What Are The Main Principles Underlying the Citizen’s Charter ? Point Out The Hindrances Faced in its Effective Implementation. (150 Words / 10 M) (GS-4 Citizen’s Charter)

Approach:

1. Introduction – what is Citizen’s charter & role in good governance.
2. Delineate the principles.
3. Mention few of the major hindrances in its implementation.

The three major aspects of good governance are transparency, accountability, and responsiveness of the administration. The Citizen’s Charter furthers all the above aspects of good governance by declaring the commitment to superiority in service. It declares the standards for various services offered.

The Principles of Citizens Charter are:

• Quality : improving service quality.
• Choice : giving appropriate choices to stakeholders.
• Standards : specify the standards of service delivery.
• Accountability : organizations are answerable to the beneficiaries if standards are unmet.
• Transparency : aids in good governance.

Major hindrances:

• Formulation of citizen’s charter is a top-down approach where stakeholder consultation has been minimal or totally absent. It thus, becomes a routine activity of organizations, with no room for improvement.
• The implementation is not robust, since the staffs are not adequately trained, oriented and sensitized. Hierarchical organization often hampers its implementation.
• Sometimes, reshuffles at the critical stages of formulation/implementation in an organization severely destabilizes the process.
• Since awareness campaign is not conducted systematically, most of the beneficiaries remain in oblivion about the concept of citizen’s charter.
• Sometimes the standards/time and norms of services mentioned in the citizen’s charter were either too negligent or too stringent, so that it became impractical to implement.