Citizen centric service delivery

Abstract

To ensure a basic minimum standard of life for all sections of people living in the rural or urban areas of our country a strategy needs to be established for developing a network of facilities to attain services delivery in respect of selected items within a stipulated time-frame. The competing demands for greater investment in other development sectors has left relatively small allocations for social services. In the face of resource constraint, the tendency is to impose economy measures or cuts in the allocations for social sectors. As service delivery is a state subject there are a wide inter-State differences in the provision of social services and infrastructure which is calling for a governmental intervention for standardizing the process of service delivery. Central Government needs proactive co-operation of State Governments in delivering services and grievance redressal in relation to subjects which are mentioned in State list and Concurrent list. In fact, the reason for stupendous success of Right to Public Services implemented in 20 States of the Country can be attributed to the leadership of Hon’ble Chief Ministers and their team in their respective States. But still there are many issues to be addressed like corruption, delay, denial, bribery and extortion; which are common at the point of service delivery. Public service delivery is plagued with several structural and informational asymmetries. Distortions in delivery of public services occur due to absence of standards measured in terms of time taken to deliver a service, proper check on accountability and the missing of a strong uniform penalty all over India. Failure of the state officials to adhere to the time limits indicates absence of accountability. The Central and State Governments have been trying to improve service delivery. But the result has not been encouraging largely due to absence of a mechanism to fix accountability. This paper explores how public service delivery are evaluated and how actually can be evaluated. Are the parameters used for evaluation correct. Then examines the ways in which public value delivery can be achieved through various combination of available resources and sectors. One method may excel in providing one type of service and other may excel in some other way. A combination of some of them will surely ensure that the citizens get services on time and by the minimum effort of transportation costs.