India : Bills & acts

The ongoing Winter Session of Parliament would witness the introduction of as many as four important bills including the National Food Security Bill 2011, Lokpal Bill 2011, Prevention of Money Laundering (Amendment) Bill, 2011 and most importantly, the Grievance Redress Bill (GRB) which is intended to give more power to people. And luckily, if the much-talked Lokpal Bill gets passed in this session, the volume of cases will be so enormous that the Lokpal body will be overburdened and might not be able to handle the cases all by itself. Thus, the Grievance Redress Bill would come in picture. The GRB aims to address complains and grievances of the common man. However, the bill is still under consideration. The final draft is yet to be prepared. This gives an opportunity to raise some issues that can be considered by the Committee before the bill is tabled in Parliament.

Firstly, the drafting committee has to define as to what is public service and delivery of public services. This is important because the horizon of public service is vast. From postal delivery to passport verification, all comes under public service. Thus, comprehending public service that will be addressed under GRB will define its area of functioning too. Secondly, the drafting committee will have to frame a Citizen Charter (which basically means the representation of commitments of any department to maintain standard, quality and timeframe of services it would provide to public). As every government department has its own Citizen Charter, thus, the Citizen Charter of GRB needs to be more comprehensive and collaborative. Third and the most important aspect is that the Committee further needs to define compensation and punishment for malfunctioning of any department intellectually, so that it can lead to speedy and concrete resolutions. This also has many facets, the present draft has only considered punishment and not reward.  Reward for employees who would contribute to its success can play a pivotal role in encouraging them. Another important issue which the committee has to address is that of Centre-state relations. Though it’s been proposed that states will have separate grievance redressal cells, but what would happen if the issue involves both the Centre and states? Finally, another bill named E-service delivery bill is expected to be presented. GRB can incorporate E-services delivery mechanism for smooth functioning.

 If all these issues are addressed properly, GRB can be a successful model which would give a sense of power to the people just like the Right to Information Act (RTI) did. The RTI Act is successful in the sense that it gave a sense of power to the common man to question government officials who are, otherwise, not directly accountable to public. GRB, if enacted, would do the same. But most importantly, India needs to find a solution to make sure that officials become people centric and understand their responsibilities. If that can be ensured, India would neither need an RTI nor a GRB. Can there be a bill to ensure that?