Terms of Reference for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Redressal & Feedback (Call Centre) for ICDS 1. Introduction Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) is recognized as one of the world s largest community based programme. The primary beneficiaries of ICDS programme is young children, lactating mothers and pregnant women, whereas the adolescents being the secondary beneficiaries. The programme includes a comprehensive package of services such as provision of supplementary nutrition, growth monitoring and promotion and health and nutrition education. Educating families (mother/primary care giver) on better nutrition during pregnancy, breast-feeding, and balanced nutrition in the early years of the development of children are another important component. ICDS has outlined five comprehensive objectives which together should serve the purpose of the scheme. They are a) To improve the nutritional and health status of children in the age group of 0-6 years b) To lay the foundation for proper psychological, physical and social development of the child c) To reduce the incidence of mortality, morbidity, malnutrition and school dropout d) To achieve effective co-ordination of policy and implementation amongst the various departments to promote child development e) To enhance the capability of the mother to look after the normal health and nutritional needs of the child through proper nutrition and health education The Directorate of Integrated Child Development Services is primarily concerned with the implementation of schemes related to children in the age group of 0-6 years, adolescent girls as well as pregnant and lactating women. In addition to these initiatives, the Directorate is concerned with the relevant policies, legislations, budget, training requirements, monitoring, evaluation and supervision of programmes concerning early childhood care and nutrition programmes. 2. Background Directorate, ICDS is rolling-out an ambitious Integrated Performance Management System. IPMS shall be the primary mechanism to monitor, review and improve the efficiency of implementation of ICDS and to gauge the progress made in achieving the objectives as set out by the directorate for the scheme. There are five essential components of IPMS namely; (1) Sevika-Beneficiary Interactions and Self Reporting, (2) LS / CDPO Monitoring, (3) Beneficiary Grievance Redressal & Feedback (call centre), (4) Dashboard and (5) HR & inventory Management. The Beneficiary Grievance Redressal & Feedback (call centre) set-up under IPMS will provide a platform to the beneficiaries to register their grievances for all ICDS stakeholders. The set-up will collect data directly from the beneficiaries/parents of children to know about the performance of their AWCs and make them aware of their rights and entitlements under the ICDS scheme. The data collected by the centre will be integrated with the data from other components of IPMS and analyzed for action taken & subsequent follow-up by the ICDS officials and other designated district authorities. A charter shall be developed to define the timeline required to address different types of ToR for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Management and Feedback System for ICDS Page 1 of 5
grievances. Component shall also have a built-in escalation matrix for resolution of grievances in a given time period. 3. Scope of work (a) The call center is envisaged to be a primary channel for capturing grievances and feedback from the beneficiaries/community about ICDS services through comprehensive tele-functionalities (both manual and IVR). It is envisaged to be a 24 X 7 (9 hours X 6 days - manned, remaining hours - through IVR) service platform. The Vendor must provide latest state of the art call center solution. IVR shall have bi-lingual (English and Hindi) support. Inbound call facility shall allow the beneficiaries community to get information related to ICDS services, register their feedback / grievances, know the status of grievance and escalate the grievance. With outbound facility, Call Center Executives shall make random calls to beneficiaries/communities and collect data in a predefined form. Outbound calls will be made to randomly selected beneficiaries and citizens from the community to solicit feedback on their local Anganwadi and to update list of phone numbers of beneficiaries in the database.the broad scope of work for the proposed call center is as follows- 1. Set up and run call center with inbound (toll free number), outbound and back office capabilities to help attain the objectives of IPMS. 2. Provide extensive online MIS reports to ICDS 3. As and when a new complaint is received, it would be registered in the IPMS Application 4. Adherence to the various labor and statutory regulations in respect of the Call Center Executives (CCEs) and other employees/ personnel hired by the vendor for providing services to ICDS will be the responsibility of the Bidder. 5. The SI shall run the call center for one year with required number of CCEs. This duration may get extended further based on the performance of SI. The CCEs and managerial/supervisory and technical staff shall be on the payroll of the bidder. Further, all statutory obligations regarding manpower would be the responsibility of the SI. 6. The SI will provide the complete infrastructure for running the call including network, manpower, PCs, Network devices, telephone equipment, cabling, maintenance of equipment, subscriptions to software licenses, Anti virus etc. 7. Space to set-up call center and telephone connection from telecom operators providing the said service in the State will be the responsibility of SI. 8. Advertisement of call centre should be within the ambit of SI. 9. Payment of call centre should be linked to incoming calls and outgoing calls. Payment will be made based on call logs by telecom vendor. There are 8165 AWCs functional in four districts. 5% of 8165 makes it to around 408. And if we adopt RCT, few AWCs (may be 20%) shall be under control. So the total no. of outgoing calls that needs to be made would be around 1200-1500 per week (assuming that everyone has a number and everyone picks the call). Team size of 8 is sufficient to handle inbound and outbound calls from these districts. Initially eight (8) numbers of CCEs (Graduates with good communication skills, proficient in English & Hindi, minimum typing speed of 30 in Hindi and 40 in English and minimum two years of similar experience) and one (1) call center Manager (Graduate/Post Graduate with good leadership skills, proficiency in English & Hindi and minimum five years of similar experience) ToR for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Management and Feedback System for ICDS Page 2 of 5
shall be deployed by the SI. Number of CCEs can be increased or decreased depending on the requirement of ICDS over the period of time. SI shall have to supply & maintain following infrastructure for the duration of the contract to run the call center IVR software CRM Software Call logging / Recording software Hardware (CCE s Desk) Headsets (phone instruments / hands free) IP enabled LAN network (b) Minimum technical requirement for call center application shall be as given below a. Proposed solution should be web-based solution. All components of the package should be accessible using standard Web-Browser without any need for extra application client software. Application should be compatible with all the browsers i.e. IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari etc. b. The system should be designed in manner that operational data is not lost in case of any failure of equipment or communication network. c. The proposed solution should have necessary security and audit trail features d. The configuration of the servers should be robust and capable of handling the current load, as well as projected load for at least five years with no visible degradation in performance. e. The solution architecture shall be preferably based on Open Industry standards and Protocol. In case other platforms are used, all run time licenses should be free, and perpetual. f. The solution shall provide an application architecture that is integrated using a middleware technology. g. The solution shall provide all the relevant leading technology (e.g. XML, Flat file, messaging etc.) to meet the integration requirements. h. The solution shall maintain integration logs that confirm the success or otherwise of the interface, complete with control totals etc. i. The initial configuration recommended should have capability of handling transactions for a period of 5 years (c) Minimum functional requirement for Call Center Application shall be as given below 1) Application should integrate with all modules of IPMS. 2) Application should allow users to create master categories of possible complaints & subcomplaints. 3) Application should allow users to design form for data collection from Beneficiary/Community. 4) Application should allow users to create complaint resolution matrix with hierarchy of officials with complaint resolution time. 5) Application should allow creating escalation matrix with timeline for resolution. 6) Application should allow call center agents to register complaint/feedback of beneficiaries/communities or collect feedback from beneficiaries in a pre-defined format. ToR for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Management and Feedback System for ICDS Page 3 of 5
7) Application should facilitate ICDS officials to report all the complaints received and processed by them, along with computation of TATs, and analysis on reasons for delay. 8) Application should ensure timely resolution of the complaints by allowing defined turnaround time (TAT) for different complaint types, and escalating issues that exceed expected resolution times. 9) The token number should be generated for all the complaints/feedback at every entry instance of registration. 10) The token number for complaints should be of the format -<AWC Code/running serial number> - YY. The running serial number should be reset every year. This will ensure that the token number is always unique. 11) Application should send SMS (in Hindi) to the complainant and action taking authority after registration of each complaint. 12) Application will escalate the complaint, in case it is not resolved in the specified time. 13) Application should allow the ICDS Officials to - 1. Receive complaints 2. Process complaints 3. Upload complaints 4. Action on escalated complaints 5. Forward complaints 6. Generate MIS reports 7. Identify malicious / habitual complainants 8. Monitor functioning of the call center 14) The system should capture the following minimum details: - Complainant details including but not limited to name, address, contact details, profession etc. and complaint details including but not limited to AWC/AWW, first time complaint or escalation, type of complaint, details of complaint. In case the complaint is a repeat complaint, previous complaint details may also be captured. 15) The system should have the facility to generate the following reports:- 1. Classification of complaints as per the AWC/Block/District 2. Classification of complaints as per the complaint status 3. Classification of complaints as per the service and functional area 4. Complaint Details 5. Average Resolution Rate 6. Repeat Complainants, frequency of repeat complaints 7. Analysis of complaints, which get Auto Escalated 8. Generate ad-hoc query / reports based on the user defined parameters 9. All reports should generated in html, excel and.pdf formats 10. Reports should also be available in graphical format 11. Reports on benchmarking of AWCs/Blocks/Districts amongst each other are also desired 12. Trend analysis and other MIS etc. are also necessary, and will include action user wise analysis 16) Application should make available, the entire data of all the complaints and the status of the complaints/feedback at any given time to ICDS/Citizens (through portal), through simple queries and aggregation, with the ability to search, filter and sort. (d) Hosting of application on internal server of ICDS stakeholders (e) Integration with IPMS application suite (f) Source code and associated rights of application shall be transferred to Govt. of Bihar. (g) Providing user training to the ICDS stakeholders (h) Application maintenance for one year (i) Type of complaint should not be hardcoded ToR for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Management and Feedback System for ICDS Page 4 of 5
4. Timeline & Deliverables The overall duration of assignment is one year. Timeline for milestones is given below Sr. Activity Deliverable (s) Timeline 1. System Study Inception Report T + 1 Week 2. Freezing system requirement Specification SRS T + 3 Weeks 3. Application Development & Demonstration BGRF Application T + 8 Weeks 4. Setting-up Call Center (Deployment of Call Center Operational T + 10 Weeks hardware, networking, call center personnel etc.) 5. Training User Manual T + 10 Weeks Workshop for stakeholders on the complete system 6. Go-Live Source code of BGRF Application T + 11 Weeks 7. O & M Change request document T + 63 Weeks ToR for Implementation of Beneficiary Grievance Management and Feedback System for ICDS Page 5 of 5