A right to be a citizen

New law to force government to do what it should, anyway

The Right of Citizens for Time-bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their Grievances Bill was reportedly cleared by the Cabinet last week, and should be introduced in the current session of Parliament. Drafts of the Bill have been available for some time now, but details of the final version are still unknown. However, the general intent of the Bill is clear: to ensure that citizens receive such services as passports and ration cards within a certain clearly defined period of time; and allowing them a method by which they can complain if something due to them from the government is not being provided. This is a long-standing demand of many activists, and was one of the legislative changes recommended by the anti-corruption activists who had coalesced around the Jan Lokpal Bill. If properly drafted, it could serve - like the Right to Information Act, or RTI - to make the government more accountable to its citizens, and its working more transparent. 

There are, of course, various objections to its implementation. One is the standard objection that involves federalism. These objections, whatever their merit, should be thrashed out before it becomes a law. The current lacuna in the RTI, which allows state information commissions to effectively ignore orders from the central information commission, or bars petitioners from appealing a state decision to the Centre, should be an eye-opener. There is also the question of whether it will be as decentralised as it should be. After all, a right to service provision, and to the redressal of grievances, is most felt in places far from state capitals. Will there be district-level or at least block-level locations where citizens can see this right enforced? If not, it might well remain just on paper.

The Bill is an innovative approach to legislation that has emerged, essentially, from the states. Madhya Pradesh enacted such a law in 2010, and it was widely studied in other state capitals. Bihar followed the next year, and then a spate of other states, with similar Bills working through state legislatures in several others. This is a reminder that, while India's federal structure is the frequent cause of frustrating bottlenecks, it is also a useful source of policy innovation. Increasingly, over the past decade, states have acted as laboratories for laws, testing if they are implementable and popular; some are then taken up by the Centre.

There is also another, darker side to the Bill, something that marks it out as different from, say, the right to information or the right to food. Essentially, it consists of an admission of failure: that the architecture of the Indian state has failed to deliver accountability without binding itself by a further law that essentially forces it to do its job. Citizens should not need the government to legislate the right to services to which they are already entitled. The fact of their citizenship is right enough. But the failure of the Indian state to deliver the services it promises has been so widespread that it finds it must force itself, legislatively, to improve. In the end, a failure of governance and public ethics infects all efforts and promises, and no law can change that.