Bureaucratic Reforms
The Front end approach to improve service delivery
Committees, seminars, conferences, reports and repeat of these several times in a decade, that is the story and tragedy of bureaucratic reforms in this country. Since independence, countless committees have been set up and volumes of reports are gathering dust to reform Indian bureaucracy or to deliver services to the people at world class standards.
We want transparency, accountability, quality service delivery from bureaucracy. But other than talking in a general way, Indians donⴠgo beyond rhetoric and we rarely take any concrete measures for designing a bureaucratic system that will deliver the results in a manner that we seek.
Transparency and accountability are not buttons on the keyboard of a computer, that by pressing these buttons, we can see transparency appearing on the screen. These are end outputs of a well designed system which delivers the desired results.
As discussed in our February issue, there are several approaches to reforming bureaucracy. The simplest among them is the ᇯal approach⠯r 㦲ont end approach䮠 Here without carrying out organisational and other reforms to begin with, focus has to be placed on the end results directly. For example, all the activities of an organisation that it is supposed to carry out must be listed exhaustively and service standards (like in an e-governance set up) must be developed for delivery of each of these services by the organisation. In the transformation process from manual to electronic governance in the virtual world of computers/ servers etc, service standards have to be evolved. For example in Kalyan Dombiveli Municipal Corporation (KDMC), services standards were developed in respect of all the services to be delivered to the citizens by the municipality: a birth/ death certificates must be delivered within thirty minutes, for example. Similarly all other activities were to be delivered in a time bound manner.
For turning the entire bureaucracy into e-bureaucracy in a developing country like India, we need huge resources, which are otherwise in short supply. However, we can achieve the same results by developing service standards in the manual domain itself, so that services can be delivered in a time bound manner and quality of services can be vigorously and assiduously checked. Again if we have to achieve time bound delivery of services with emphasis on quality, it will be most hazardous to leave it to the bureaucrats themselves and therefore there is a need for legislation on the subject.
First of all, we must enact a ᒩght to Performance Act⠨RPA) at the central level and each organisation or department within the government must be mandated to develop service standards for all the services it renders to citizens or other users. Under the central RPA, the specific act governing other organisations/departments will have similar legal provisions by way of rules or regulations, whereby service standards will have to be publicly notified. For example, in a tax department just as citizens have deadlines to submit tax return, pay taxes (in the case of advance taxes) TDS etc, citizens in turn must by legislation be guaranteed of refund to be made within a certain deadline. Through the RPA, each department can thus be made answerable, as it will have to ensure that what it does must be delivered within a law mandated deadline. Similarly, for example in Customs Department, different services are rendered in an adhoc manner and there is no timeline for completing those services. For example when goods are imported and provisional assessment is resorted to, years pass but no action is taken to close the provisional assessment. In fact as the cases pile up and become older, officials feel pressurized to indulge in deliberate act of injustice so as to justify their inaction of years. This loophole can be plugged, if the Customs Act itself provided for a deadline (six months/ one year) for closure of the provisional assessment.
The Right to Performance Act will guarantee the citizens delivery of certain activities within a deadline. However, this would not be enough. The next step should be to ensure that quality services are delivered and government organisations are not allowed to indulge in reckless injustice. For this purpose, right from the time the decisions are taken, further monitoring should be done to ensure that the officers who deliver services or pass orders are monitored in respect of their quality of delivery of those services for future. For example in tax related matters, the cases should be monitored right up to the stage of Supreme Court and officers passing the orders are held accountable.
Right to Information Act (RTI) merely provides information, but it can do nothing about the timely delivery of services and can not ensure about the quality of those services. But, the RPA can truly revolutionalise the citizen-government relationship and can usher in a new era of governance.
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