Monitoring activities meet the urgent demands of life and development.

Lesson 1: Timely removal of obstacles

In the city named after Uncle Ho, the supervision of the People's Council (PC) after the process of rearranging neighborhoods and hamlets in the city is important and urgent, and is prioritized by the Standing Committee of the City PC.

During the supervision, the Supervisory Team directly listened to representatives of the neighborhoods share the advantages, difficulties, and problems regarding all issues after merging, separating, and establishing new neighborhoods, hamlets, etc. The advantages and difficulties were reflected and fully accepted by the Neighborhood Management Board and the people, then reported to the leaders of the City People's Committee and departments, branches, and sectors for timely resolution.

Stay up all night to do "hard, miserable" work

In the scorching August sun, the Supervisory Delegation of the Standing Committee of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, led by Mr. Huynh Thanh Nhan, Vice Chairman of the City People's Council, is still working busily with districts on the contents after the city splits, merges, establishes, and renames neighborhoods and hamlets.

According to Mr. Huynh Thanh Nhan, the hamlet and people's group model was built and existed since the early days of the establishment of the Ho Chi Minh City government. Since then, organizations under the ward/commune/town level have operated effectively, contributing to socio-economic development, ensuring national defense and security at the grassroots level. However, at present, the 2-level model under the ward/commune/town level has some limitations and shortcomings.

For example, due to urbanization, the population size in many places has increased rapidly, leading to unevenness, with some places exceeding 4,000 households, causing difficulties in state management, as well as propaganda and security and order management at the grassroots level. In addition, the activities of neighborhoods, hamlets, residential groups, and people's groups have revealed many limitations and have not yet promoted the effectiveness and role of grassroots mass organizations. Therefore, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council has passed a Resolution on rearranging the organizational model of neighborhoods and hamlets to innovate and streamline the city's urban government apparatus.

The monitoring delegation of the Department of Culture and Society, Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, supervised the issuance of identity documents to children in special circumstances at social protection centers.

The monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of the Resolution on the arrangement of neighborhoods and hamlets demonstrates the role of supervision and social criticism of elected bodies on the activities of governments at all levels. At the same time, through monitoring, the self-management model and the role of people as masters are promoted according to the motto "People know, people discuss, people do, people inspect, people supervise, people benefit".

In addition to the monitoring delegation of the Standing Committee of the City People's Council, members of the Culture and Social Committee of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council divided into many delegations and groups to districts, towns, and social protection centers to monitor the issuance of identification documents (birth certificates, identification codes, ID cards) to children in special circumstances and at risk of falling into special circumstances.

The monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of the Resolution on the arrangement of neighborhoods and hamlets demonstrates the role of supervision and social criticism of elected bodies on the activities of governments at all levels. At the same time, through monitoring, the self-management model and the role of people as masters are promoted according to the motto "People know, people discuss, people do, people inspect, people supervise, people benefit".

With the goal of "leaving no one behind", in order to ensure that children are eligible to enter the new school year, members of the Cultural and Social Committee work tirelessly day and night, closely coordinating with 5 departments, branches, districts and counties to clearly understand the circumstances and causes, remove obstacles and be flexible in the procedures for issuing identification papers for children.

TNT and TTB (temporarily residing in Ward 28, Binh Thanh District). Their parents are not registered for marriage. The father is being re-educated in Binh Thuan, the mother is a permanent resident in Binh Thuan. Currently, the two children live with their grandmother. Due to difficult circumstances, when the two children were born, their family did not have enough money to pay the hospital fees, so they have not completed the discharge procedures and have not been issued birth certificates. Faced with this situation, members of the monitoring team coordinated with the hospital to issue birth certificates and contacted Binh Thuan province to create identification codes for the two children to go to school.

When conducting the monitoring, Mr. Cao Thanh Binh, Head of the Department of Culture and Society, City People's Council said that the department and other units clearly and specifically identified the causes of each problem regarding children's identity papers in order to find solutions. He said that in particularly difficult cases, discussions would be held to specifically resolve each case with the goal of ensuring that 100% of children in special circumstances have full civil rights.

In response to public concerns and complaints about food safety and hygiene at wholesale markets and night markets, the Culture and Society Committee of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council organized overnight monitoring teams. During the monitoring session at the Thu Duc agricultural wholesale market (Thu Duc city), the team suddenly inspected vegetable, root and fruit stores without prior notice.

Here, the delegation asked the warehouse owners to present relevant documents such as certificates of origin, plant quarantine certificates and additional labels on the packaging. Many businesses did not provide all the necessary documents, citing many reasons to avoid inspection. This shows that there is still a lack of seriousness in complying with food safety regulations, and at the same time poses a big challenge for market management.

The monitoring delegation of the Culture and Society Committee, Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, monitored food hygiene and safety at the agricultural market, Thu Duc city on the night of August 16, 2024.

Continuing to work with the Market Management Board, this unit admitted that there were still many shortcomings in the process of managing food hygiene and safety; the situation of spontaneous trading of agricultural products and food around the Thu Duc wholesale market area was still complicated, affecting security and order, environmental hygiene and food safety. The representative of the Market Management Board proposed that the monitoring team coordinate with the relevant agencies to clear these spontaneous trading areas, creating conditions for small traders in the market to operate stably, safely and in compliance with the law.

“The Department of Culture and Society will re-monitor these units to record the changes after the monitoring. This is a regular practice of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council in monitoring topics,” added Mr. Nguyen Minh Nhut, Deputy Head of the monitoring delegation.

There are still many problems

Comrade Nguyen Thi Le, Deputy Secretary of the City Party Committee, Chairwoman of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, said: The supervision activities of the People's Councils at all levels in the city have recently had many positive changes; the supervision content focuses on key issues in areas that voters are interested in; the form has many innovations.

Accordingly, through monitoring, it has promptly detected and recommended, requested all levels and sectors to overcome limitations, shortcomings, inadequacies, and obstacles in the implementation of assigned tasks and powers of state agencies in the city.

The report of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council shows that since the beginning of the term, this agency has focused on enhancing the effectiveness of supervision work through the issuance and implementation of the project "Improving the quality and effectiveness of supervision activities of the People's Council in the context of implementing urban government, term 2021-2026". Since then, positive changes have been created, with 414 supervisions, 305 surveys; 3 explanation sessions, 4 questioning sessions; more than 100 supervisions conducted by the City People's Council delegations...

The monitoring delegation of the Department of Culture and Society, Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, supervised the issuance of identity documents to children in special circumstances at social protection centers.

Many topics of supervision of content, quality, and participants have been clearly improved. For example, in 2022, the City People's Council stopped the supervision session for 3 departments: Health, Finance, Labor - Invalids and Social Affairs on a number of policies serving the work of epidemic prevention and support for people affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, because the reports of these units were too sketchy, the participants were not complete... After stopping the supervision session, the leaders of the departments sent letters of apology, improved and corrected, and completed the report content, participants...

Or in the topic of monitoring the conservation and preservation of historical relics, during the monitoring process, discovering a construction being seriously damaged, the monitoring team of the City People's Council immediately reported and recommended the City People's Committee to handle it. This construction was later restored and embellished...

Despite many positive results, comrade Nguyen Thi Le and many officials of the City People's Council frankly admitted that the supervision and social criticism work of the People's Council, the Fatherland Front and socio-political organizations at all levels in some places in the city have not met the requirements and have not strongly promoted the role and participation of members of the Fatherland Front and the people.

Concerned about innovation and improving the quality of monitoring and criticism activities, Mr. Cao Thanh Binh, Head of the Culture and Society Committee, Ho Chi Minh City People's Council, said: It is necessary to clarify the responsibilities of organizations, individuals and the role of elected representatives in monitoring, and have specific opinions on resolving complaints, denunciations and recommendations of voters. According to Mr. Binh, this is very necessary content, because the role of the delegation and the National Assembly delegation in localities is very important.

“Currently, when meeting voters, receiving citizens, and receiving petitions, many units just forward them to central agencies. This is the cause of overload for the National Assembly Standing Committee, while in reality this is the responsibility of the delegations and local National Assembly delegations,” Mr. Cao Thanh Binh frankly stated.

Mr. Binh also said that the delegations and representative groups must have the responsibility to invite people to explain to them, propagate to convince them, so that people can understand better. "Recently, I have seen many monitoring topics, which sound very good, but no one checks how the units perform after that monitoring? Therefore, there needs to be sanctions to hold the monitoring agencies accountable if they do not fulfill their responsibilities," Mr. Binh suggested.

After the rearrangement, Ho Chi Minh City will have more than 2,000 neighborhoods, hamlets and more than 25,600 residential groups and people's groups in more than 300 wards/communes/towns that will be rearranged.

The process of arranging neighborhoods and hamlets must ensure the correct order and procedures according to the provisions of law, not disrupt people's lives, especially ensuring the rights of those participating in work in neighborhoods and hamlets.

(According to the report of Ho Chi Minh City People's Council)

(To be continued)

Source: https://nhandan.vn/hoat-dong-giam-sat-dap-ung-doi-hoi-cap-thiet-cua-cuoc-song-va-qua-trinh-phat-trien-post827590.html