The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : ‘A tool to check corruption’

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Sunday, Jul 08, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

‘A tool to check corruption’

Special Correspondent

Public Affairs Centre report on ten years of citizens’ charters released

BANGALORE: The Chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, M. Veerappa Moily, has said citizens’ charters are an effective instrument to check corruption and improve service delivery by public sector agencies in the country.

Mr. Moily, who released a report titled “India’s Citizens’ Charters: A Decade of Experience” brought out by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), Bangalore, said red tape and nepotism were concerns in public administration. The Right to Information (RTI) Act had largely opened up institutional mechanisms to combat the problems in civil administration. “Many times, rules and regulations have taken away the spirit of the law of the Constitution and made the lives of citizens miserable.” It was necessary to work out a law to provide a statutory mechanism in critical areas, he said.

Comparison

Drawing a comparison between the RTI Act and citizens’ charters, Mr. Moily said, “The latter is a document which represents a systematic effort to focus on the commitment of the organisation towards its citizens in respect of services.” The RTI Act was a legal instrument while the charter was not legally enforceable. The charter was a tool for facilitating the delivery of services to citizens in terms of standards, quality and time, he said.

The four features of the charter, according to Mr. Moily, are: responsibility for service delivery, performance standards, compensation for non-performance, and instant redressal mechanism. “A lot needs to be done to make citizens get good value for public money. The charter is one of the necessary tools in this struggle to make citizens the sovereigns and the Government their servant,” he said.

Planning Board Deputy Chairman A. Ravindra critically analysed the report and said the PAC could have surveyed the display of charters by local bodies and awareness among the people at the grass roots. He called upon NGOs to launch awareness campaigns to make the charter relevant to the public.

PAC chairman Samuel Paul and project team members T. Sethumadhavan, Gopakumar Thampi, Sita Sekhar, Meena Nair and A. Venugopala Reddy participated in the discussion.

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