Record-Busting Redressal or Bureaucratic Balderdash?
Cyber fraud A Representative Image
The #specialcampaign4 Grievance runs risk of cosmetic approach to deepening crisis of grievances piling in India.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, October 10, 2025 — The recent announcement by the Secretary of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances that the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare had disposed of 42,00,000 grievances under #specialcampaign4 is being hailed as a historic feat.
A mighty statistic, certainly—but any celebration of this “record” rings hollow unless one grapples with why so many grievances exist, how old these complaints are, the true meaning of “redressal,” and who has the authority or responsibility to resolve them. The answer to these questions reveals an even deeper anomaly: agriculture and farmers’ welfare are constitutionally state subjects in India, yet this campaign spotlights the central government’s administrative prowess while obscuring where the actual responsibility-and often failure-resides.
To begin, the very existence of 42,00,000 grievances filed against Departments supposedly dedicated to farmers’ welfare is a blaring alarm, not a badge of efficiency. This Everest of complaints suggests persistent, entrenched neglect somewhere along the chain of command. Why is a policy domain designed to nurture India’s agricultural backbone repeatedly generating such mass distress?
The swelling volume hints less at a recent spike and more at a layered backlog, where old and new grievances gather dust together-accumulating through years, perhaps even decades, of inattention and bureaucratic inertia.
But before one imagines a Herculean clean-up-piles of grievances swept clear from ministries overnight-the real question is: what does “redressal” actually mean here? In the language of government dashboards, redressal might merely mean the passing of the buck: a grievance transferred from the Centre to a State department (since agriculture is a State List subject), or from one department to another, is often declared “disposed of” irrespective of whether the citizen’s concern is addressed in any substantive way.
Meaningful redressal, on the other hand, would demand remedy, restitution, or at least a fair hearing and closure for the complainant-not merely shifting files to another jurisdiction.
This brings us to the bedrock of confusion: while the Centre takes credit for bulk disposal, the actual machinery of agriculture-be it implementation, monitoring, or grievance resolution-is largely under the states’ domain. India’s federal structure places agriculture and all primary welfare policy execution with state governments.
The Centre may fund, frame, or nudge with big-ticket schemes, but the grind, the service delivery, and most complaint-handling remain state turf. Many “resolved” grievances may thus reflect little more than referrals passed from central systems like CPGRAMS down to state portals, where they may simply vanish into oblivion.
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Who, then, certifies resolution—particularly when “resolution” is often the act of offloading responsibility? There is still no credible third-party audit or mechanism to verify that the transferred grievances were actually closed to the citizens’ satisfaction, let alone solved. The possibility remains open that some “redressals” are little more than administrative shuffling-a performance for central dashboards, not a balm for aggrieved citizens.
Without external, independent checks or even systematic citizen feedback, one cannot trust the numbers themselves. Layer on top of this India’s notoriously uneven digital and administrative capacity across states, and the situation becomes clearer (and more alarming): states with poor grievance redressal infrastructure or indifferent officials see complaints stuck in limbo, while the central government’s tallies nevertheless claim “record-breaking” disposals. The façade of achievement grows from this muddle of buck-passing between Centre and States, with minimal accountability or scrutiny.
Hail Transparency not Number
For any genuine progress or trust, India must move from number games to actual impact. Transparency is the first step: all ministries, state and central, should publish time-stamped, disaggregated data showing not just disposals, but resolution quality and user satisfaction. There must be a categorical distinction between transfer/forwarding and genuine redressal; mere movement of paper must never count as closure. Independent audits and real-time citizen feedback mechanisms can inject some overdue accountability into this process, ensuring that the primary question-has the farmer actually gotten relief-remains central.
And above all, robust state capacity, not dashboard performance, must become the test of India’s agricultural governance.
Until such reforms are visible, each newly minted “record” of grievance disposal should draw more suspicion than applause. In a quasi federal system where ultimate responsibility for farmers’ welfare lies with the states, any central claim to have cleared millions of grievances is not just misleading-it is a statistical smokescreen that does justice neither to the public nor to the spirit of good governance.
I have already suggested an all-India performance audit of the entire CPGRAMS architecture and implementation by CAG in my book ‘CAG- WHAT IT OUGHT TO BE AUDITING?’ published by White Falcon Publishing.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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