Mangaluru: The officials of the department of Legal Metrology under the Ministry of Food, Civil supplies and Consumer Affairs have been seized of their powers to inspect the instruments of weights and measures, leaving them to do only the verification. Hitherto, the officials were carrying out verification and inspection of all instruments of weights and measures, including MRP and packaged commodity violations.
As many as ten teams have been formed for the State to carry out only inspections. Four districts will be covered by one team consisting one Assistant Controller and an inspector. The Assistant Controller who will have his office in Madikeri will take care of complaints received from Mangaluru, Udupi, Chikkamagaluru.
Speaking to NewsKarnataka.com, Harsh Gupta, Principal Secretary of Food, Civil supplies and Consumer Affairs said, “We want to separate the powers of verification and inspection. This is a standard administrative principle. Whoever does a highly sensitive work, should not cross verify his work himself. Some other authority should do it. The inspecting teams in state have been raised for this reason. We want to hand over the responsibility to one set of officers, while another set of officers can do the cross checking. In case of emergency where a officer has to do both verification and inspection, we have appointed a controller who can authorise anybody to carry out inspection”.
To be clearer Gupta said,” Like commercial or professional tax department, one who does the assessment does not do the audit. We do not want the same person to do the assessment and the audit, which defeats the neutrality”.
Gupta further said that some of the officers of the department have unnecessarily got perturbed. We need to improve the quality of service which can in turn benefit the public. If we find any discrepancies after the implementation, we can always find other alternative. Officers fear that the restricting of powers will not help them to redress the public grievances. Changes keep happening in every department and these are standard practices adopted, said Gupta.
The Principal Secretary stated that business establishments till now could visit their office for verification, get license and also renew them. We have urged the government for privately run test centres for verification. We want all our officers to involve in audit and inspection. Only four teams in Karnataka were exclusively involved in inspection at present, he said.
When queried whether the government will trust privately run test centres, Gupta said that entrusting the responsibility will help empower people. The government of India has amended the act five years back, allowing private run government approved test centres and we are allowing only that, he said.
When pointed out to Gupta that there was no positive response to customers’ complaints, he said that it was for this reason that the department was trying to improve their services. This is a positive step from our department. We will take punitive action in case of any default in the audit by officer, he said.
Gupta also said that the new system will strengthen in the coming days. He also said that the whole purpose of this exercise is to assure better service and also to be public friendly.
