Citizens Ombudsman

Yesterday, Pranab Mukherjee in his reply to the debate on the three demands of Anna Hazare in the parliament requested speaker to convey, "in principle agreement" of the three demands and the sense of the house along with the entire debate proceedings to the sanding committee for their consideration in the preparation of the Lokpal bill. Even though there is no binding on the standing committee to include all the three demands in the draft Lokpal bill to be submitted back to the cabinet / parliament, non-inclusions will only lead to a serious political implications.

Inclusion of PM, Judiciary may or may not effect common man on a day to day basis but the three demands Anna has made will have an effect. These 3 demands are inclusion of lower bureaucracy, citizen’s charter, appointment of lokayuktas – inclusion of public servants of state.

Citizen’s charter is more like a service level agreements (SLA) by the government office to the citizens / customers to whom they provide service with certain penalties. Section 25 of Jan Lokpal bill talks about the Citizen’s Charter.

Section 25 (2) says, “Every citizens' charter shall enumerate the public authority's commitments to the citizens which are capable of being met within a specific time limit and shall designate the officer whose duty would be to fulfill the commitment of the public authority”. This is similar to SLA.

Section 25(5) says, “Each public authority shall designate an official called Public Grievance Redressal Officer in each station where the public authority has an office, to whom a complaint could be made for any violation of the citizens' charter”. This section talks about the mechanism to address the slippages of the SLA (Grievances).

Section 25(9) says,“The Lokpal after hearing the Grievance Redressal Officer would impose suitable penalty not exceeding Rs. 500/- for each day's delay but not exceeding Rs. 50,000/- to be recovered from the salaries of the Grievance Redressal Officer”. This section talks about the penalty to Grievance Redressal officer for not getting the grievance redressed within the specific period of 30 days a complaint.

We see and hear about people paying bribe for two kinds of things:

1. You pay bribe to make the officer to do the work they are supposed to do - You have all the required documents or submitted the required documents to get the service from government office, still your work is delayed or not done as the officer asks or expects money from you to provide the service (on time).
2. You pay bribe to do the work which they are not supposed or intended to do – You do not have all the documents or do not have required things as per the rules. People pay bribe to the officer to ignore or by pass things to get the service done.

In my opinion Citizen’s Charter would minimize the first kind of bribes if not the later and hopefully we see and sense in all the government offices what Gandhiji said about customer, “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so”.