Lahore Gets Complaints Monitoring System But Public Access Unclear

LAHORE: Lahore’s district administration has launched a system to track complaints about filthy streets, open manholes, encroachments and dead streetlights, but it has not yet said whether residents will be able to file or follow a complaint on it themselves.

The Supervisory Municipal Issues Reporting System was presented on Thursday at a meeting chaired by Commissioner Nauman Yousaf, who congratulated the district administration on the launch. Officials told him the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has begun work to make it fully operational across all districts.

Deputy Commissioner Captain (retd) Muhammad Ali Ijaz said putting every department responsible for civic services on a single portal, with close coordination between them, would raise the standard of service. Live monitoring, officials said, will help settle citizens’ grievances on time.

The first word of its name deserves attention. As described so far, this is a supervisory tool, a screen on which senior officers watch how departments respond. Nothing published explains how a citizen registers a problem, receives a tracking number or learns that a case has been closed.

Lahore is not short of places to complain. The waste company answers on 1139, the water agency on 1334, and the federal citizen portal takes grievances by app. What residents lack is a way to see whether anything happened afterwards.

That is the test the new system has to pass. Four questions remain unanswered such as how quickly each type of complaint must be resolved, which officer answers when it is not, whether unresolved cases will be counted separately from closed ones, and whether any of the data will be made public.

The gap between orders and outcomes is familiar. When the Parks and Horticulture Authority chief toured the city’s parks this month, deadlines were ordered but none was announced. The commissioner, for his part, has been inspecting school construction sites in person, which suggests he does not rely on files alone.

Sanitation is already run province-wide under Suthra Punjab, so the system’s real value may lie in the complaints that fall between agencies that the manhole nobody owns, the streetlight on a road shared by two departments.

The administration says the portal will end delays. It can prove that by publishing its numbers.