City Pulse

Mumbai: Mumbai’s municipalities and citizens alike are lapping up Centre’s Swachhata app to bring about cleanliness in their area. Between April 1, 2017, and March 10 this year, residents of Mumbai’s nine municipalities submitted more than 16.95 lakh complaints through the app. Of these, 98.95% were marked ‘resolved’ in the app’s database. And of all the resolved complaints, 99.01% were fixed within the stipulated time.

Swachhata-MoHUA (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs) app was launched on August 6, 2016, as part of the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Mission. It was designed and is managed by IChangeMyCity — a division of Janaagraha, a Bengaluru-based non-profit organization.

People can take a picture of the issue they wish to report. The app records the picture location using GPS. The complaint is assigned to the department concerned. The complainant receives regular updates and can reopen a complaint if it’s ignored.

Last December, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) formed 24 teams to visit all the wards in the city and encourage people to use the Swachhata-MoHUA App. The Centre has been encouraging cities to promote the use of the app among citizens. Mumbai has nine municipal corporations and they show varying degree of usage of the app.

According to the app’s usage database, Mumbaikars’ top five complaints are:

• Sweeping not done
• garbage dump
• dustbins not cleaned
• garbage-collection vehicle not arrived
• dead animals

Greater Mumbai leads case for cleanliness

With its population at 1.24 crore, Greater Mumbai has seen highest registration on the app, with 4.7 lakh citizens using it. Between April, 2017 and March 10, residents of this area submitted 9.28 lakh complaints through the app. Of these, 99.6% complaints were resolved. Of all the complaints that were resolved, 99.4% were fixed within stipulated time. (The stipulated time to address all the nine issues is 12 hours, except clearing the body of a dead animal, for which the authorities have 48 hours to act.)

“We get around five to six complains per day,” says Suryakant Gosavi, assistant area supervisor of BMC for Kandivali area, who is also the top engineer in Greater Mumbai region having resolved 1,24,034 complaints. He says the app helps both citizens and the municipal staff, who act immediately once complainant uploads a picture and they get the location. “At times, the complaints we receive are not from our area, so we forward those to relevant department,” says Gosavi.

Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner, A-ward, MCGM and nodal officer for Swachha Bharat Abhiyan says the high participation of people and success of the app is due to the awareness campaigns conducted by the corporation.

“We had organised street plays, included Marathi actors to promote the app, and the response has been outstanding. While only 6,000 downloads of the app were made till December 2017, there are around 1,00,000 users now, with around 25,000 active users. However, we have stopped campaigns since February,” Dighavkar says.

While the app does save time and helps improve municipal workers’ efficiency, some problems, particularly those which require technical assistance, take longer to resolve, says assistant public health officer of Kalyan-Dombivali corporation, Vilas Joshi.

“These complaints are usually about water issues or need police involvement, so we forward them to concerned department,” says Joshi.

Municipalities more efficient

It is not the municipal authorities alone who are appreciating the efficiency of Swachhata App. Residents, too, are an impressed lot.

Thane resident Bala Champad says her complaints about garbage on roads and unclean public toilets through the app have seen immediate action by Thane municipal corporation. “This is a useful app that will make Thane cleaner than before,” says another Thane resident Kiran Parmar, whose complaints regarding garbage dumps have been resolved within stipulated time.

Before the app was launched, it was difficult to manage a big area like Thane, says B Haldekar, medical officer at sanitation department, TMC, who has a team of 50 supervisors at his disposal. “We receive photos from people and act immediately. It saves a lot of time. However, I am not happy with the ranking system, because it is based on the number of downloads and number of complaints resolved in each corporation. We had to coax people into downloading the app to improve our score, but you can’t coax them to register complaints,” Haldekar says.

Bhayander resident Prashant Suresh Bole, 29, downloaded the app three months ago. “It is helping us connect with the concerned department. Most of my complaints are about road cleaning,” Bole says.

Navi Mumbai (11.2 lakh) and Kalyan (12.4 lakh) have similar population figures and have seen almost same number of downloads of the app - 27,500 and 30,000, respectively. While Navi Mumbai has seen close to 9,300 complaints, Kalyan has seen about 12,200. In Navi Mumbai, complaint resolution rate is about 76% whereas it’s 87% in Kalyan.

One aspect where Navi Mumbai is clearly ahead of Kalyan is resolving complaints within the stipulated time-frame. While only 401 issues stretched beyond stipulated time in Navi Mumbai, Kalyan had 960 such complaints. This difference is reflected in amount of positive feedback these areas have got from citizens.

Kalyan received positive feedback on the app from 1,550 citizens, but the number stood at 2,194 for Navi Mumbai.

Bhiwandi has more than 66,000 plaints registered via app. Despite having higher population and more users of the app than Bhiwandi, Mira Bhayandar has less than 30,000 plaints registered. In Bhiwandi, each user has submitted more than three complaints on average, signifying that the number of app downloads is not the best criterion to assess its usage.

In Thane, the average number of complaints per user stands at 11.7 whereas in case of Greater Mumbai, the number is 1.97. This explains corporations’ emphasis on popularising the use of Swachhata app.