Disclaimer :- This is an exclusive UPSCTREE write up.The italicized sentences are the inputs we derived from other sources.
Background:-
It was an afternoon of a Thursday, unlike any, it was significant because it was a particular day of a particular year – November 19,1863 and it was the Abraham Lincoln speaking from the podium of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Yes, that’s right.It was not a date of great war or signing of a great treaty , it was just a speech that had the power to influence the generations of the time and generation yet to come.
And a single sentence of the speech left undying impression on Human landscape forever.
“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”
That single line had such power that it ultimately defined democracy.No body writes about democracy without writing the sentence irrespective of whether it is an essay to be written by a school-goer or an erudite examining the functioning of democracy.
More than a century has passed since that afternoon and more and more countries became democracies in the process.Yet , the sentence still has profound meaning for the ruled and for the ruler.
Democracy was the utopia that started with great expectations , it delivered some and it faltered to deliver some.But, democracy is not a one day or one year affair – it is a work in progress and it will always be as such
And, like any work in progress , it had to change,reform , adapt ,endure and deliver continuously.
Change is constant , and in order to be a constant affair, democracy has to change.Change begin with reforms, reforms begins with adaptation , adaptation ensures endurance , and when there is endurance – deliverance is guaranteed.
A look around all democracies in the world, tells us that , people are undoubtedly proud of it , people are satisfied with it and people are dissatisfied with it too.It evokes mixed response and mixed emotions.
To make it more robust, more meaningful and more relevant – there is a call for another round of Gettysburg address.But this time, no leader has to take podium or give a speech , instead it requires calculated rearrangement and calibrated decision making.What those decisions are and what those rearrangements thus calls for assessment.
Another round of – “For the people, of the people and by the people “:-
Recently , the private sector’s response to customer demands has also raised public expectations for government services. In this context, what should governments focus on prioritizing and getting right?
At its simplest, what governments should be focusing on is what citizens want. At one level, that’s a very trite answer, but where we think there’s an interesting layer to that is that there do seem to be a set of outcomes that citizens increasingly care about.
Those outcomes require departments and agencies to work together in ways that they’ve never done before. More and more governments are setting a smaller number of very meaningful outcomes that citizens want, and they end up being things like reducing street crimes or making the street clean or delivering services in real-time.
A big thing that governments have to get right, and get right at the outset, is that digital is not just about digital. It’s integral to every discussion you have on major policy issues. That just like big corporations, you can’t just put digital in a corner of government activity and leave that to a check-savvy department. You have to integrate it with the main purposes of government. You have to put the muscle of a bigger purpose behind it to actually drive it through.
One point to raise here, is whether to use the word prioritize. Governments struggle with that tremendously because it implies trade-offs have to be made. While it’s easy to identify a long list of things that governments want to do, be it because fiscally they have to or because citizens want them to, the challenge is often what they do not do. Usually getting that list is pretty straightforward, but the most difficult part is getting a cabinet together and for them to actually say, “At what point do we say this is no longer a priority? Or is this a priority maybe for later?”
In a modern democracy, when there are more voices from more parts of society and the political spectrum, it can be hard for government to make choices. To some extent, you’re squeezed. You’ve got more things that you have to deal with. There’s not a lot more money to be able to work to address that with.
That’s a huge opportunity for government, and it’s also a challenge in the sense if you went back 10, 15 years, for most citizens their expectations of the department of an agency were set by another government department or another agency. Today, their expectations are driven by the private sector. They’re driven by their digital experience with a bank, with their mobile-phone provider, with their pay-TV provider.
One little insight that we’ve seen from several countries that have done this quite well is that, if you’re a consumer company, historically, if you were a customer of mine, I used to look at you in terms of how productive my relationship with you was over a one-year period. Increasingly, what world-class consumer companies are doing is looking at the value of a customer over a lifetime. Essentially, what is the value of that customer journey, that customer experience, over the whole time of the relationship? Believe it or not, governments have never done that. They’ve always looked at you, , and what the nature of your relationship was over the last year ?
Thus, reforms are important, but what is more important is – increasing people’s participation demands better service across range of issues.And to deliver that , the government has to keep check and reassess , not once in a decade but probably once in a year.That could make democracy more meaningful.
Democracy transcended it’s core that is- people’s participation.In a modern democracy , people are not there just to vote , they are here to demand.And the demands have moved from ideological arena to delivery of day-to-day services.The demands can be as simple as – baby food in trains , 24hr electricity , cleaning the clogged drainage system of a city or getting a passport with in a day.
A close look at the demands tells us that , whatever the government services are there – they don’t have the luxury of time anymore.A citizen does not expect to get his/her passport in a month anymore ,he/she wants it in a day.In a faster age , delivery got to be faster, else democracy will lose its meaning.
In modern democracy, the demands are not about getting the political right anymore. It is about getting the social and economic justice – not in 100 years but in lightning speed.Governments will be judged on this parameters and will be voted in or out on this basis.
Speed is the new core of democracy and the mantra is – “democracy is there, just make the services simpler,faster and real-time”.
If one wants to achieve speed , one needs to do away with discretion in decision making, and make it digital and transparent. Corruption will erode as discretion erodes.So speed will help in curbing all other negative externalities that became synonymous with democracy such as – bribery, corruption, policy-paralysis etc.Speed will indeed help in restoring the public faith that mutated to public cynicism over the past decades.
Recent Posts
- In the Large States category (overall), Chhattisgarh ranks 1st, followed by Odisha and Telangana, whereas, towards the bottom are Maharashtra at 16th, Assam at 17th and Gujarat at 18th. Gujarat is one State that has seen startling performance ranking 5th in the PAI 2021 Index outperforming traditionally good performing States like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, but ranks last in terms of Delta
- In the Small States category (overall), Nagaland tops, followed by Mizoram and Tripura. Towards the tail end of the overall Delta ranking is Uttarakhand (9th), Arunachal Pradesh (10th) and Meghalaya (11th). Nagaland despite being a poor performer in the PAI 2021 Index has come out to be the top performer in Delta, similarly, Mizoram’s performance in Delta is also reflected in it’s ranking in the PAI 2021 Index
- In terms of Equity, in the Large States category, Chhattisgarh has the best Delta rate on Equity indicators, this is also reflected in the performance of Chhattisgarh in the Equity Pillar where it ranks 4th. Following Chhattisgarh is Odisha ranking 2nd in Delta-Equity ranking, but ranks 17th in the Equity Pillar of PAI 2021. Telangana ranks 3rd in Delta-Equity ranking even though it is not a top performer in this Pillar in the overall PAI 2021 Index. Jharkhand (16th), Uttar Pradesh (17th) and Assam (18th) rank at the bottom with Uttar Pradesh’s performance in line with the PAI 2021 Index
- Odisha and Nagaland have shown the best year-on-year improvement under 12 Key Development indicators.
- In the 60:40 division States, the top three performers are Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu and, the bottom three performers are Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar.
- In the 90:10 division States, the top three performers were Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Mizoram; and, the bottom three performers are Manipur, Assam and Meghalaya.
- Among the 60:40 division States, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are the top three performers and Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Delhi appear as the bottom three performers.
- Among the 90:10 division States, the top three performers are Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland; and, the bottom three performers are Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh
- Among the 60:40 division States, Goa, West Bengal and Delhi appear as the top three performers and Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Bihar appear as the bottom three performers.
- Among the 90:10 division States, Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura were the top three performers and Jammu & Kashmir, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh were the bottom three performers
- West Bengal, Bihar and Tamil Nadu were the top three States amongst the 60:40 division States; while Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan appeared as the bottom three performers
- In the case of 90:10 division States, Mizoram, Assam and Tripura were the top three performers and Nagaland, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand featured as the bottom three
- Among the 60:40 division States, the top three performers are Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa and the bottom three performers are Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Goa
- In the 90:10 division States, the top three performers are Mizoram, Sikkim and Nagaland and the bottom three performers are Manipur and Assam
In a diverse country like India, where each State is socially, culturally, economically, and politically distinct, measuring Governance becomes increasingly tricky. The Public Affairs Index (PAI 2021) is a scientifically rigorous, data-based framework that measures the quality of governance at the Sub-national level and ranks the States and Union Territories (UTs) of India on a Composite Index (CI).
States are classified into two categories – Large and Small – using population as the criteria.
In PAI 2021, PAC defined three significant pillars that embody Governance – Growth, Equity, and Sustainability. Each of the three Pillars is circumscribed by five governance praxis Themes.
The themes include – Voice and Accountability, Government Effectiveness, Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality and Control of Corruption.
At the bottom of the pyramid, 43 component indicators are mapped to 14 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are relevant to the States and UTs.
This forms the foundation of the conceptual framework of PAI 2021. The choice of the 43 indicators that go into the calculation of the CI were dictated by the objective of uncovering the complexity and multidimensional character of development governance
The Equity Principle
The Equity Pillar of the PAI 2021 Index analyses the inclusiveness impact at the Sub-national level in the country; inclusiveness in terms of the welfare of a society that depends primarily on establishing that all people feel that they have a say in the governance and are not excluded from the mainstream policy framework.
This requires all individuals and communities, but particularly the most vulnerable, to have an opportunity to improve or maintain their wellbeing. This chapter of PAI 2021 reflects the performance of States and UTs during the pandemic and questions the governance infrastructure in the country, analysing the effectiveness of schemes and the general livelihood of the people in terms of Equity.
Growth and its Discontents
Growth in its multidimensional form encompasses the essence of access to and the availability and optimal utilisation of resources. By resources, PAI 2021 refer to human resources, infrastructure and the budgetary allocations. Capacity building of an economy cannot take place if all the key players of growth do not drive development. The multiplier effects of better health care, improved educational outcomes, increased capital accumulation and lower unemployment levels contribute magnificently in the growth and development of the States.
The Pursuit Of Sustainability
The Sustainability Pillar analyses the access to and usage of resources that has an impact on environment, economy and humankind. The Pillar subsumes two themes and uses seven indicators to measure the effectiveness of government efforts with regards to Sustainability.
The Curious Case Of The Delta
The Delta Analysis presents the results on the State performance on year-on-year improvement. The rankings are measured as the Delta value over the last five to 10 years of data available for 12 Key Development Indicators (KDI). In PAI 2021, 12 indicators across the three Pillars of Equity (five indicators), Growth (five indicators) and Sustainability (two indicators). These KDIs are the outcome indicators crucial to assess Human Development. The Performance in the Delta Analysis is then compared to the Overall PAI 2021 Index.
Key Findings:-
In the Scheme of Things
The Scheme Analysis adds an additional dimension to ranking of the States on their governance. It attempts to complement the Governance Model by trying to understand the developmental activities undertaken by State Governments in the form of schemes. It also tries to understand whether better performance of States in schemes reflect in better governance.
The Centrally Sponsored schemes that were analysed are National Health Mission (NHM), Umbrella Integrated Child Development Services scheme (ICDS), Mahatma Gandh National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SmSA) and MidDay Meal Scheme (MDMS).
National Health Mission (NHM)
INTEGRATED CHILD DEVELOPMENT SERVICES (ICDS)
MID- DAY MEAL SCHEME (MDMS)
SAMAGRA SHIKSHA ABHIYAN (SMSA)
MAHATMA GANDHI NATIONAL RURAL EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE SCHEME (MGNREGS)