Delivery of Public Services In India- way ahead

1. Delivery of Public Services-
The way Forward
Dr. R Ramakrishnan,
ramakrish54@gmail.com

4. Public services mean the services provided by a
government to its citizens, either directly or by financing
private provision of such services.
The State has a very important role to play in making
available the essential public goods and services that
ensure certain minimum level of well-being to everyone
in need of those.
To improve the quality and quantity of services delivered
to the citizens, governments resort to continuous
improvements.
Need for delivering the services efficiently and effectively
to ensure desired level of well-being to all concerned
and within as short time span.

5. To serve the customers effectively, Private sector
segment their customer-bases according to various
factors including Demographic profile, Age and
Economic status to provide them more Personalized
services.
Competitiveness in the market ensures efficiency of
delivery of private services.
On the other hand most of the time Public service is
having monopoly. Lack of competition tends to make the
service sloppy. Further In the public sector, in contrast to
the private sector, it is crucial to understand the nature
of the policy outcomes required – as well as the
customer outcomes.

6. Public and private Sectors also differ
significantly in their service relationships
with external customers.
In the private sector, the relationship
between service provider and customer is
normally direct and comparatively
straightforward while in the Public sector,
provider customer relationship is often
more complex and indirect

7. The poor face more barriers in
accessing even a free public service.
Poverty
Physical
Associated vested interests
Less efficiency and corruption
prone
Psychological barrier
Mismatch between time slot
Language barrier

8. The bureaucracy In India has expanded
substantially after independence with introduction of
many welfare activities for improving the socio-
economic status of the citizen.
But failed in transforming itself by developing right
attitude and responsiveness towards the citizen
Providing services require interaction between the
service provider and the client and the service provider
should be responsive to the need of the people.
Commitment to change the institutional
arrangement for transforming the delivery system is the
urgent need for improving services to the poor.

9. Three ways of improvement of Services
Increasing poor clients’ choice and
power over service providers and their
participation in service delivery,
Raising poor citizens’ voice, through
the ballot box
Rewarding the effective and Penalizing
the ineffective delivery of services to poor
people.

10. Improved Public Service Delivery depends on
•Easy access and availability of public servants
•Transparency in administrative systems:
• Accountability:
• Monitoring of Public Services
•A good complaint management system
•Simplification of processes etc.
• Strong measures against corruption.
• Usage of IT

11. ETVX Model
Entry criteria define what inputs are required and what
quality these must be to achieve the exit criteria.
Task definitions specify the actions within the process
Validation definitions identify test points within the
process and define the tests and criteria for checking at
these points.
Exit criteria define what outputs are required and what
quality these must be to meet the needs of customer
processes.

12. SEVOTTAM Model
1.Citizen’s Charter – that specifies and publishes the standards of service delivery.
1.1 Implementation
Identification of services offered and their standards
Understanding service recipient expectations
Aligning services offered with service recipient expectations
Preparation of Citizen’s Charter
Understanding of Charter’s contents
1.2 Monitoring Comparison of actual with prescribed standards
Communication about differences in actual and prescribed
standards
Elimination of differences between actual and prescribed
standards
1.3 Review Charter effectiveness assessment
Alignment of Charter with changes in environment
Awareness about revision in service standards and Charter

13. 2. The Public Grievance Redress Mechanism
2.1 Receipt
Public awareness of grievance lodging process
Convenience to public in lodging a grievances
Classification of grievances at the point of receipt
2.2 Redress
Determination of time norms for grievance handling
Adherence to time norms for grievance handling
Disposal of grievances
2.3 Prevention
Identification of grievance prone areas
Action on grievance prone areas through Annual Action
Plan
Action on grievance prone areas through Charter Review
Action on grievance prone areas through internal
coordination
Awareness about progress of controlling grievance prone
areas
Identification of grievance prone areas

14. 3. Delivery Capability
3.1 Customers
Determining and improving citizen satisfaction levels
Measuring citizen satisfaction levels across the organization and
field
Using citizen satisfaction measurement for Charter review
Creating a citizen focused environment across field offices
Differences in service delivery performance across field offices
3.2 Employees
Employee behaviour for courtesy, punctuality, delivery promptness
Willingness of employees to accept responsibility
Employee motivation for service delivery improvement
3.3 Infrastructure
Basic infrastructure and facilities for service recipients
Resource requirement to meet prescribed service standards
Efficient use of available resources for continuous improvement
Basic infrastructure and facilities for service recipients

15. Sevottam is a very well thought out mechanism that takes into account
the practical realities of public service delivery
Define the services and classify clients
Set standards and norms for each service
Develop capability to meet the set standards
Perform to achieve the standards
Monitor performance against the set standards
Evaluate impact through an independent
mechanism
Continuous improvement based on monitoring
and evaluation
Even though Government of India took the initiative of creating the citizen
charter in 1996, yet it is still in infancy. Citizens have to resort to the RTI
act 2005 to get information even now. Like many things, what we need is
implementation rather than planning

16. It can be seen that technology is a great equalizer. The
most important aspect of Public Delivery – transparency
can be achieved very easily with ICT.
Improving transparency of functioning also helps to reduce
corruption and gap in effort of the public servants in
improving delivery.
Similarly Accountability is also very easy to attain when we
use ICT, because manipulations becomes more difficult in
this scenario.
The government of India’s definition of e-governance as ‘using
IT to bring about SMART (Simple Moral Accountable
Responsive Transparent) governance appears more rounded
and wider in scope but tends to dilute the boundaries between
good governance and e-governance. But we find most of the
government websites are not updated for months together

17. The main problem with us has been in implementing what has
been planned.
What we need is a mechanism that continuously monitors. And
the best bet for the same is the society at large rather than the
politicians or bureaucracy. And to make our democracy of the
people to be really effective we need to make it by the people and
for the people.
Over the years the role of the government and the
businessmen has gone lots of transformation in the recent years.
The distinction has become blurred and we find government in the
commercial role on one hand and the private sector doing many
social services as part of their CSR activities.
We also have different models of Public Private Partnerships
as well.
I think in the current scenario we need to depend more on
these PPP’s than anything else in solving our problems as then
only there will be involvement of all the stakeholders.

18. Thank YOU