Discuss the barriers to citizenry engagement in the state-driven governance mechanism. How can civil society bridge this gap?
The engagement of the citizenry is seen as one of the mechanisms required for effective implementation of the welfare schemes and effective governance. It brings transparency and accountability in the state driven governance mechanisms.
However, despite various recommendations of the Administrative reforms committee, active engagement with the citizen have remained lackluster.
Challenges to the development initiatives taken through the government:
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- Power distance between the government and the citizen: This makes it difficult for the citizen to approach the government.
- Poor civil servants to people ratio: India has one of the poorest ratio of public servants to people ratio in the world. This overburdens the bureaucracy, reducing the possibility of citizen engagement.
- Lack of awareness of the People: People are not aware about the mechanisms such as RTI, Citizen charter and social audits.
- Sense of complacency: the Indian bureaucratic elite have little appetite for risk-taking and innovation because of the constant changing goalposts of their politician-bosses or because the quantum of work is more than what they can efficiently handle.
- Career-based civil services coupled with excessive job security: There is also the fear of failure, with its deep-rooted consequence of non-risk-takers smoothly sailing to the top posts.
- Lack of training and Old red tapist mind-set: It doesn’t emphasize on innovation or service delivery improving effectiveness of administration.
Thus, to bridge the gap active involvement of the civil society organizations (CSOs) is often desired because -
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- Innovation in community engagements: non-state actor have freedom to innovate and create breakthrough models of community engagement. The Bureaucracy is too tied in the web of procedures which prevents innovations.
- Bridging power gap: They also become the vehicle to carry the demands of people to formal institutions. For example, in the case of the Right to Information (RTI) campaign, which became a law after decades-long efforts by NGOs. The law has brought a dramatic change in the degree of transparency in India, with most Government ministries falling under its ambit.
- NGOs have greater penetration in the society: NGOs and CSOs with their penetration are best suited for last-mile delivery of government schemes or implementation of a corporate house’s CSR work, thus nudging one another in the path to a developmental state.
- Implementation of the schemes: It is common knowledge that the District Collector calls on vetted NGOs/CSOs to implement various schemes during the normal course of the day or to step in at short notice when calamities strike.
- Reducing the government work: NGOs and CSOs sometimes do the heavy lift and ensure that schemes reach the last person even in the face of disaster. When non-state actors take a large load off the state’s shoulder, the state can focus more on governance.
However there are various limitations of the NGOs/CSOs too:
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- Corruption: Often NGOs & CSOs are involved in corruption. When partnered with corrupt bureaucracy, they can act as a money diversion schemes. For example scams in the construction of shelter-homes.
- Lack of transparency: Often NGOs do not file returns which are necessary under the income tax act. The fact that has been previously pointed out by the Supreme court
- Foreign influence: various NGOs which also act as a pressure groups receive foreign funds which can mean foreign power influencing policy making in India.
- Terror funding & Money laundering: Often NGOs are used for illegal transactions that are prejudicial to Indian's national security.
Due to the degree of freedom that the Non-state actors enjoy, it is easier for them to implement the government schemes. However, there is an increased need for transparency and accountability in the monitoring of the NGOs. The Reports of the 2nd Administrative reforms commission (ARC) recommend measures to improve accountability of NGOs such as -
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- Penal action upon detection of irregularities
- Defining charitable institutions
- Putting in place a system of accreditation / certification of voluntary organisations which seek funding from government agencies.
- Regulation of the foreign contribution, which as been done with the implementation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation act, 2010.
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