The Citizens’ Charter is an instrument which seeks to make an organization transparent, accountable and citizen friendly. A Citizens’ Charter is basically a set of commitments made by an organization regarding the standards of service which it delivers.

BENEFITS OF CITIZEN CHARTER

• It enhances accountability by providing citizens with a clear understanding of service delivery standards, including timetables, user fees for services, and options for grievance redress.
• It increases organizational effectiveness and performance by making a public commitment to adhere to measurable service delivery standards.
• It creates a way for both internal and external actors to objectively monitor service delivery performance.
• It creates a more professional and client-responsive environment for service delivery.
• It fosters improvements in staff morale.
• It decreases opportunities for corruption and graft by increasing transparency and educating citizens about their rights.!
• It increases government revenues by ensuring that the money citizens pay for services goes into the government’s coffers (and not into employees’ pockets).

PROBLEMS FACED IN IMPLEMENTING THE CHARTERS

As pointed out, the Citizens’ Charters initiative in India had started in 1997 and the Charters formulated are in a nascent stage of implementation. Introduction of a new concept is always difficult in any organisation. Introduction and implementation of the concept of Citizens’ Charter in the Government of India was much more difficult due to the old bureaucratic set up/procedures and the rigid attitudes of the work force. The major obstacles encountered in this initiative were:-

1. The general perception of organisations which formulated Citizens’ Charters was that the exercise was to be carried out because there was a direction from the top. The consultation process was minimal or largely absent. It thus became one of the routine activities of the organisation and had no focus.
2. For any Charter to succeed, the employees responsible for its implementation should have proper training and orientation, as commitments of the Charter cannot be expected to be delivered by a work force that is unaware of the spirit and content of the Charter. However, in many cases, the concerned staff were not adequately trained and sensitised.
3. Sometimes, transfers and reshuffles of concerned officers at the crucial stages of formulation/implementation of a Citizens’ Charter in an organisation severely undermined the strategic processes which were put in place and hampered the progress of the initiative.
4. Awareness campaigns to educate clients about the Charter were not conducted systematically.
5. In some cases, the standards/time norms of services mentioned in Citizens’ Charter were either too lax or too tight and were, therefore, unrealistic and created an unfavourable impression on the clients of the Charter.
6. The concept behind the Citizens’ Charter was not properly understood. Information brochures, publicity materials, pamphlets produced earlier by the organisations were mistaken for Citizens’ Charters.

STEPS TO IMPROVE CITIZEN CHARTERS

• Internal restructuring should precede Charter formulation: As a meaningful Charter seeks to improve the quality of service, mere stipulation to that effect in the Charter will not suffice. There has to be a complete analysis of the existing systems and processes within the organization and, if need be, these should to be recast and new initiatives adopted.
• One size does not fit all: This huge challenge becomes even more complex as the capabilities and resources that governments and departments need to implement Citizens’ Charters vary significantly across the country. Added to these are differing local conditions. The highly uneven distribution of Citizens’ Charters across States is clear evidence of this ground reality.
• Involve customers in the creation of guarantees, standards, redress policies, complaint systems, and customer service agreements: This is necessary to know what is important to the customer. It is prudent not to assume what the customer wants. Customer surveys are useful here, but face-to-face contact with customers is even more important. Customer councils and different types of customer voice tools can be used for this.
• Educate customers about the services that an organisation provides, so they will have realistic notions of what is possible and will understand their own responsibilities: Often services won’t work unless customers uphold their end of the deal. e.g., tax agencies can’t send speedy refunds if taxpayers don’t fill out their returns completely and accurately.
• Firm commitments to be made: Citizens’ Charters must be precise and make firm commitments of service delivery standards to the citizens/consumers in quantifiable terms wherever possible.
• Redressal mechanism in case of default: Citizens’ Charter should clearly lay down the relief which the organization is bound to provide if it has defaulted on the promised standards of delivery.
• Periodic evaluation of Citizens’ Charters: Every organization must conduct periodic evaluation of its Citizens’ Charter preferably through an external agency. This agency while evaluating the Charter of the organisation should also make an objective analysis of whether the promises made therein are being delivered within the defined parameters.
• Benchmark using end-user feedback: Systematic monitoring and review of Citizens’ Charters is necessary even after they are approved and placed in the public domain. Performance and accountability tend to suffer when officials are not held responsible for the quality of a Charter’s design and implementation.
• Hold officers accountable for results: All of the above point to the need to make the heads of agencies or other designated senior officials accountable for their respective Citizens’ Charters. The monitoring mechanism should fix specific responsibility in all cases where there is a default in adhering to the Citizens’ Charter.

Include Civil Society in the process: Organizations need to recognize and support the efforts of civil society groups in preparation of the Charters, their dissemination and also facilitating information disclosures.

SEVOTTAM MODEL

• Sevottam is a Service Delivery Excellence Model which provides an assessment-improvement framework to bring about excellence in public service delivery. The need for a tool like Sevottam arose from the fact that Citizens’ Charters by themselves could not achieve the desired results in improving quality of public services. Besides, the absence of a credible grievances redressal mechanism within organizations was also becoming a major impediment in improving service delivery standards. Thus, it was felt that unless there is a mechanism to assess the outcomes of various measures, the reform initiatives would not yield the desired results. The Sevottam model works as an evaluation mechanism to assess the quality of internal processes and their impact on the quality of service delivery.
• The Sevottam model has three modules. The first component of the model requires effective Charter implementation thereby opening up a channel for receiving citizens’ inputs into the way in which organizations determine service delivery requirements. Citizens’ Charters publicly declare the information on citizens’ entitlements thereby making citizens better informed and hence empowering them to demand better services. The second component of the model, ‘Public Grievance Redress’ requires a good grievance redressal system operating in a manner that leaves the citizen more satisfied with how the organization responds to complaints/grievances, irrespective of the final decision. The third component ‘Excellence in Service Delivery’, postulates that an organization can have an excellent performance in service delivery only if it is efficiently managing well the key ingredients for good service delivery and building its own capacity to continuously improve service delivery.
• An organization which meets Indian Standard 15700:2005 will be entitled for “Sevottam” certification, “Sevottam” being the Indian name for excellence in service delivery. This is known as Charter Mark Scheme. Given the largely negative opinion prevalent about the quality of government services in the country, the implementation of “Sevottam” is going to be a challenging exercise.