Governance by Commitment: Exploring Empirical Insights of Citizen Charter Model in Indian Administrative Culture

Abstract

Era of New public management (NPM) reforms and public choice approach led to structural changes in the service delivery to public/clients, resulting in development of more people oriented and time bound services from government officials. Evolution of Citizen Charter (CC) in public sector is the most obvious and prominent mechanism for decentralized and citizen centric governance tool. Since 1997, Citizen Charter in Indian context has evolved significantly and still being modified to match the practical aspects of governance. In stages, it has been consistently institutionalized prominently in the central and state governments to develop a more transparent, service oriented administrative culture with a clear focus of enhancing current efficiency levels. However there have been severe issues and deficiencies with the theoretical aspects of charter formulated by governments and the execution, starting with those ministries and department that have large public interface. From this perspective the paper critically appraises and evaluates the citizen’s charter(s) formulated by ministries and departments of central government and state governments available on official websites. These issues have been analyzed through conceptual and analytical framework. On the basis of findings, the study concluded that the lack of awareness and less publicity; absence of stakeholders’ participation; institutional and administrative inability to ensure supervision and monitoring mechanism and almost non-existent periodical review of charters has affected its potential effectiveness. Finally, the paper qualitatively measures the competency of charters on the assessment criteria articulated in Sevottam Model. Ultimately it becomes mandatory on the part of administration to ensure necessary modification in citizen charter implementation by promoting citizen-centric administrative culture.