Making voice work: the report card on Banglalore's public service

Samuel Paul

No 1921, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The author reports how a"report card"on public services in the Indian city of Bangalore was used by citizen groups to creategreater public awareness about the poor performance of public service providers and to challenge them to be more efficient and responsive to their customers. The report card was the result of a survey of a sample of users (both rich and poor) of the city's services and rated public agencies in terms of public satisfaction with different dimensions of their services. Public feedback was used to quantify the extent of corruption and other indirect costs of the services. The result was a citizen's assessment of public services. The survey was completed in 1993, but the follow-up activities continued for three years, with the active involvement of several concerned citizen groups and nongovernment bodies. The author discusses how the media disseminated the report card findings, how public agencies responded to it, and how agencies joined citizen groups in joint initiatives to improve services. Similar report cards have since been prepared on several other large cities in India. It is not easy to measure the impact of the report card on the quality and responsiveness of Bangalore's service providers. The author examines the problems involved and gives some intermediate indicators. There is some evidence that public awareness of the problems has increased as a result of the experiment. Civil society institutions seem to be more active and their interactions with public agencies have become better organized, more purposeful, and continuous. As a result, some public agencies in Bangalore have begun to take steps to improve their services.

Keywords: Enterprise Development&Reform; Decentralization; ICT Policy and Strategies; Municipal Financial Management; Corruption&Anitcorruption Law; Governance Indicators; ICT Policy and Strategies; Poverty Assessment; Municipal Financial Management; Health Economics&Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-05-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... d/PDF/multi_page.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:1921

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().