# **Box 2. Citizen’s Charters in India**

Citizen’s charters were introduced in 1997 in the context of an ‘Action Plan for Effective and Responsive Government.’ By 2001, 68 citizen’s charters had been formulated by central government agencies, and 318 at subnational level. They were posted on government websites and were open to public scrutiny. A pilot ‘exemplary implementation’ exercise had been carried out in three national banks.

Some reservations about the initiative surfaced in evaluations:

- The initiative was seen as coming from the top, with minimal consultation.

- The employees affected received little training or orientation

- Staff transfers disrupted implementation in some cases

- The charter concept was not properly understood by clients

- Some charter service norms were either too lax or too tight<sup>xi</sup>

_Source:_ Sharma and Agnihotri (2001).

The reservations echo findings from the UK, where the charter movement began. The UK Citizen's Charters were a flagship initiative of Prime Minister John Major, yet only 16 out of 1,000 people polled there in the mid-1990s at its height were both familiar with a Charter and satisfied with it (O’Conghaile, 1996). The criticism arose that lip-service was being paid to citizens’ views, and that the charters reflected the priorities of managers, not citizens (Clarke and Newman, 1997).

The involvement of non-state providers is probably of greater significance than ‘managerialist’ initiatives such as citizen’s charters. In this paper we are not interested in stand-alone service provision, whether by NGOs, for-profit providers or donors, even though in some countries there are areas such as water and sanitation where private provision predominates, but in services that are contracted by or actively aligned with state service provision. Experience here has been mixed yet again, and probably more negative than positive. An early study of contracting for clinical and ancillary services in the health sector found problems created by the limited capacity of slow-moving, rule-ridden bureaucracies to perform even very basic functions such as paying contractors in a timely manner (Bennett and Mills, 1998). A more recent comprehensive survey echoed that finding, and noted that formal policy dialogue between government and non-state providers was often imperfect and unrepresentative, especially in fragile settings, and sometimes unduly dominated by the provider side (Batley and Mcloughlin, 2009).

# **The Appropriateness of NPM**

NPM has been described as ‘truly a global paradigm’ (Borins, 1997: 65) whose spread is impeded only by bureaucratic isolationism (Thompson, 1997: 13). However, the contributors to a comprehensive review in 2001 found that its incidence in developing countries was limited (McCourt and Minogue, 2001), and that picture has probably not changed a great deal in the last decade. The problem-solving approach that I have taken in this paper suggests an explanation. If NPM is essentially a response to the problem of improving performance and delivering on a government’s objectives, then a prior condition for its application must be that government makes improving performance a priority.

Whether performance is or even ought to be a priority was the subject of a debate over the application of the New Zealand version of NPM (New Zealand was a market leader in the early days of NPM). Bale and Dale (1998), as advocates, argued that the New Zealand reforms were relevant to developing countries because they were developed from a broad, system-wide perspective that focused on the causes, not the symptoms, of dysfunctionality, and because having specified the performance standards that the center expected, the reforms devolved to line agencies the management authority that they would need to meet the standards. However, they conceded that some stringent conditions were also necessary: a 11