Improving State Response to Public Grievances

The Delhi Government’s Public Grievance Monitoring System (PGMS) seeks to redress citizen complaints about public goods and services. Currently, the redressal process is slow, resolutions are of poor quality, and citizen satisfaction is low. We seek to pilot interventions towards improving the quality of service delivery of the PGMS by examining the interplay between local politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. We aim to answer three questions about the process. First, does providing local politicians with detailed current information on constituent grievances improve the speed and quality of resolution? Relatedly, does informing bureaucrats and/or citizens about this information sharing with local politicians have any incremental effects? Second, we examine whether providing detailed performance indicators to senior officials improves the speed and quality of resolutions. Finally, we seek to test whether improving the process by which complaints are matched (using machine learning methods) to relevant departments and officials within departments speeds up grievance resolution.