Various divisions of the ministry would organise Twitter chat sessions to engage with people and take suggestions from them in policy making process.
The commerce ministry will soon begin accepting public suggestions on policy making on Twitter, expanding the services it offers under its #mociseva hashtag on the social media platform.
“In the coming days, #mociseva would take a huge leap forward and would act as an interactive platform to provide information about the ministry's work. For this, various divisions of the ministry would organise Twitter chat sessions to engage with people and take suggestions from them in policy making process,“ said a person in the know.
The plan is to have periscope live video sessions on Twitter and Facebook chat sessions in the days to come for a rounded policy process including all stakeholders, the person cited earlier said.
One such session would be held on April 28 by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) to take suggestions and provide clarifications on the midterm review of Foreign Trade Policy.
The expansion of the ministry's Twitter Seva from a grievance redressal mechanism for startups and traders to an interactive platform comes on its first anniversary on April 21. A year ago, the ministry had set up a team to work for its Twitter cell called `Central Desk', housed in its headquarters in Udyog Bhawan, to handle queries and complaints. Most of the queries belong to the DGFT, Startup India, Make in India and intellectual property rights.
Besides the Twitter handles of the ministry and the minister, there are five additional handles -for special economic zones, broad commerce-related issues, foreign trade, farm exports and miscellaneous matters -where 6,563 tickets have been raised till now, of which 6,565 have been closed. An average of 500 tickets have been raised per month. As per the ministry, none of the tickets are pending beyond two working days. Moreover, the response time has come down to 1-2 days from 4-5 in the last one year.
“We have not only responded to queries that pertain to our ministry, in fact #mociseva has responded to almost a thousand queries that belonged to other ministries,“ the person said.