Dipanjan Chakraborty
ABSTRACT
Social welfare schemes and public infrastructure services often face implementation and last mile delivery challenges. Governments in India have set up phone helplines for beneficiaries to report irregularities but we find that it remains challenging for beneficiaries to realise positive outcomes through these helplines; without a personal follow-up with the concerned local government officials by experienced members from the civil society, the redressals done are often inadequate. To combine the scalability of centralised helplines with the effectiveness of decentralised mediation by civil society groups, we set up an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system where beneficiaries can record their grievances, which are then delegated to a network of civil society volunteers who do the required local follow-ups for resolution of these grievances. Through this pilot, we analysed over 200 cases of redressal and document how volunteer networks operate and can plug accountability gaps in government services. We advocate for formalisation of this civil-society mediated and technology assisted model into the design of public welfare schemes to enable citizens to engage with government departments in productive ways.
- {n. d.}. Bharat Nirman Volunteers. http://ruraldiksha.nic.in/. {n. d.}). Accessed: 14/4/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Bihar Public Grievance Redressal System. http://www.bpgrs.in/. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 16/1/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Census of India, 2011. http://www.censusindia.gov.in/pca/Searchdata.aspx. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 1/7/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Jharkhand CM Helpline. http://jharkhandsamadhan.nic.in/. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 16/1/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Madhya Pradesh CM Helpline. http://cmhelpline.mp.gov.in/. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 16/1/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Public Health Resource Network. http://phrsindia.org/. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 15/5/2017.Google Scholar
- {n. d.}. Right to Food Campaign, India. http://www.righttofoodcampaign.in/. ({n.d.}). Accessed: 9/3/2017.Google Scholar
- Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, and B. Kelsey Jack. 2014. No margin, no mission? A field experiment on incentives for public service delivery. Journal of Public Economics 120 (2014), 1--17.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Parthasarathi Banerjee. 2006. Land Acquisition and Peasant Resistance at Singur. Economic and Political Weekly 41, 46 (2006), 4718--4720. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4418907Google Scholar
- Thomas Carothers and William Barndt. 1999. Civil Society. Foreign Policy 117 (1999), 18--29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1149558Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dipanjan Chakraborty and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2015. Building Citizen Engagement into the Implementation of Welfare Schemes in Rural India. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 10 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Facebook. {n. d.}. NREGA Sahayata Kendra. http://bit.ly/2pMJxkw. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 18/4/2017.Google Scholar
- Jayati Ghosh. 2006. The "Right to Work" and Recent Legislation in India. Social Scientist 34, 1/2 (2006), 88--102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518173Google Scholar
- Brenton Holmes. 2011. Citizens' engagement in policymaking and the design of public services. Research Paper, Parliament of Australia, Department of Parliamentary Services 1, 2011--12 (2011). http://bit.ly/2qkZtdk Accessed: 10/3/2017.Google Scholar
- IBNLive.com. 2013. CAG's NREGA report reveal poor implementation, use of funds. http://bit.ly/2rhQPOa. (2013). Accessed: 15/1/2017.Google Scholar
- Shikha Jha and Bharat Ramaswami. 2010. How can food subsidies work better? Answers from India and the Philippines. Asian Development Bank Economics Working Paper Series 221 (2010).Google Scholar
- LiveMint. 2015. Corruption Catalogue Public Distribution System. http://bit.ly/2rh2Brg. (2015). Accessed: 15/1/2017.Google Scholar
- Meghana Marathe, Jacki O'Neill, Paromita Pain, and William Thies. 2016. ICT-Enabled Grievance Redressal in Central India: A Comparative Analysis. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 11 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MHA. 2011. Census of India 2011: Houses, Household Amenities and Assets-2011. http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/hlo/Data_sheet/India/HLO_Indicators.pdf. (2011). Accessed: 09/02/2013.Google Scholar
- Anjali K. Mohan, Edward Cutrell, and Balaji Parthasarathy. 2013. Instituting Credibility, Accountability and Transparency in Local Service Delivery?: Helpline and Aasthi in Karnataka, India. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers - Volume 1 (ICTD '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 238--247. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aparna Moitra, Vishnupriya Das, Gram Vaani, Archna Kumar, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2016. Design Lessons from Creating a Mobile-based Community Media Platform in Rural India. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 14, 11 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aparna Moitra, Archna Kumar, and Aaditeshwar Seth. {n. d.}. Mapping Jharkhand Mobile Vaani's Community Mobilization Strategies. In Submission ({n. d.}).Google Scholar
- Preeti Mudliar, Jonathan Donner, and William Thies. 2012. Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 159--168. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G.S. Mudur. 2017. Grim diagnosis of govt health cover. http://bit.ly/2qmIMjj. (2017). Accessed: 2/5/2017.Google Scholar
- Jayaprakash Narayan. {n. d.}. Pressure Groups and Democratic Governance - An Indian Perspective. http://bit.ly/2pOljFK. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 9/3/2017.Google Scholar
- Sriharini Narayanan. 2010. Accountability and the New Media: Use of ICTs in Governance in India. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 28, 10 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vijaysinh Parmar. 2012. Ghost beneficiaries galore under NREGA in Amreli village. http://bit.ly/2pBkR2o. (2012). Accessed: 15/1/2017.Google Scholar
- Hindustan Times. 2017. No electricity, doctors use mobile phone flashlights in infra-starved Jharkhand hospital. http://bit.ly/2pNO19y. (2017). Accessed: 2/5/2017.Google Scholar
- Maharashtra State Rural Livelihood Mission (MSRLM). 2014. Self Help Groups, SHG Federations and Livelihoods Collectives in Maharashtra. An Institutional Assessment. http://bit.ly/2qmHnsR. (2014). Accessed: 14/5/2017.Google Scholar
- The Economic Times. 2017. Irregularities detected in allotment of Indira Awaas Yojana. http://bit.ly/2pMFFjD. (2017). Accessed: 2/5/2017.Google Scholar
- Aaditeshwar Seth, Abhishek Katyal, Rohit Bhatia, Dinesh Kapoor, Balachandran C, Vidya Venkat, Aparna Moitra, Sayonee Chatterjee, Mayank Shivam, Zahir Koradia, and Praveen Naidu. 2012. Application of Mobile Phones and Social Media to Improve Grievance Redressal in Public Services. In M4D (M4D). http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~aseth/m4dpositionpaper.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Debra Singh, Joel Negin, Michael Otim, Christopher Garimoi Orach, and Robert Cumming. 2015. The effect of payment and incentives on motivation and focus of community health workers: five case studies from low- and middle-income countries. Human Resources for Health 13, 1 (2015), 58.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Vivek Srinivasan. 2015. Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond. Oxford.Google Scholar
- Vivek Srinivasan, Vibhore Vardhan, Snigdha Kar, Siddhartha Asthana, Rajendran Narayanan, Pushpendra Singh, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Amarjeet Singh, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2013. Airavat: An Automated System to Increase Transparency and Accountability in Social Welfare Schemes in India. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development: Notes - Volume 2 (ICTD '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 151--154. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dietland Stolle and Thomas R. Rochon. 1998. Are All Associations Alike? American Behavioral Scientist 42, 1 (1998), 47--65.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Md. Abu Taher. 1999. Politicization of Trade Unions: Issues and Challenges in Bangladesh Perspective. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations 34, 4 (1999), 403--420. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27767614Google Scholar
- Ruhi Tewari. 2015. More than 70% NREGA wages unpaid this fiscal. http://bit.ly/2pBs1DN. (2015). Accessed: 15/1/2017.Google Scholar
- Jasper van Teeffelen and Isa Baud. 2011. Exercising Citizenship: Invited and Negotiated Spaces in Grievance Redressal Systems in Hubli-Dharwad. Environment and Urbanization Asia 2, 2 (2011), 169--185. arXiv:http://eua.sagepub.com/content/2/2/169.full.pdf+htmlGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- Rajesh Veeraraghavan. 2013. Dealing with the Digital Panopticon: The Use and Subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers - Volume 1 (ICTD '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 248--255. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katrin Voltmer. 2009. The Media, Government Accountability, and Citizen Engagement. In Public Sentinel: News Media and Governance Reform, P. Norris (Ed.). World Bank Publications, Chapter 6. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=xzFVxDDhfnkCGoogle Scholar
- M. Weiner. 1962. The politics of scarcity: public pressure and political response in India. University of Chicago Press. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IVnRAAAAMAAJGoogle Scholar
- Wikipedia. {n. d.}. Labour Movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_movement. ({n. d.}). Accessed: 9/3/2017.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Findings from a Civil Society Mediated and Technology Assisted Grievance Redressal Model in Rural India
Recommendations
Decision support grievance redressal system using sentence sentiment analysis
ICEGOV '20: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceAfter effective implementation of online grievance redressal frameworks by various government offices, the lodging of grievances by common citizens has increased many folds. As the number exponentially builds up, it challenges the administration to ...
ICT-Enabled Grievance Redressal in Central India: A Comparative Analysis
ICTD '16: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and DevelopmentHelping citizens to resolve grievances is an important part of many e-governance initiatives. In this paper, we examine two contemporary initiatives that use ICTs to help citizens resolve grievances in central India. One system is a state-run call ...
Contrasting perceptions about transparency, citizen participation, and open government between civil society organization and government
The concepts of Transparency, Citizen Participation and Open Government is increasingly being used by politicians, public officials and civil society. Open Government strategies are being assumed by public administration at different levels of ...
Comments