The Hindu Business Line : Firm steps to becoming more citizen-friendly

They draw up highly convoluted schemes and issue circulars in unintelligible gobbledygook, little realising that the chief reason for the chronic lack of a culture of implementation in India is the use of arcane jargon of which nobody down the line, especially in the present state of knowledge of English, is able to make head or tail.

Of course, some small steps have been taken such as citizens charters, grievance cells and the like, but the experience of ordinary citizens is that these are mostly ritualistic, with the officials supposed to be in charge of them continuing to be as callous as before.

My recent reference in these columns to the citizen-hostile attitude of chief secretaries of two States brought a flood of calls and messages from readers recalling their own bitter memories.

If the Government has to have a human face, every functionary should present a human, not an ogre's, face to the citizen.

A great responsibility for this devolves on the head of the organisation — whether it is a Ministry, Department or Public Sector Enterprise. It is he who should set an example in behaving with a human face.

A fear should be instilled in him that if he does not measure up, he will be removed or downgraded.

With the help of information technology network, it should be possible to track the progress towards, and the pace of, disposal of every grievance/complaint addressed to him.

The SMS technique used by TV channels for conducting surveys on issues can equally do to ascertain from such of those citizens who own or use mobile phones or PCs what kind of complaints/grievances they had sent about service delivery and what their measure of satisfaction with the response was.

If in a majority of cases, the service delivery has been poor or the organisation had been indifferent, then the head is not fit to hold his job and should be removed.

By way of supplementing the efforts of the head of the organisation to acquire a human face himself and helping those under him also to do likewise, they should be put through intensive training/refresher programmes at least once a year.

Without some blood-letting and cracking of the whip, the citizen's plight will be the same as it has been all these 60 years after Independence.

B. S. RAGHAVAN