Business Standard: New
Delhi: Monday, March 11, 2013.
The Right of
Citizens for Time-bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their
Grievances Bill was reportedly cleared by the Cabinet last week, and should be
introduced in the current session of Parliament. Drafts of the Bill have been
available for some time now, but details of the final version are still unknown.
However, the general intent of the Bill is clear: to ensure that citizens
receive such services as passports and ration cards within a certain clearly
defined period of time; and allowing them a method by which they can complain
if something due to them from the government is not being provided. This is a
long-standing demand of many activists, and was one of the legislative changes
recommended by the anti-corruption activists who had coalesced around the Jan
Lokpal Bill. If properly drafted, it could serve - like the Right to
Information Act, or RTI - to make the government more accountable to its
citizens, and its working more transparent.
There are, of
course, various objections to its implementation. One is the standard objection
that involves federalism. These objections, whatever their merit, should be
thrashed out before it becomes a law. The current lacuna in the RTI, which
allows state information commissions to effectively ignore orders from the
central information commission, or bars petitioners from appealing a state
decision to the Centre, should be an eye-opener. There is also the question of
whether it will be as decentralised as it should be. After all, a right to
service provision, and to the redressal of grievances, is most felt in places far
from state capitals. Will there be district-level or at least block-level
locations where citizens can see this right enforced? If not, it might well
remain just on paper.
The Bill is
an innovative approach to legislation that has emerged, essentially, from the
states. Madhya Pradesh enacted such a law in 2010, and it was widely studied in
other state capitals. Bihar followed the next year, and then a spate of other
states, with similar Bills working through state legislatures in several
others. This is a reminder that, while India's federal structure is the
frequent cause of frustrating bottlenecks, it is also a useful source of policy
innovation. Increasingly, over the past decade, states have acted as
laboratories for laws, testing if they are implementable and popular; some are
then taken up by the Centre.
There is also
another, darker side to the Bill, something that marks it out as different
from, say, the right to information or the right to food. Essentially, it
consists of an admission of failure: that the architecture of the Indian state
has failed to deliver accountability without binding itself by a further law
that essentially forces it to do its job. Citizens should not need the
government to legislate the right to services to which they are already
entitled. The fact of their citizenship is right enough. But the failure of the
Indian state to deliver the services it promises has been so widespread that it
finds it must force itself, legislatively, to improve. In the end, a failure of
governance and public ethics infects all efforts and promises, and no law can
change that.
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