What's New

How does a citizen’s charter ensure transparency and accountability in the administration? How far has it been able to make administration citizen centric?

Approach-

• Introduce the answer by briefly defining the citizen’s charter and its objectives.
• In the body of the answer discuss in detail how citizen’s charter helps in making the administration accountable and citizen centric.
• In the next part of the body discuss various shortcomings in the citizen’s charter.
• In the last part of the body discuss in detail ways to make the charter more responsive and effective.
• Conclude the answer by reiterating the importance of the charter and making a case for adopting global best practices.

Citizen’s Charter is a voluntary, non-binding document of commitments made by a government

organization to the citizens in respect to services being provided to them. It outlines vision and mission statement of the organization, and strives to make the administration accountable in following ways:

1. The Citizen’s Charter established a quantifiable level of service, allowing for high expectations of an organisation and encouraging conscientious labour on their part.
2. The citizen’s charter encourages participatory governance by educating citizens about the objectives of the organisation and creating a forum for input.
3. The Citizen’s Charter establishes time-bound service delivery, which ensures accountability by reducing bureaucratic delays.
4. By outlining the service delivery process in detail and lowering the amount of discretion, the citizen’s charter encourages transparency in government.
5. The Citizen’s Charter provides for the resolution of grievances, providing citizens with a legal remedy against subpar service.
6. By streamlining the service delivery process, the citizen’s charter makes the organisation productive and efficient.

Though Citizen’s charter intends to make administration citizen centric, there remains some challenges such as:

1. The content, language and design are not user friendly which makes it difficult to understand
   Ex. Charters are often not available in regional languages, creating a linguistic barrier.
2. t is observed that in majority of cases the citizen’s charter is not formulated through a consultative process, resulting in a copy paste charter for every department/organization.
3. The service providers, especially at the cutting-edge level, are not familiar with the philosophy, goals and features of the charter.
4. Poor awareness about the charter among the public makes it limited.
5. Charters are not updated in a timely manner, failing to reflect the aspirations of the changing society.

In order to make citizen’s charter more responsive and effective following steps need to be taken:

1. Consumer groups, CSOs, etc., stakeholders should be involved at every stage of formulation of the citizen’s charter.
2. The language and design of the charter should be easily comprehensible. Charter should be made disabled friendly. Eg: Charter should be brought in braille system.
3. Orientation and training of the staff about the features and requirements of the charter.
4. Citizen’s charter should be publicised through hoardings, pamphlets, text messages etc.
5. Third party involvement in assessing the charter and revising it periodically.
6. To make the charter more effective it can be given a binding character through legal backing.

Citizen’s charter plays an important role in bridging the information gap between the citizens and the government. Its efficacy can be improved by adopting the global best practices and implementing the sevottam model as proposed by the 2nd ARC.