language and the tone of the applications were also similar. What puzzled the chief minister even more was the fact that the problems mentioned in the applications were very different from what the applicants were narrating to him. The disappointed chief minister asked Patna district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Singh to probe the matter. He also assured that such a thing would not be repeated in the janata darbar.

Today, a formatted page was attached with each application. The page contained all the details of the complaint and the kind of help needed.

The new process functions somewhat like this: before the darbar begins, the officials at janata darbar meet each and every applicant and read their application carefully. Then, they mark out the problem that can be related with the parameter mentioned on the format. After that, at the end of the application, they write the whole problem in brief. The brief is finally read by Nitish when the complainants hand over their application to him. The new process also saves a lot of time because it has become easier for the chief minister and his secretaries to read the name and the problem that is written neat and clean, unlike earlier when, they had to struggle to read the problems properly.

However, Nitish, “the perfectionist”, was not fully satisfied with the format and suggested a number of alterations. For instance, the welfare of backward and economically backward classes and the welfare of Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and Minority are mentioned under the same head on the format. “This is not the proper way. It is confusing as well,” Nitish told his officials.