The prime focus of government is timely and effective redressal of public grievances, which leads to citizen satisfaction and credibility of government in Public Delivery systems. With this in mind, the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances, Government of India in technical collaboration with NIC Headquarters, has come up with an initiative "Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS)" in most of the central ministries. To extend the benefits of a standardized and well established system of grievance redressal to state governments, Haryana was selected as pilot state. It started with the study of state level requirements and subsequently customization of CPRGAMS was done. NIC Haryana did the detailed study at state headquarters, a few departments and District Panchkula and the inputs were given to the NIC-DARPG team for development / customization of the solution. The customized solution for Haryana was named as "Harsamadhan", which means Har - Everyone and samadhan - Solution. OBJECTIVES Launched on 18th June 2010 by Hon'ble Chief Minister of Haryana Sh. Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the CM stressed that the redressal of residents' grievances was the priority of the state government and hoped that the user-friendly new portal would help residents get their grievances redressed quickly. Harsamadhan is designed and developed with a view to achieve a uniform and systematic approach towards monitoring. It is an endeavor of the Haryana Government for fast Samadhan (Redress) of every kind of citizen's grievances with a vision of pursuing excellence in e-Governance. This project is implemented by Government of Haryana in Technical Collaboration with NIC Haryana State Unit. Strategy Adopted for Implementation Intensive training sessions were conducted before the launch of the portal, for all level of officers who were to use the application. A technical session was held for all financial Commissioners and few Deputy Commissioners to make them aware of the workflow of the system. User manual and guidelines for the implementation were also made available. Hierarchy was created for users at senior level and user ids with password and guidelines were sent to all departments by post and through e-mail. In order to effectively manage the grievances submitted by the citizens and for smooth operations of the portal, Deputy Principal Secretary to Chief Minister was designated as State Nodal Officer in Chief Minister's Secretariat. One nodal officer has been designated in each department/District. ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Responsibilities of State nodal officer/Central grievances cell: To liaison with all government offices Intimate various departments, District administration and field offices on any new developments, addition/deletion of features in the portal Under Secretary (grievance cell) would look into the mails received and would reply to them. All technical issues would be taken up with NIC Project coordinator The Central Grievance cell would also ensure to upload all grievances received manually/by post in the central grievances cell Responsibilities of line departments: Directly responsible for management of the grievances related to the portal Create hierarchy and user accounts of all officers Ensure uploading of all grievances received manually or through post View all the Grievances and forward them to Subordinate organizations/officers Responsibilities of NIC: Technical ownership of Harsamadhan Portal Design, re-design, hosting and technical maintenance of the Portal Provisioning of requisite resources at NIC Haryana state data centre to host the portal Provide training to all government departments on operations of Harsamadhan Maintenance of the web and data base servers on which the portal is operational To ensure 24X7 availability of the portal. TECHNOLOGY USED & SECURITY POLICY The complete application has been developed in an open source Web development platform using LAPP stack. LAPP uses Linux as the operating system, Apache as the Web server, PostGreSQL as the RDBMS, and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. The application is hosted in NIC Haryana State Data Centre, which is well equipped with all necessary resources required to enforce security. BENEFITS TO CITIZENS The main stakeholders of this system are the citizens and all the departments of Haryana Government. Single Channel - Harsamadhan is designed in such a way that the grievances are channelised into one cohesive system with a Unique Grievance Tracking Number. Easy to use - Allows online registration of grievances in bilingual mode. Quick feedback - A Unique Registration Number is generated on submission of the grievance. Any supporting information for effective grievance redressal is immediately asked for. Monitoring by Senior Officers- Status of Action taken at subordinate level is automatically accessible to senior officers. BENEFITS TO GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS Easy to use- Information from citizens is collected in a standard format. Easy search and filtering mechanism allows one to access the relevant information quickly. Easy Monitoring- Facility to monitor the progress of grievance redressed by subordinate officers. Facility to send reminder to subordinate offices. Facility for reviewing action taken report of subordinate office before final disposal of the grievance. Saves time and efforts - The workflow based processes saving of time and efforts Detailed MIS reporting - Comprehensive reports are available for each department and consolidated reports for higher levels. Data security - Web-based architecture of the application ensures data security at the central level. IMPLEMENTATION STATUS Harsamadhan is already up and running in the entire state covering Chief Minister's Office, Chief Secretary's Office, Grievances Cell, all the departmental head offices and all the 21 districts of the state. Grievances are either examined at Nodal officer level or are forwarded to concerned officials. So far 6586 grievances have been registered and 652 users are using it. REPLICATION IN OTHER STATES After successful implementation of this initiative in Haryana, DARPG has been encouraging other states to adopt this system which would require a little state specific customization. The system was replicated in Odhisa state on 31st July, 2010. Currently, the work of replicating it in Punjab and Rajasthan is in progress. For further information GHAN SHYAM BANSAL State Informatics Officer NIC Haryana State Unit Haryana Secretariat Sector 17, Chandigarh-160017 Ph: 0172-2711642 sio-hry@nic.in