Rajnath launches app for paramilitary forces to air grievances

New Delhi: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday launched a mobile-based grievance redressal application for central paramilitary personnel, development that comes against the backdrop of burgeoning incidents of troopers taking to social media to voice their complaints.

"Now I am only a click away," Singh said after launching the app. He asked the personnel to send their grievances directly to his ministry.

Singh said his ministry was making efforts to ensure that the family of every trooper killed in action gets a compensation of at least Rs 1 crore.

The centralised app for five Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) of CRPF, BSF, CISF, ITBP, SSB besides the Delhi Police has been launched about four months after BSF jawan Tej Bahadur Yadav took to social media to complain about alleged bad quality food being served to troops. Quite a few such videos followed in quick succession.

The minister, however, said he had proposed such an app for troops during the annual conference of Directors General and Inspectors General of Police in Hyderabad last year.

"I had expressed my desire to connect with the jawans of these forces...I had said we should do something for them. There is a provision for solving the problems of the personnel within their respective forces but there are some issues or problems where the help of the MHA (Ministry of Home Affairs) is required.

"You can now send your grievances directly to MHA. Now, I am only a click away. I assure you that I will review the status of grievances sent by jawans to MHA every month," Singh said after the launch of the app at a BSF facility here.

He also launched an exclusive 'BSFMyApp' for the personnel of the Border Security Force. The BSF app will also help jawans register their complaints and know the details about their pay, provident funds and deputation among others.

The minister said he "gets emotional" when he sees the jawans and officers of these forces working in difficult areas and recounted who the jawans had to stay under a tin roof in an interior area of Chhattisgarh.

"Our jawans and officers are very disciplined...They would not speak out about their problems but they can do so now with these new apps, both of their respective organisations and that of the MHA," Singh said.

The apps, owing to security reasons, will not be available over the Android or Apple-based play stores but can be downloaded from the website of the respective forces and the MHA app from the home ministry's official portal.

A number of unique personal and service identification details of a personnel will be used to activate the App, a senior official said.

While speaking highly about the CAPF personnel, the minister made a specific mention of an incident in the Kashmir valley some time back where a jawan was seen being heckled and assaulted by some people while on duty in a video.

"People who question the particular jawan's response do not know that he was dedicated towards his mission. The mission was to take EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) safely to their destination," he said.

The troops react according to a strategy, defensive or offensive, Singh said, adding both these aspects are the like the two sides of a coin.

Mobile and internet connectivity is essential for the functioning of such apps, he said but deplored that many parts of the country face connectivity issues.

Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) has promised that mobile services will reach every area of the country very soon, he said. "We are working towards it," he said.

So, if a jawan is not able to access the app while he or she is in an area where there is no connectivity, they can use it when they travel to another location or go home on leave.

The home minister, however, stressed that the first point of grievance redressal of these forces should essentially be their respective forces and, if no solution is found, the matter should be taken up at the level of the MHA.

He said the ministry has resolved some service-related issues of these forces like promotion to about 34,000 constables to the rank of head constable.