AI enabled tool developed by IIT Kanpur to augment redressal of grievances

In a significant move towards enhancing the government’s commitment to responsive and citizen-centric governance, researchers at IIT Kanpur have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) based tool for the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS), a central government-run portal for registering public grievances. The tools aim to make the grievance redressal process more user-friendly and efficient.

What is CPGRAMS?

Implemented by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) is an online platform available to the citizens 24x7 to lodge their grievances to the public authorities on any subject related to service delivery. It is a single portal connected to all the Ministries/Departments of the Government of India and its States. According to official sources, more than 1.12 crore public grievances have been redressed in the last five years on this portal. A total of 1,12,30,957 grievances were redressed from 2020-2024 and an annual all-time high of 23,24,323 grievances have been redressed from January-October 2024. The average resolution time has decreased from 28 days in 2019 to 13 days in 2024.

The portal envisages integration of various public grievance platforms, creation of dedicated grievance cells in ministries/departments, appointment of experienced and competent nodal officers, emphasis on root cause analysis of grievances and action on feedback, strengthening escalation processes by appointing appellate authorities, grievance closure guidelines with further reduction in the upper limit of resolution time from 30 days to 21 days.

The CPGRAMS Mobile App 2.0 was recently launched, designed to streamline grievance submissions and monitoring for citizens. The app is now available on the Google Play Store.

Integrating with AI

The Intelligent Grievance Management System (IGMS) was developed by the team at IIT Kanpur to augment public grievance management workflows with artificial intelligence solutions. The IGMS 1 was initially designed for the Ministry of Defence to redress the grievances of their department. The team built an effective search engine that works in the context of queries, unlike the conventional string-matching algorithms. The IGMS 2.0 Dashboard, an upgraded version of the first one, was launched in October 2023 and is a groundbreaking tool developed in collaboration with IIT Kanpur under an MoU with the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) while using AI to streamline the grievance redressal process.

“In view of the large number of grievances, the classification and monitoring of grievances cannot be done manually. The IGMS portal will help in expediting the grievance redressal process by the concerned ministry/department,” says IIT Kanpur Director Manindra Agrawal.

One of the key features of IGMS 2.0 is its real-time tabular analysis of grievances besides providing insights into both filed and resolved grievances, categorizing them by state, district, and ministry. This feature empowers government officials to efficiently track and manage grievances, ensuring a more responsive system.

Besides, the IGMS 2.0 dashboard provides the capability to identify the root causes of grievances. Understanding these underlying issues is crucial for effective resolution and addressing citizen concerns comprehensively.

“The semantic multi-lingual search engine was developed using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Machine Tools,” says Prof. Shalabh, who leads the team at IIT Kanpur. “The technology has helped build efficiency. A grievance that took several months for redressal earlier was now being resolved in just a few weeks.”

The new search engine defined four categories – urgent, spam, repeat and normal – which helped in the classification of the grievances. The AI-driven technology has successfully developed and deployed a semantic search engine in which user can semantically search information from the corpus (millions of grievances) of subject content and their supporting documents.

“The AI module offers the ability to automatically discover trends and sub-trends within a subset of public grievances, resulting in an information tree of information,” says Prof. Shalabh.

Users can choose their area of interest and navigate deeper into the data, enabling them to uncover the root cause of the problems. By drilling down into the selected domain, users gain a comprehensive understanding of the underlying issues and can identify the key factors contributing to the problem.

“Developing an AI-based grievance redressal solution with the IIT Kanpur team has been an innovative journey. In 2020, we were working on large language models (LLMs). The team's efforts allowed us to identify the root causes of complaints and offer actionable insights to decision-makers, ensuring systemic improvements and preventing grievances from recurring,” says Dr. Ajay Kumar, former Defence Secretary.

Prof. Shalabh maintained that a well-designed analysis revealed patterns of rent-seeking behaviors, pinpointed specific purposes for which bribes were solicited, and identified offices with recurring complaints. “By integrating geographical mapping, we created heatmaps highlighting regions with higher complaint incidences, enabling targeted interventions.”

Dr. V Srinivas, Secretary DARPG feels that the comprehensive reform program driven by technology has played a pivotal role in improving the quality of grievance disposal and reducing the redressal timelines. “The IGMS developed by the team at IIT Kanpur has helped in augmenting the public grievance management workflows with artificial intelligence solutions,” he says.

The portal is accessible here: https://pgportal.gov.in A big win for responsive governance!

(This article is authored by Dr. Vanita Srivastava)

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