Govt to come up with Grievance Redressal Bill to check graft

New Delhi, Aug 22 (PTI) Amid a demand that Parliament
should pass a strong Lokpal Bill, Indian Government Monday
said it will soon come up with a draft Grievance Redressal
Bill that will also address the issue of corruption at local
level.
Indian Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said the
issue of grievance redressal has been "under discussion for a
long time" with his cabinet colleagues Kapil Sibal and Salman
Khurshid.
"Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also agrees that we must
do something on grievance redressal mechanism," Ramesh told
reporters here.
"The bill I am working on now, and I hope to make a draft
public by the end of this week will address the problems of
grivance redressal at local level," he said.
Ramesh said his Ministry can use MGNREGA's experience and
it is one government programme with "the most elaborate system
of institutionalised mechanism through social audit.
"I have tried to extrapulate from that and see whether we
can have a legislation that addressess the concerns that many
people have been raising that what do you do about corruption
at cutting edge levels," the Minister said.
"So what we are working on is a grievance redressal bill,
that will take the NREGA experience and make it applicable
across the board. So anybody who has a grievance as part of an
entitlement programme can take recourse to this legislation
that we are proposing," he said.
The Minister said the bill will have in its ambit
officials at the level of Tehsildar and Block Development
Officer and also address the complaints on the functioning of
Public Distribution System (PDS).
"We need a multi-layered mechanism (to check
corruption)--central level, state level and local level," he
said.