GOPIO International officials, Life Members and chapter officials from the New York area were invited to an interactive meeting at the Indian Consulate in New York on Jan. 13th. This was a new initiative from the Indian Consulate, ‘Chalo Consulate’ where community representatives could interact with Consulate officials and discuss issues of the community and find solutions to them.
Indian Consulate was represented by Consul General Sandeep Chakravorty and all other Consulate officials including Consul for Trade Devi Prasad Misra, Consul Vipul Mesariya Political & Press, Information and Culture), Consul Murugesan Ramaswamy (Consular, Passport, Visa & OCI), Consul for Community Affairs A.K. Vijayakrishnan and Head of the Chancery Jaideep Chola.
GOPIO was represented by its Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham, International Coordinators Lal Motwani and Harbachan Singh, GOPIO-New York Vice President Inderjit Singh, GOPIO-CT President Ashok Nichani, GOPIO-Central New York President Patsy Leopald, GOPIO North Jersey Vice President Dhnanjay Desai and many other Life Members and chapter officials. GOPIO also invited a few other community representatives to this meeting including South Asian Council for Social Services (SACSS) and The Kerala Center.
The Indian Consulate in New York has launched PRAMIT program through its website where most of the consular and other information can be channeled in a very effective way.
Consul General Chakravorty said, “To strengthen response management system of Consulate, we have focused on e-Governance solutions and designed in house a web application named PRAMIT (Pravasi Mitra). Within few months of its launch it has become very popular among the users. PRAMIT web application has dashboard based centralized monitoring and response system for calls as well as messages form users. At present through PRAMIT we are able to monitor as well as reply every Call/Queries within one business day. It is very simple and user-friendly web application.”
According to CG Chakravorty, on an average the Consulate handles 800- 1000 applications/applicants per day. In last one year through PRAMIT and has handled around 16000+ message queries as well as processed around 4000+ misc services applications (Aug-Dec 2019) and answered/replied around 32,000+ calls (April-Dec 2019). PRAMIT has been proven to be an effective e-Governance tool to handle various issues related to Indian Community.
“Most importantly, we never missed a single call/message after PRAMIT was launched and our website has been visited by around 2.7 million people in the 13 months,” added CG Chakravorty.
GOPIO Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham said that GOPIO works very closely with all Indian missions worldwide for the benefit of the Indian Diaspora community. Participants at the meeting could also bring out general community issues at this meeting.
At the end of the meeting, GOPIO officials presented Ambassador Chakravorty two First Day Covers released by the US Postal Service at the First Convention of People of Indian Origin in New York in 1989. Dinner and networking followed.
“It was a highly productive meeting,” said GOPIO Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham.
