A Matter of Attitude

It is a welcome augury that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has decided to implement the concept of service-level agreements (SLAs) that will mandate penalties to be deducted from the salaries of dealing officials if there are delays in providing citizen services like issuance of ration cards and driving licences. It will be first implemented in Delhi from April next year and then in Union Territories, and other States are expected to take the initiative on their own later on as many of the services fall under State subjects. In Delhi, initially nine services will be covered: issuance of ration cards, issuance and renewal of driving licences, registration of voters, issuance of voter identity cards, registration of births, registration of deaths, registration under the Department of Value Added Tax, issuance of SC certificate and issuance of OBC certificate. The SLAs will make it binding on the authorities concerned to help provide certain services in a time-bound manner. The moment a department receives an application form for a particular service, a dealing official will be identified and the applicant will be informed of who will be handling the case. Now what is significant is that the SLAs put the onus of helping an applicant complete and submit the form on the officials of the department concerned. Once the form is accepted, it will be presumed that all formalities have been completed and a time limit will be set for the applicant’s case. If any loopholes are detected in the application form after it has been accepted, the SLAs will hold the official who accepted the form accountable, not the applicant. The entire process will be computerized, which means the monitoring of each official’s performance will be done electronically, and if there is any delay, a penalty will automatically be deducted from the salary of the official responsible.

The latest PMO initiative is aimed at making government services more people-centric and people-friendly, and could be a meaningful addition to the transparency regime that the RTI Act has ushered in. However, given the enormity of the systematically perpetuated culture of corruption and the anti-people attitude of government officials who have nothing to lose by being deliberately hostile to ordinary citizens in dire need of some service (the deliberate hostility stems from the security in a government job), it will be too utopian to expect a sudden miracle in the fashion of government services. What will matter is an attitudinal shift — from being an uncooperative babu looking for shady deals in exchange for fast service to the one who has respect for the norms of democracy and who volunteers his service towards the making of a welfare state. According to reports, the violator of SLAs will face a penalty of Rs 200, to begin with. Even if it is, say, Rs 1,000 eventually, will it really matter to the one who has several parallel illegitimate sources of income, who is part of the grand architecture of corruption? And unless there is a change in the characteristic mindset of government officials long used to harassing people who are not prepared to cough up bribes to get their works done, nothing dramatic can be expected from the new system. Or the penalty should be high enough for one to be really afraid of paying it. THE SENTINEL