By Our Correspondent
BHUBANESWAR: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday made a statement in the Assembly over the issues raised by Opposition BJP and Congress. CM Grievance Cell is handled by the CMO and as per my directions, officers from the CMO conduced decentralized grievances cell in all the districts of the state,” the Chief Minister said in the statement.
“As regards chopper use, I would like to clarify that it would have taken one and half years to do the same exercise by Road vis a vis by chopper. Every day conducting three to five meetings in different locations is humanly impossible within a window of 10 am to 3 pm which is convenient to people. In the last three and half years we have spent about Rupees 40 crores on chopper. On an average Rupees 1 to 1.5 crore is spent on chopper every month. In the past six months when chopper was used intensively to reach out to the people, the average expenditure was the same around Rupees 1 to 1.5 crore per month. It’s completely false and misleading to say that excess expenditure has been made,” said Patnaik.
“This mammoth exercise was carried out in more than 190 locations over a period of six months. Every day, three to five venues were covered and in the process 57442 petitions were collected from the people, and as on date 43536 petitions have been resolved or disposed of. The entire exercise is transparent, and technology driven. All the petitions and the action taken reports and the stage of disposal are available in the janasunani portal,” said Patnaik.
“If all these 57000 petitioners (most are community petitions) had to come to Bhubaneswar to attend CM Grievance Cell, how much money they would have had to spend in travel and stay, how much wage loss they would have had? All this has been saved by the CM Grievance Cell travelling to the doorsteps of people,” he said.
