Delivery of Public Services - The Way Forward

Abstract

The public sector is, collectively, the world’s largest service provider. Traditionally, Public Sector has been seen as a passive vehicle for executing social policy mandated by legislation.

Delivery of various public goods and services is the basic responsibility of the State. 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. These services would generally be required in large numbers and yet financial and other resources available are always limited. There is thus the need for delivering the services efficiently and effectively to ensure desired level of well-being to all concerned and within as short time span. Special care needs to be taken for the delivery of services to the poor, as they depend on public services for survival.

The poor face more barriers in accessing even a free public service. These barriers could be: Poverty - due to difficulty in accessing services including their failure to bear the implied cost, even for receiving free services ( e.g., Educational and Medical facilities); Physical due to the lack of infrastructure as many of the rural poor live in remote and difficult areas (Example: Banking, Medical, educational etc.); Associated vested interests leading to private gains if the services fail (e.g., Rice, Kerosene, Sugar); Due to less efficiency and corruption prone because of low voice, lack of responsiveness of the service providers; Psychological barrier - Service providers are from better socio-economic background and have much higher income than the people whom they serve; Mismatch between time slot the client has and when services are provided; Language barrier - particularly in areas inhabited by the linguistic minorities could yet be another cause for not being able to reach the poor.

The society has various forms of discrimination and deprivations, which should be reduced and, therefore, the resources should be so allocated that there is justice and equity in the outcome of all public services. It is even more important to ensure that services are delivered effectively and efficiently for attaining desired outcome. So it is necessary to understand various aspects of delivery of public services. 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.

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.

This paper will look at the Public Delivery Services, how they differ from the private services, and how we can get synergy between the two, as we try to go people first by the change of public services from public administration to public management.

It will also look at the different models like ETVX, Citizen Charter SERVOTTAM that has been developed over the years. It will also look at the improvements for the that can be made with the development of technology in India.

Keywords: Public Service, Delivery, Public sector, Sevottam, ETVX