Several Delhi Government officers have adopted social media as a key tool to share information related to administrative policies with people. East District Magistrate Kunal, a 2005-batch IAS officer, came on Twitter to share the status of the night shelters. He gave detailed information about night shelters of East Delhi and also appealed his followers to keep informing him about homeless people across the city so that they can ferry them to night shelters.
He tweets: “Our officials are on night rounds to ensure the homeless sleep in night shelters. A tough job. Difficult to make them move.” “last week we opened an account on Twitter as @dmeastdelhi so that we can take feedback from people and there can be two-way communication,” Kunal said. Kunal also shared various policies and schemes being launched and implemented by the city administration through Twitter. Besides, he is using Facebook to interact with people and collect the feedback to reduce various loopholes in implementation of administration policies.
After lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung reviewed the conditions of night shelters and asked the concerned officers to carry out inspections in night shelters, Kunal visited night shelters and took the stock of situation. He said that on Saturday they are going to launch a special drive and they will give live updates on Facebook and Twitter about homeless being shifted to night shelters.
The officer also said that their main goal is to ensure that not a single homeless people sleep under open sky in cold. “We interact with people on these social networking sites to get people opinions, ideas and their problems,” he said. The 2005-batch IAS officer also stated that they have also redesigned their official website and made it more people friendly where people can send their feedback and register their grievances. “We have not entirely changed the website but added new features and uploaded more information about Government initiatives,” he said.
Kunal also said that they get both negative and positive feedback; many people criticised the administration and many thanked them. “It is a good platform to know about the people’s problems. We take every feedback seriously and try to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” he added. He also said that they formed a special helpdesk for North East people and Additional District Magistrate was made a nodal officer.
Kunal is the second officer in Delhi to use social networking sites to share Government initiatives after IPS officer Madhur Verma, who joined twitter to share every development in the Uber rape case investigation.