29-10-2014, 02:36 PM
Abstracts: Different groups of citizens exercise their citizenship through various channels in Indian cities to realize their social rights. In classic urban management systems dominated by government, citizens’ rights are allocated by governments. New forms of network governance see governments as enabling actors for private sector provision, relegating citizen rights to ‘consumer rights’. New e-based grievance redressal systems in many Indian cities are part of this new perspective, designed to make government–citizen relations more transparent and effective. The article describes how various social groups make of use of political and e-based grievance redressal systems. These groups force government to utilize ‘political society’ channels and strategically negotiates with government for realizing rights. In contrast, middle-class citizens who are provided basic services, utilize alternative forms of mobile-based grievance systems to obtain better quality of services. Internet-based systems are not yet used by anyone. The CGS has got two faces of the application, one for the public and other for the officials. This makes the application partly distributed within the departments and partly online for the public reach-ability. Of the two parts, the limited online forum provides a way to open up the problems or grievance of the public. These grievances will be addressed by the respective department officials under the order of the collector or the respective authority in an offline version of the same application. These two parts will be coordinated by the central distributed database.