Government’s insouciance

TIMES without number, the media has projected the plight of the common person with the hope that those in the Government would address those issues. One example is the serpentine queue at the office of the Meghalaya Power Distribution Corporation Ltd (MPDCL) opposite the main Secretariat building in Shillong and other counters across the city. It is said that time is money but this does not seem to apply to the MPDCL and its lackadaisical staff who are still living in the era of ‘Government service’ where there is no accountability and no measurement of employee output. The Government of Meghalaya has been talking of e-governance for a while now. The Department of Information and Technology is well set up and boasts of a swish infrastructure but beyond exchange of emails among government staff on some key issues, paper files still move up and down the corridors of the Secretariat and Directorates and result in interminable delays.
Whereas most public sector companies, corporations and business establishments provide the client with online transaction facilities the MPDCL still believes in manual transactions perhaps because it does not know how to lay off the excess staff it had already employed. The Corporation continues to treat its clients with disdain. And to think that people are actually queuing up to pay money! What happens if all the consumers suddenly decide to go on a strike and refuse to pay their bills unless the Corporation mends its ways?
The Government here is not used to tackling public agitations by consumer rights groups. It is more familiar with agitations of pressure groups that invariably have a political slant. It is high time that consumers come together to address their own grievances because they cannot expect the so-called NGOs to take up issues that do not get them the headlines. A consumer protection group is the need of the hour in Meghalaya. The first task before this group would be to push the MPDCL to draw up an action plan to reduce the waiting time for bill payments. Often the alibi given is that clients should pay by cheque which can be deposited in a drop box at the MPDCL premises. But the consumer has not yet learnt to trust that method since there is no system of getting receipts for payments by cheque. Will the MPDCL wake up?