Bihar Lok Shikayat Nivaran — Complaint, Two-Stage Appeal and What to Do If It Is Rejected

Why Bihar Lok Shikayat is a legal right, not a helpline

Most states handle public grievances administratively. A citizen calls a number, an officer is asked to look at it, and a supervisor can close the file when satisfied that enough has been done. Nothing in that arrangement gives the citizen a right to anything, and nothing in it lets you challenge the closure — you can only complain again.

Bihar built something different. Its system operates under the Bihar Lok Shikayat Nivaran Adhikar Adhiniyam, in force from 5 June 2016, which creates a right to grievance redress, places it before a designated Public Grievance Redressal Officer, fixes a period within which the matter must be disposed of, and provides a first and a second appeal to authorities above that officer.

The practical difference shows up at exactly the moment things go wrong. In a helpline system, a complaint closed against your wishes leaves you with no route except starting over. In Bihar, a decision you disagree with is a decision you can appeal, to somebody who did not make it. That is a genuinely stronger position, and it is squandered every day by people who respond to a rejection by filing the same complaint again.

It also changes how you should write the complaint in the first place. An administrative helpline responds to a described problem. A statutory process responds to a claimed entitlement. Ask for a defined outcome — a decision on an application, a named service, a specific correction to a record — because that is the thing an appellate authority can later find was wrongly refused.

What the 60 working days actually promises you

The portal states the entitlement precisely, and the precision matters. Within 60 working days the law gives every applicant a hearing of their complaint, an opportunity for its redress, and the legal right to be informed of the decision taken on it. Those are three separate things, and only the third is a guaranteed outcome — you are promised a decision, not necessarily the decision you wanted.

Read that as a checklist rather than a deadline. If 60 working days have passed and you have had no hearing, that is one failure. If you had a hearing but were never told the outcome, that is a different failure, and it is the one that blocks your appeal, because an appeal is an argument against a decision you have to have seen. The portal makes the decision copy available for exactly this reason, and there is a facility to download a web copy of the final decision.

Note the words "working days". Sixty working days is roughly three calendar months once weekends and holidays are taken out, so a complaint registered in January is not overdue in March. Count from the date on the registration receipt, which is issued immediately along with a hearing date.

The hearing itself is worth turning up to. The portal describes it as a face-to-face hearing between the complainant and the government servant concerned — which is an unusual and genuinely useful feature, because it puts the officer who has been sitting on your file in the same room as you in front of someone who has to decide.

• A registration number and receipt are issued immediately, with the hearing date.
• The hearing is face to face with the government servant concerned.
• A copy of the decision is provided, so that an appeal can be filed if you are aggrieved.
• A web copy of the final decision can be downloaded from the portal.
• Filing is free — the portal states complaints are filed without charge, and that applies at every stage.

The five ways to file, and which one to use

Bihar accepts a complaint through five channels, which is more than most states offer, and they are not equivalent in what they leave you holding afterwards.

How to file a Bihar Lok Shikayat complaint so it can be appealed later

Every appeal you might later file is an argument about a decision, so the complaint has to be written in a way that forces a decision to be made on something specific. A vague complaint invites a vague disposal, and a vague disposal is very hard to appeal against because there is nothing concrete to attack.

1. 1File online at lokshikayat.bihar.gov.in rather than only by phone where the matter is at all serious — the written text and the uploaded documents are what an appellate authority will read.
2. 2Name the department and the district exactly as the portal names them, so the complaint reaches the right designated officer instead of losing its period in a misrouting.
3. 3Open with the identifier: application number, receipt number, ration card number, consumer number, plot or khata number, case number.
4. 4State the entitlement, not the annoyance. "My mutation application of [date], number [x], has not been decided" is appealable. "The office is not listening to me" is not.
5. 5Ask for one defined outcome. Multiple unrelated demands in one complaint tend to produce a disposal that addresses the easiest of them.
6. 6Upload the underlying documents at the time of filing — the application, the receipt, the earlier reply.
7. 7Note the complaint number and the date of registration. Both appeals are keyed to that number, and you will need the date to know when the period expired.
8. 8Check the status before the period runs out, so a routing error can be corrected while the complaint is still live.

Using the first and second appeal properly

The appeals are the reason to prefer Bihar Lok Shikayat over any other route for a state grievance, and they are the least used part of it. Both are filed free, through the same portal, against the original complaint number.

A first appeal goes to an authority above the officer who decided your complaint. Its subject is that officer's decision. The most effective first appeals do three things in half a page: they identify the decision precisely, by number and date; they state what the officer was required to consider and did not; and they ask for the same defined outcome the complaint asked for. What sinks a first appeal is retelling the original story, because that gives the appellate authority nothing to disagree with the officer about.

A second appeal goes higher again, and its subject is broader — not only the original decision but how the first appeal was dealt with. If the first appellate authority did not deal with the point you raised, say exactly that, and quote your own words from the first appeal. At this level you are no longer arguing about a hand pump or a certificate; you are arguing that the process itself has not been applied.

Watch the clock at both stages. An appeal has its own period, and an appeal filed late is the easiest thing in the world for an authority to decline without reaching the merits. Note the date of every decision as it is recorded against your complaint number.

• File the appeal on the portal against the original complaint number — not as a new complaint.
• Name the decision you are appealing: its date and the officer or authority that made it.
• State the point that was not dealt with, in one paragraph, without repeating the original narrative.
• Attach the same underlying documents again; do not assume the file travels complete.
• Ask for the identical outcome you asked for at first instance, so the relief sought stays consistent across all three stages.
• Keep a copy of everything you filed, with dates. If you later go to the nodal officer or CPGRAMS, this trail is your case.

What to do when the complaint is disposed of but nothing changed

A disposal is a record that the system considers the matter dealt with. It is not evidence that your ration card was issued or your mutation recorded. Treat the two as separate questions, and check the second one on the ground before you accept the first.

1. 1Copy the recorded disposal text verbatim from the portal before doing anything else. Your appeal is an argument about those words.
2. 2Establish the fact that contradicts it — the office visit that produced nothing, the record that still shows the old entry, a dated photograph where physical work was claimed.
3. 3File the first appeal against the disposal, within its period, naming the disposal and the fact that contradicts it.
4. 4If the first appeal is dismissed without dealing with your point, file the second appeal and make that failure the point.
5. 5Once both appeals are exhausted, write to Bihar's nodal public grievance officer — Deputy Secretary, General Administration Department, Patna, 0612 221 5409, publicgrievances-bih@gov.in — with the complaint number, both appeal outcomes and the relief still outstanding.
6. 6File the same facts on CPGRAMS at pgportal.gov.in in parallel. It is forwarded back to Bihar, but it carries a 21-day norm and a 30-day appeal window and leaves a record outside the state system.
7. 7Where the grievance is about a service you paid for and you want money back rather than the service, stop escalating administratively and go to the District Consumer Commission, which is the only forum here that can award compensation.

What Bihar Lok Shikayat cannot do, and where to go instead

A statutory grievance system is still a grievance system. It can direct that your entitlement be granted and can hold an officer to a period, but it does not award damages, it does not adjudicate a dispute between two private parties, and it will not touch a matter that is pending before a court. Knowing the boundary saves months.

The most frequent mismatch is money. People bring a claim for compensation — for the loss caused by a delayed connection, or for a payment that was never made — to a grievance portal, and receive a disposal recording that the department has been asked to look into it. If what you want is money, the forum with that power is the consumer commission where you paid for the service, or a civil claim where you did not.

Worked examples