Bhubaneswar: The municipal corporation had in December planned to strengthen its grievance redress system by organising fortnightly meetings among communities, receive complaints on the spot and simultaneously take steps to resolve those.

To execute the plan, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation had divided the city into 12 zones for holding interactive meetings. The days when the meetings were held were termed Jan Sampark Diwas.

However, the plan tripped after a month as people showed little interest in airing their grievances in public.

"This is a city not a village where you will have time to attend such so called 'Palli Sabhas'. Civic issues are many, so are the grievances. There should be effort to strengthen the online services and other such mechanism than organising such meetings," said Patia resident Jaynarayan Mishra.

The first such meeting was held on December 16 when the civic body's camp received a mere 15 complaints while the next schedule camp was cancelled since it fell on the New Year's day on January 1. Sources said the civic body didn't continue with the camp on the next fortnight since there was no response.

"The objective of the camps was to receive complaints from those people who can't use the online platforms or reach out to our headquarters for various reasons. However, the response was not so good in the very first camp since we have decided to drop the plan," said an official of the municipal corporation.

At present, the civic body has a smartphone application and another special website beside a desk at its headquarters on every Monday to receive grievances from the citizens related to various civic issues.

"We had planned to reach out to the root of the problems since the camps were decided to be put in place," said the official.

Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena said though the Jan Sampark Diwas plan was dropped, they still had a strong mechanism to receive grievances from the citizens.

"We already have both online and offline mechanism to receive grievances. Our officials are handling the issues very efficiently. We are in the process of making the mechanism stronger in the near future," said Jena.

Gaja Vihar resident and schoolteacher Debadatta Mohanty said the civic body should have all options ranging from getting complaints online to offline to strengthen the grievance redress system.