The Pune Municipal Corporation’s grievance system, PMC Care 2.0, is holding 14,644 complaints that residents filed and nobody has closed. The backlog spreads across 15 ward offices and roughly 43 departments, and some of the tickets have been waiting two months without even being routed to the department that would have to act on them.

The pile is not spread evenly. Kondhwa-Yewalewadi leads with 2,010 pending complaints, followed by Sinhagad Road at 1,885, Dhole Patil Road at 1,813 and Aundh-Baner at 1,675. Among the functional departments, health carries 1,248 and water supply 716, according to the ward-wise breakdown reported this week. Those four ward offices sit on Pune’s fastest-growing edges, where new construction has outrun the drainage, roads and garbage collection that PMC Care exists to log complaints about.

The explanation, and what it leaves out

Rahul Jagtap, who heads the PMC’s IT department, put the delay down to staffing. Employees have been pulled into election-related work for the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, and routine transfers have left new officers taking charge at several ward offices. He said meetings would be held soon to plan the clearance, without naming a date.

Both causes are real. Neither is new. The SIR draft roll came out on August 31 and the claims window runs to September 30, so the staff drain on Pune’s ward offices has weeks left to run. Transfers happen on a cycle the corporation controls and can plan around. A grievance platform that stalls whenever the administration has a second job to do is a platform with no cover built into it.

The second failure runs the other way

A backlog is the visible problem. The one residents complain about more often is the opposite: tickets marked resolved when nothing changed on the ground. The Free Press Journal reported residents alleging that complaints are closed without any check with the complainant, particularly those raised on X, where the platform holds no mobile number to trace the case back to. By that account, streetlight and pothole reports do get attended to, while encroachment and footpath complaints get closed without a fix. Jagtap told the paper that complaints are not closed deliberately.

Read the two problems together and the count of pending tickets stops being a scorecard. A ward office can bring its number down by fixing things or by closing tickets, and from outside the two look identical. That is the argument for reporting resolution quality alongside volume, which the PMC does not publish.

What Pune residents can do about their own complaint

PMC Care takes complaints through nine routes, including the civic website, the mobile app, WhatsApp, the call centre and the corporation’s social media handles. They are not equally useful:

• File through the app or the website, not social media. A complaint carrying your mobile number generates a ticket the system can trace and the call centre can ring you about. A tweet often does not.
• Keep the ticket number. It is your only handle if the complaint is marked resolved and the pothole is still there.
• Photograph before and after. A dated image is what turns a reopened complaint into an argument the ward office has to answer.
• Reopen rather than refile. A fresh complaint restarts the clock and loses the history of the old one.

What to watch

The clearance meetings Jagtap promised are the near-term test, and the honest measure of them is not whether the 14,644 falls but whether it falls in Kondhwa and Sinhagad Road, where the pile is deepest and the staff thinnest. The other number worth asking for is how many closed complaints get reopened. Until the PMC publishes it, residents are the only auditors the system has.

Sources: Punekar News, The Free Press Journal

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.