Delivery of Public Services- The way Forward

31st SKOCH Summit 2013 Rethinking Governance 25th & 26th March, New Delhi India (i) Title of submission: Delivery of Public Services-The way Forward (ii) Name of the author: Dr. R Ramakrishnan Principal /Director (iii) Mailing address: College : Agni School of Business Excellence NH45, Morepatti, Dindigul 624802 India Residence: 5/7 Padmavati Colony, Near Thigaraja Polytechnic, Salem 636 005 (iv) E-mail of Author: ramakrish54@gmail.com or ramakrish54@yahoo.com (v) Phone number(s) College : +914551 320622 Mobile : + 919952669656 Residence : +91427-4040492 Presented by me at the 15th Thinkers and Writers Forum on 26th March, New Delhi India 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. *************** Delivery of Public Services-The way Forward Full paper 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. Public services mean the services provided by a government to its citizens, either directly or by financing private provision of such services. 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. At the same time quality of services is mainly constrained by managerial inefficiency. To improve the quality and quantity of services delivered to the citizens, governments resort to continuous improvements.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. Over the years Private sector has learnt that the only way for their survival and growth is to win the hearts of their customers. That only would ensure profit to their shareholders Satisfied customers are cheaper to serve, easier to deal with and more likely to keep coming back. They need to understand their customers to satisfy and delight them by serving them efficiently and effectively with Competitors at all levels. To serve the customers effectively, private sector segment their customerbases 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. Unlike the private sector, where the organization is at liberty to define its customer segments, the public sector is required to service numerous diversified customer segments. It is therefore essential to develop clear policies to meet the needs of each segment. The principles of fairness and equity are most important when we come to examine the concept of quality in public administration. Public and private Sectors also differ significantly in their service relationships with external customers. In the private sector, the relations hip 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 In addition to their primarily noncommercial character, public services are often distinguished by an absolute, or at least comparative, lack of competition in the normal market sense of seeking to entice customers away from their competitors or rival service providers. Given the regulatory role often performed by public services such as tax collection and law enforcement, they can also be mandatory apart from monopolistic or oligopolistic in character 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 socioeconomic 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. The bureaucracy In India has expanded substantially after independence with introduction of many welfare activities for improving the socio-economic status of the citizen. However, the bureaucracy has failed in transforming itself by developing right attitude and responsiveness towards the citizen and in perceiving that they have obligation in reaching various public services to the citizen as their right 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. Services delivery to the poor people can be improved when service provision system remains people-centric and when the poor have choices. Making services work requires changing the institutional relationship among key actors and incentivizing them. Too often, services fail poor people in access, in quantity, and in quality. There are three ways in which services can be improved for the poor by facilitating organisation of the poor:
By increasing poor clients’ choice and power over service providers and their participation in service delivery, so that they can monitor and discipline providers;
By raising poor citizens’ voice, through the ballot box and making information widely available; service can be increased by demand for better public services and forcing politicians to act;
By rewarding the effective and penalizing the ineffective delivery of services to poor people. Improved Public Service Delivery depends on the following  Easy access and availability of public servants to the citizens  Transparency in administrative systems: The citizen will be able to assert his rights, and government will be able to establish strong client focus  Accountability: In case of failure to deliver the services or delay, the concerned officials in the government will be brought to book and compensation awarded to the citizen. Bench marking of services and quality certification such as ISO 9000, ISI etc can only ensure value for money, efficiency and productivity in operations  Monitoring of Public Services by the involvement of citizens’ groups, voluntary associations, professional bodies, universities and other civil society groups  A good complaint management system for all departments of the government with citizen advisory committees to oversee the grievance management system.  Simplification of processes, forms and procedures, rules and regulations as people driven and not rule driven.  Strong measures against corruption and speedy punishment of government officials found collecting bribes from citizens.  Usage of IT for easy access to information to improve the citizen administration interface. Public services must match their responsibilities with their capabilities. To ensure the quality of service delivery and accountability of delivery system, the effectiveness, efficiency and economy of public service needs to be analyzed through citizen charters and various external audits such as social audit, peoples’ audit and report cards Some of the useful models for improving Public service delivery are
ETVX Model
SEVOTTAM Model ETVX Model: Delivery of public services is organized through assigning responsibilities of performing certain tasks to the bureaucracy and their ability to perform the tasks and motivation decides how efficiently the services will be delivered. Ensuring proper performance of any task can be analysed by the ETVX model used in management to document the processes involved. The ETVX model introduced by IBM to document the quality of their processes is a good model. Here ‘E’ stands for the Entry criteria that must be satisfied before a set of Tasks (T) can be performed; 'V' stands for the Verification & Validation process to ensure performance of right tasks, while ‘X’ stands for the eXit criteria or the outputs of the tasks. If an activity fails in the validation check, either corrective action is taken or a rework is ordered. It can be used in any development process. Great service is not an accident. It comes from intention and attention to detail. There are four places where the quality can be specified and checked:
Entry criteria define what inputs are required and what quality these must be to achieve the exit criteria. The entry requirement is related to assigning responsibility on some agent and providing resources for doing the task. In public domain the task is assigned by the political executives as per their goal as to what the government will do for the citizen. Entry criteria should be communicated to supplier processes, to become their exit criteria. If supplier processes are sufficiently well controlled, then there is no need to check inputs.  Task definitions specify the actions within the process: Based on the entry criteria, the upper tier (Management wing) of the bureaucracy allocates various resources like authority, fund, and manpower (frontline employees or service providing wing) from whom the citizens receive the service  Validation definitions identify test points within the process and define the tests and criteria for checking at these points. This enables problems to be caught close to their cause, reducing rework and scrap costs, and enabling problem causes to be addressed. In this phase there is need to validate whether the task has been performed satisfactorily. This is done by the reports generated by the field offices and feedback and complaints received from the citizens who receive the service. The task can be said to have been performed satisfactorily only if delivery of the service meets the set norms of performing the task. If it is found after validation that the same has not been done satisfactorily the lapses are to be rectified by enforcing necessary corrective measures. The same is done by using the authority of the management wing on the frontline service providers.
Exit criteria define what outputs are required and what quality these must be to meet the needs of customer processes. the task is performed properly the process ends and exit from the task gets completed.Exit criteria may be derived from the entry criteria of customer processes. If required, the tasks can be further subdivided and each subtask can be further structured using the ETVX model. SEVOTTAM Model: SEVOTTAM is the Quality Management System (QMS) developed by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Government of India, The term is a combination of two Hindi words – ‘Uttam’ + ‘Seva’= Sevottam .is backed by an Indian Standard IS 15700 :2005 that was especially created for certifying achievement of excellence in service delivery in the government service sector The QMS Sevottam framework provides the answer through three modules that help to identify Gaps in Service Delivery
Citizen’s Charter – that specifies and publishes the standards of service delivery. A charter is an explicit statement of what a public agency is ready to offer as its services, the rights and entitlements of the people with reference to these services and the remedies available to them should problems and disputes arise in these transactions. It is a mechanism for augmenting the accountability and transparency of the public agencies interfacing with the people. It has eleven different tasks under three phases as under 1.1 Implementation 1.2 Monitoring 1.3 Review 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 Comparison of actual with prescribed standards Communication about differences in actual and prescribed standards Elimination of differences between actual and prescribed standards Charter effectiveness assessment Alignment of Charter with changes in environment Awareness about revision in service standards and Charter
The Public Grievance Redress Mechanism that process complaints from citizens when standards in Citizen’s Charter are not met in the service delivery. Once the grievance has been recorded and classified as to who is responsible for redressing the same all concerned have to act within the promised timeframe. It is equally important that preventive measures are taken to reduce the grievances so that there is less requirement of taking corrective steps. There are total eleven elements in this module also as shown in the table below. 2.1 Receipt 2.2 Redress 2.3 Prevention Public awareness of grievance lodging process Convenience to public in lodging a grievances Classification of grievances at the point of receipt Determination of time norms for grievance handling Adherence to time norms for grievance handling Disposal of grievances 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
Delivery Capability: Capacity Building for service delivery to bring improvements on a continuous basis. The three aspects of improving capability is to know the service recipients better in terms of their satisfaction level (which do not always come as complaint), improving attitude and skill of the employees and providing necessary infrastructure for performance. The eleven steps associated with this model is given below 3.1 3.2 3.3 Customers Employees Infrastructure 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 Employee behaviour for courtesy, punctuality, delivery promptness Willingness of employees to accept responsibility Employee motivation for service delivery improvement 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 The framework embodies a set of criteria to guide organisations in assessing and improving implementation of citizen’s charters, public grievance redress mechanism and to enhance service delivery capability. Sevottam is a very well thought out mechanism that takes into account the practical realities of public service delivery. It has enough flexibility to account for sectoral and regional variations and offers a systematic way to identify weaknesses in specific areas and rectify them through action focused on citizen-centric outcomes. All the thirty three activities listed above can be broadly clubbed in seven steps as under: 1. Define the services and classify clients 2. Set standards and norms for each service 3. Develop capability to meet the set standards 4. Perform to achieve the standards 5. Monitor performance against the set standards 6. Evaluate impact through an independent mechanism 7. 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. Any effective public service delivery mechanism must ultimately lead to good governance. Briefly put, it is the inter-relationship between the government functionaries and the citizens to whom the services of the government are addressed to, and the manner in which the services reach those for whom they were intended. Any effective public service delivery mechanism must ultimately lead to good governance. The governments generally utilise one or the other of a variety of mechanisms for delivering services to the citizens such as Central Government Schemes, implementation of state-specific schemes, local self-government interventions, small-scale interventions of NGOs, special purpose vehicles such as DRDAs (District Rural Development Agency) and JNURM (Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renew-al Mission), contracting out or outsourcing to the private sector, fostering other partnerships etc. The Indian governments, at the national and state level, are keenly encouraging the development of IT as a strategy for responsive and transparent administration in all major domains. India does have an inspiring vision of where egovernance is going. There is a gap between service delivery and reality in that country. 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. We find most of the government websites are not updated for months together. 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 of 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. *************** Reference A handbook for Designing and implementing SEVOTTAM Compliant- August 2010 Available at rural.nic.in/sites/.../sevottam/Handbook_on_sevottam_guideline.pdf CAPAM. 2011. “Service Delivery, Governance and the Citizen”. Commonwealth Association for Public Administration & Management, 17(2). Accessed from www.capam.org/_documents/ci_june2011.pdf 20 Feb 2013 Gilmore, Andrew and D’Souza, Clare, 2006. “Service excellence in e-Governance issues: An Indian Case Study”, JOAAG, Available at http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan045529.pdf “Good Practices and Innovations in Public Governance”, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The United Nations, New York available at http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan046119.pdf http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan035284.pdf Humphreys Peter C -Improving Public Service Delivery-. Committee for Public Management Research Discussion Paper 7 (1998) Institute of Public Administration 57-61 Lansdowne Road Dublin 4 Ireland available at http://www.ipa.ie/pdf/cpmr/CPMR_DP_7_Improving_PublicService_Delivery.pdf Loffler Elke- Public Management and Governance. Editors -A. G. Bovaird, Elke Löffler, Rutledge, 2003 Public Sector Research centre-The road ahead for public service delivery- Delivering on the customer promise accessed from http://www.iccs-isac.org/en/pubs/the_road_ahead_for_public_service_delivery.pdf Saravanan M and Shreedhar K, Impact of Innovation in Public Service Delivery SCI Journal of Management 41(1): 156–165 accessed on 05 Feb 2013 from www.cgg.gov.in/pdfs/ASCI_%20ServiceDelivery_Paper.pdf Shah, Anwar. 2005. “Public Services Delivery”, The World Bank, Washington DC United Nations. 2011. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/PSGLP/Resources/PublicServiceDelivery.pdf Sevottam model (2010) available at http://www.darpg.nic.in/darpgwebsite_cms/Document/file/Sevottam_Model.pdf Sevottam Guidelines Sept-2011 - Department of Administrative ... available at http://www.darpg.nic.in/darpgwebsite.../Sevottam_Guidelines_Sept_2011.pdf World Bank. 2006. “India: Reforming Public Services in India - Drawing Lessons from Success”, The World Bank, R. No. 35041-IN.accessed from http://www.wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/03/27/000012009_ 20060327084642/Rendered/PDF/350410rev0IN.pdf Brief Bio of the author Dr Ramakrishnan Ramachandran, a baby boomer did his PhD in Corporate Social Responsibility and is currently the Director of Agni School of Business Excellence NH 45, Morepatti Dindigul, an emerging Business Management School in Tamilnadu India After working in the Government of India in the Cabinet Secretariat and Indian High Commission Seychelles for 22 years, he worked in the manufacturing and IT sector for the next 8 years and has also done consultancy works in the field of Quality for small and medium industries in India. He joined academics to pursue his passion – Teaching. Author of books ranging from Total Quality management to Environmental Science to Ethics, Ramakrishnan has presented over 30 papers on various management topics. He is continuing his research work on various topics ranging from Mentoring to Marketing as he tries to give shape to the future managers of India. He can be contacted at Cell No. +9952669656 and ramakrish54@gmail.com His current post doctoral research interests are Social Responsibility, Gender studies, Financial Inclusion, Development Studies etc. His research papers can be accessed at SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=646193