PIB TrackerStates redressed more grievances than they received, and still hold 2.37 lakh
Both CPGRAMS reports landed on the same day: 1.15 lakh cases closed by States in September and 2.39 lakh by central ministries, at an average of 13 days.
What happened
- DARPG released its 50th CPGRAMS report for States and UTs and its 53rd report for central ministries on the same day, both for September 2026.
- States and UTs received 99,134 grievances and redressed 1,15,168, the highest disposal of the year; Uttar Pradesh alone disposed of 45,970.
- State and UT pendency stands at 2,37,128 as on 30 September, with 23 States and UTs holding more than 1,000 pending cases each.
- Central ministries redressed 2,38,579 grievances - the 51st month in a row above one lakh - at an average disposal time of 13 days.
- 12,996 grievances came through Common Service Centres, of which Karnataka accounted for 54 per cent; 92,822 new users registered in the month.
For Prelims
- CPGRAMS: the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System, the single online platform for citizen grievances against central ministries and participating States, run by DARPG under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
- What it is not: CPGRAMS is a forwarding and tracking system, not an adjudicating body. A grievance is routed to the office competent to act, and "redressed" means that office has recorded a disposal - which is why appeal and feedback mechanisms matter.
- Sevottam: the service-delivery framework combining a Citizen’s Charter, a grievance redress mechanism and service delivery capability. The training figures in this report are its capacity-building arm.
- GRAI: the Grievance Redressal Assessment and Index, which ranks ministries on efficiency, feedback, domain and organisational commitment, published in groups so that large and small departments are compared with their peers.
- Common Service Centres: village-level access points run by village level entrepreneurs under the Digital India programme - the channel through which a citizen without a smartphone files online.
- Why disposal time matters more than disposal count: a system can close cases by disposing of them unsatisfactorily, which is what the feedback and appeal data is for - 1,87,362 feedbacks in a month is the quality check on 3.5 lakh disposals.
- Citizen’s Charter: a department’s published commitment on services, standards and timelines. It has no statutory force in India, which is the standing criticism of the grievance architecture.
- The Right to Services Acts: several States - beginning with Madhya Pradesh in 2010 - have made time-bound delivery of notified services a statutory right with penalties, which is the legislative alternative to a portal.
For UPSC: The best monthly data on how Indian administration actually responds to citizens, published for both halves of the federal system on the same day. Deploy it on governance and citizen-centric administration, on grievance redress mechanisms and their limits, on Sevottam and the Citizen’s Charter, and as a worked example of reading a disposal figure against a pendency stock.
What it is NOT: Neither report gives a disposal-quality measure beyond raw feedback counts, so how many of the 3.5 lakh disposals satisfied the complainant is unknown. No appeal figures, and no rejection rate. The State report gives no category breakdown of what the grievances are about, which is the one thing that would tell an administrator where service delivery is failing. No State-wise pendency table in the release text, though 23 States are said to exceed 1,000. And no explanation for Karnataka accounting for more than half of all Common Service Centre filings.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS2.15 · GS2.10 · Linkage L2
Anchor
DARPG published both its CPGRAMS reports for September 2026 on the same day: States and Union Territories redressed 1,15,168 grievances against 99,134 received, while central ministries redressed 2,38,579.
Substantiation (data)
State disposal exceeded receipts by about 16,000, the highest disposal of the year, yet pendency across States and Union Territories remains 2,37,128 with 23 of them above 1,000 each. Uttar Pradesh accounted for 45,970 disposals - roughly 40 per cent of the total. On the central side the average disposal time for 2026 is 13 days, and monthly disposal has stayed above one lakh for 51 consecutive months.
Position
The two halves of the system are not comparable, and the reports invite the comparison anyway. A central ministry administers a scheme and can close a grievance by rechecking a record; a State department is usually being asked about a road, a ration card or a water connection, which cannot be redressed from a desk. That the Centre disposes twice as many cases in 13 days is a statement about what kind of grievance each tier receives, not about which tier works harder.
Counterpoint
The concentration figures cut against reading this as a national picture. One State contributes 40 per cent of State disposals and another 54 per cent of all Common Service Centre filings. That pattern usually means uneven adoption rather than uneven grievance - the citizens of the other States are not necessarily satisfied, they may simply not be filing here.
Way forward
Two publications would make this series far more useful: a State-wise pendency and ageing table, and a category breakdown of grievances. The second is the one that turns a redress system into a diagnostic instrument, because a month of complaints about one service is a map of where delivery is breaking.
Conclusion
Three and a half lakh grievances closed in a month, 13 days on average at the Centre, and 2.37 lakh still pending in the States. The machinery is working at scale; what it has not yet published is whether the people who complained got what they asked for.
Deploys into: Citizen-centric governance and grievance redress · Sevottam and the Citizen’s Charter · Centre-State administrative comparison · Reading disposal against pendency
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions · 2026-10-13 · PRID 2322663 · PIB source ↗