Govt. offices: Are you being served?
View(s):
Motor Traffic Department
Are you being served at key government departments and institutions either in person or through the websites? The Business Times took the unusual step this week of undertaking a survey of key state departments and institutions that regularly deal with the public.
We took two approaches: visits to the organizations on the pretext of being a member of the public and checking out the service delivery, and secondly, accessing government websites and asking information and seeking responses to issues of daily life. Our reporting team fanned across to the departments of Immigration and Emigration, Customs, Inland Revenue, Motor Traffic, Grama Niladhari and Sri Lanka Telecom (which is semi-government). Separately our IT specialist reporter scanned the webs and interacted with government networks to check out the response and the speed of response to public queries.
The objective was to find out whether the public is being serviced courteously and provided all the information they need in an efficient and polite manner when calling over at these institutions. Or, are they being sent from pillar to post. The results were mixed and quite interesting. Security guards were generally off-handish and not people-friendly while the situation was different when meeting the concerned officer who was receptive, accommodating and was efficient.
Another objective of the exercise was to gauge the efficiency and reliability of the service delivery of these vital arms of the Government and ascertain whether they are ‘truly servants of the people’ or whether the public are the ‘servants of the state’ – meaning begging, pleading and waiting for long hours for service.
The following real-life episodes by our team are reported in a conversation form so that it would strike a chord with any member of the public who has gone through a similar experience. We encourage our readers to send in their comments of their experience (good or bad) at institutions of public wellbeing. – Business Editor.
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