Poll code escalates people's woes in Vizianagaram

Vizianagaram: Thousands of petitions which are being submitted to various officers during Prajavani are gathering dust as the officers unable to concentrate on general duties except election-related works.

Even the people are also not showing much interest to attend Prajavani to press their grievances as they came to know that the officers are not looking into these issues due to effect of model code of conduct. Because of elections, the district administration has cancelled the grievances programme being conducted on every Monday to receive the applications from public over civic problems. District Collector M Hari Jawaharlal has been busy with conducting reviews regarding election arrangements and other preparatory arrangements.

Though the elections are completed by April 11, the officers are still on election duties. Every senior officer is required to visit the strongrooms where the EVMs are kept, twice a day and report to the district election officer. After the poling, the officers are making arrangements for counting and the collector, chief electoral officer is conducting reviews with them. The officers have no time to look into public related issues and many petitions submitted during previous Prajavani are gathering dust. Generally, every Monday over 300 grievances would come on various issues like pensions, housing, loans but today the collector received only 55 petitions and most of them are on Pasupu Kumkuma and on pension scheme.

As of now 24,744 petitions on various issues are pending with the collectorate and 8,636 of them are related to financial matters and 13,365 are non-financial issues.