On 21st
of April, 2016, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry launched a grievance
redressal mechanism (Twitter Seva) with an aim to resolve matters related to various
departments of the ministry. Under this Seva, anyone who wants assistance from
the Ministry of Commerce & Industry shall use #mociseva along with their
query on Twitter. A special Twitter Cell created in the ministry monitors these
queries and forwards them to the concerned officer of the respective departments
who responds to the queries within 48 hours.
As part of the
Twitter Seva team, I had a lot of apprehensions about this project. We were
told that Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Railways and Bangalore
Police are already using Twitter Seva successfully. Would we be able to use
this tool efficiently and what will be people’s reaction to it? Is getting an
exporter’s IEC code done seems as effective as getting someone’s passport? How
are we going to deal with policy-related issues since such issues can’t be
solved in a day or two? Though it’s a
huge ministry but will people really ask questions, that too on Twitter? How to
convince senior officials to respond to these queries within a give time frame?
Why would they listen to us? With these doubts we started working on this
project. Our team was trained by Twitter India team for few days on how to use the
Twitter Seva system and after that we were supposed to train senior officials.
Honestly, first
few weeks were not easy. We faced a lot of technical glitches, officials were
not very eager to learn and respond. Most of them had no idea about Twitter and
they were supposed to answer Twitter queries that itself was a big challenge.
We conducted a series of training sessions with officials. Within a month
things started falling in place. Officers were now comfortable with the new
system, the reluctance to learn and respond had gone, thanks to the Minister’s
continuous involvement with #mociseva. Sometimes Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman,
Commerce & Industry Minister, herself raised tickets/tweets on Twitter and
her office kept a track of the time frame in which these tickets were responded
to.
Till date we
have got over 2000 queries and over 98% of them have been responded to. Most of
the queries we got were related to Startups, Import-Export Code (IEC),
anti-dumping laws in India, FDDI issue, Make in India, SEZ, FDI policy and
revised IPR Policy. Besides, we have also responded to queries that belong to
other ministries as well. We share e-mail id & phone number of the public grievance
cell officer in the concerned ministry.
We have to admit
that we have also learned about how government system works and what are
various issues that come under this ministry from the officials who work here.
The officers dealing with Startup India, IPR and DGFT have been very supportive
to us. Overall, it has been a good experience so far. We are still working on
our weaknesses and trying to improve our response time. Hopefully, we will
achieve 100% clearance rate very soon. As far as people’s reaction is
concerned, here’s a small video for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvMJgt80Kho&feature=youtu.be
