The institute was already doing this for the department of defence and has extended the same functionality to the PMO’s public grievance portal.
File image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI
The Prime Minister’s Office will get a helping hand from IIT-Kanpur in dealing with lakhs of public grievances it receives from across the country every year. The premier institute will help the top office with an “artificial intelligence-powered algorithm” for a smart analysis of these complaints, News18 has learnt.
The PMO receives a large number of public grievances related to topics that fall under the purview of different ministries, departments or states. Close to 80 per cent of all grievances [almost 30 lakh a year] received by the Centre are through the PMO channel, and these are then forwarded to concerned ministries or states.
The mathematics faculty of IIT-Kanpur has developed an algorithm that will help the Centre identify different categories of grievances, such as a location from where most grievances in a particular category arise, and then do a “one-shot smart analysis” of the entire exercise.
The institute was already doing this for the department of defence and has extended the same functionality to the PMO’s public grievance portal.
“There was a need for a more focused and analytical approach towards grievances, like identifying the nature of each complaint and its location. A dashboard has been created with the AI algorithm by IIT-Kanpur and extended to the PMO,” a senior government official told News18.
He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed public grievances closely at the monthly PRAGATI [pro-active governance and timely implementation] meeting and wanted core issues behind such complaints to be identified.
Rural Beach
The central government also wants to ensure that people in rural areas can also file online complaints with the PMO, for which the Centre inked a pact with common service centres [CSC] last month, so as to increase accessibility of Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System [CPGRAMS] to the rural population, News18 has learnt.
This will enable residents of rural areas to go to CSCs to register online complaints. Also, the Centre has partnered with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to develop a regional language interface for CPGRAMS to make it linguistically inclusive. Gujarati, Marathi and Bangla have been taken up for the first phase of this exercise, News18 has learnt.
The Centre received about 22 lakh complaints last year, pertaining to central ministries and about eight lakh for states. This number has risen each year since three lakh complaints in 2013.