Only Varanasi figures in top-20 list of cities in UP for downloading Swachhata app on the last day

VARANASI: Although the

Varanasi Municipal Corporation

(VMC) managed to get top position in UP with over 10,000 downloads of

Swachhata app

on smartphones of denizens, yet it could not even be close to its targeted downloads of 25,000 on the last app-downloading day on Tuesday.

A mass app-downloading drive was carried out by corporation officials as a part of its initiative on the final day to publicize the app's usage among the general public and garner maximum downloads. Though the count of downloads continued to surge from 7,000 to 8,000 finally crossing the 10,033 mark by 4pm in evening, it could not improve its ranking as slipped to 16th position.

But, it was not a deterrent for officials as well as a few voluntary organizations who visited several places including the head quarters of 11th battalion of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), offices of Bar Association, 39 GTC in Cantonment as well as mobile shops urging people to get the app downloaded on their phones.

Municipal commissioner SP Shahi said that over 1,500 apps were downloaded by city residents till Tuesday afternoon and that efforts were on to cross 20,000 mark. "At the NDRF camp, around 400 Swacchata apps were downloaded by the personnel at a time while response was overwhelming from owners of mobile shops," he said, adding that use of the app by the public will help the city move up in the ranking list and also make it easy to achieve the goals under the smart city initiative.

The

ministry of urban development

(MoUD) had rolled out

Swachhata

app in August last year in order to assist citizens to draw the attention of their respective urban local bodies to a host of deficiencies in service and get the officials concerned to act on it. This app, though rolled out on a national basis, is urban local body specific and is linked with Swachh Survekshan 2017 that will get underway in a couple of days.

It is to be mentioned here that Varanasi is the only city from UP that is in top 20 despite decline in its rankings from spot 14 to 16. Cities including Aligarh (60) and Ghaziabad (81), however, have managed to secure its place among top 100.

As per the data of performance of cities shared online by MoUD, registered users of Varanasi have made a total of 3,801 complaints of which 3,230 have been resolved while 119 are open and 17 are being processed. The citizen happiness factor that has a weightage of 30% has recorded 1,253 of 1,471 satisfied users, 199 dissatisfied users and 19 neutral responses. The civic body has also managed to resolve 3,041 of 3,230 complaints within estimated time period.

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