GS4 (Quality of service delivery)
The public will only trust the government when it delivers its services efficiently. What are the challenges in delivering services efficiently? How will you improve the delivery?
Best answer
Srishty Srivastava wrote the best answer for this question and got a score of 4.5/10 (if the best answer is an image, it cannot be uploaded here, hence scroll down to see those). The answer is being reproduced below for everyone’s convenience. Of course these answers can always be improved. (Best answer of a particular only involves those given on that day, later answers may not have been checked)
The public’s faith and trust in the government depends on its ability to perform its duties in an proper manner. Service delivery is an important duty of the government and so, failure in providing public services tarnishes the credibility of the establishment.
Challenges in delivering service are manifold:-
1. Citizen Charter:- Lack of uniformity in standards at state level, ambitious standards that are difficult achieve.
2. Poor targetting and leakages resulting in exclusion and inclusion errors
2. Ineffective monitoring and review mechanism in order to flag off inefficiencies in processes
3. Lack of an effective grievance redressal mechanism
4. Bureaucratic Apathy
5. Corruption, Nepotism, conflict of interest starting from the lower rungs to the top of hierarchy
6. Lack of active disclosures under RTI due to problems with handling and storing data resulting in lack accountability and transparency
The solution would lie in:
1. embracing e-governance and ICT solutions to solve the problems of lack of accountability and transparency. Only digitisation of processes would not solve the problem. Revamping of the entire process is needed in application of ICT.
2. Citizen Charter Bill may help in streamlining and homogenising the service standards, quality control, redressal mechanism.
3. Active transparency under RTI must be encouraged and incentivised.
4. Grievance redressal must be made more user-friendly and time-bound with better UI, information placement, system of escalation in case of dissatisfaction with remedial measures.
5. Bureaucracy must be empathetic to the needs of citizens and ensure that laws are not used to exploit the citizens but to aid them.
Servitude, sense of social justice, empathic responses to the needs of citizens and accountability in duty are the essence of a successful public service delivery paradigm. Therefore, an attitudinal change is required on part of the government. The rest will follow.
