Collaborative Governance for Viksit Bharat

Syllabus: GS2/ Governance

Context

• The complexity of development challenges calls for collaboration among the government, communities, markets and civil society to ensure good governance.

From Government Delivery to Impactful Governance

• Government-centric governance often focuses on schemes, expenditure and administrative processes, whereas impactful governance focuses on whether interventions actually improve citizens’ lives.
• Wicked problems such as poverty, malnutrition, sanitation, etc. involve multiple interconnected social, economic and institutional factors.
• Such problems require decentralised decision-making, community participation, professional expertise and convergence across departments rather than isolated departmental interventions.

Government initiatives for Good Governance

• Government e Marketplace (GeM): Facilitates online procurement of common use Goods & Services required by various Government Departments/ Organizations/ PSUs.
  • GeM aims to enhance transparency, efficiency and speed in public procurement. 
• UMANG App: Developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and National eGovernance Division, the UMANG App serves as a single platform to access PAN India services of the Government.
  • It brings together major government services on a single mobile app so as to enable the accessibility of government services on mobile phones of citizens.
• Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS): A 24×7 online platform for time-bound redressal and monitoring of public grievances through dashboards, enhancing transparency and accountability in service delivery.
• e-HRMS 2.0 Mobile Application: The e-HRMS 2.0 app, available on Android and iOS, was launched to provide government employees seamless access to human resource services.

Local Governments as the Foundation of Collaborative Governance 

• The Eleventh Schedule assigns 29 subjects to Panchayats, while the Twelfth Schedule provides 18 functional areas for municipalities.
• Local governments can act as platforms for convergent action because issues such as nutrition, sanitation, livelihoods, health and poverty are closely interconnected at the local level.
• However, effective decentralisation also requires adequate funds, functions and functionaries so that local governments can translate their responsibilities into meaningful outcomes.

Experiences of Community Participation

• Women’s Self-Help Groups: The National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) demonstrates how women’s collectives can build social capital and participate in local development beyond their traditional role in savings and credit.
• Swachh Bharat Mission: Sustained improvements in sanitation require not only infrastructure but also community mobilisation, behavioural change and local leadership.
• ASHA workers demonstrate the importance of locally resident and trained frontline workers who connect public health institutions with communities.
• Watershed and livelihood programmes: Community participation in watershed management and livelihood diversification can improve the effectiveness and sustainability of interventions because local stakeholders participate in managing common resources.
• Total literacy campaigns demonstrated how citizen participation and decentralised mobilisation can complement formal government systems.

Key Challenges

• Centralised decision-making: Administrative systems tend to prefer centralised planning and standardised implementation, even when local problems call for context-specific solutions.
• Weak institutional capacity: Many local governments do not have sufficient technical expertise, professional staff and administrative capacities.
• Inadequate Resources: Devolution of duties without adequate financial and human resources reduces the efficiency of decentralisation.
• Weak Accountability Mechanisms: Monitoring focuses on expenditure and physical targets rather than quality of outcomes and citizen satisfaction.
• Limited Community Validation: The quality of public services experienced by citizens may not be adequately captured in government data.

Way Ahead

• 3Fs of decentralisation: Local governments should be provided enough funding, functions and officials with more decision-making autonomy.
• Local professional capacity: Technical and management assistance should be provided by the positioning of professionals and skilled community resource workers closer to the community.
• Connect funds to outcomes: Financial resources should be linked to the developmental shortfalls revealed using instruments such as the Panchayat Advancement Index.
• Social accountability: Community validation, social audits, citizen feedback and transparent public information should supplement traditional administrative monitoring.

Source: IE