A loud message which comes out of the recent public movements and expressed desire to move away from conventional ruling party systems is that people want change in the way governance is happening. While the Lokpal and the Lokayuktas may help bring about fear and some correction in the system, there will still be many areas left where the common man may continue to feel that his concerns about the immediate problems he has to confront through interface with government officers continue.
I remember during my district days that large numbers of people used to come every day from different parts of the district to meet the head of the district with the hope of finding solutions to their problems. Problems relating to land disputes or issue of ration cards or grant of old age pensions or the police not acting on a complaint, and so on, would be compressed into a one-page application (to get it written or typed, he/she would have spent some money, plus the travel expense to come up to the district headquarters had to be found); with that he would have a one- or two-minute interaction with the head of the district, after which he would leave it to luck. There was no deployment of technology to facilitate an immediate acknowledgement or subsequent dynamic tracing of action.
Today things have changed to the extent that if the matter relates to getting a particular service, depending on how proactive the state is, he could depend on the Guarantee of Services Act. In Karnataka, as many as 265 services are guaranteed through time-bound systems and to the credit of the state, timely disposal stands at 96.5 per cent during a year. As many as 14 states have this legislation now and the number of services guaranteed range from a low of 17 in Uttar Pradesh to 251 in Chhattisgarh and 265 in Karnataka. A transparent online monitoring system, applicants being able to review status on a dynamic basis without hassles, and holding officials accountable for timely delivery have ensured that the system works well. Kerala's efforts in attempting to deal with people's grievances more directly have been led by the chief minister himself, through a large number of direct public contact programmes in different parts of the state and by implementing a web-enabled call centre on a 24x7 basis for grievance redressal, directly monitored by the chief minister's office.
While a change has definitely come about as far as redressal handling is concerned, much more needs to be done to ensure that people feel comfortable about their interface with governmental systems. A recent Janaagraha survey of factors governing payment of bribes in select cities showed that among the top five corrupt departments at the city level are the police, stamps and registration, municipal services, customs, excise and service tax, and education. The citizen is bound to feel agitated when he has to pay to get police verification expedited, register property, get a khata certificate and so on.
For the states, it is departments like Registration of Transport which provide a major chunk of the state's revenues, but if one just visits the offices where registration is done or from where a driving licence is issued, one can get a feel of the pathetic conditions there which only tends to encourage the tout culture, the miserable condition in which the departmental functionaries perform and the miserable treatment meted out to those who go there to avail themselves of the services. The places are overcrowded, there is no system or method, people have to stand in the sun waiting for hours, not knowing whether the work will happen that day or not, on top of which is the authoritarian treatment of those who man the counters.
Some states have made a start in bringing about systemic change. Punjab aims to have a system where no citizen of the state will have to deal with any government functionary directly. Everything is planned to be either online or outsourced. With this they expect corruption and inefficiency to be totally eliminated. A separate ministry of administrative reforms, which apparently has enough clout, will review all obsolete laws, many of which have been there since British days.
Secrecy in preparation of legislation is another weak point in our governance, because they get prepared without public dialogue, do the rounds of concerned ministries and get approved by cabinets. Only when they are placed before the legislature do they become public and by then the governments become so adamant that if at all there is time to suggest changes and even when they are suggested, the resistance within the system is great. So we end up with legislations with which one has to live and even a small amendment becomes such a complicated process that no minister or ministry is keen to take it up. There is also the debatable point about how competent and professional the drafting process is, and if the legal language reflects the field-level situation.
There is a system today of governments preparing an action agenda department-wise, earmarking accountability for performance accordingly and assessing performance at the end of the year. This could be an effective and useful tool in bringing about much-needed change to better facilitate individual citizens' day-to-day interaction with the government, provided the process is participative, there is outside confirmation about the fulfilment of targets/actions meant for better delivery of services and both ministers and key officials responsible are judged against targets set in a transparent manner.
The writer is a former Secretary to the government of India
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