The Punjab government has launched "Punjab Model of Proactive Governance" to fight corruption, improve service-delivery mechanism and to facilitate the citizens' engagement by proactively seeking feedback of people who received any day-to-day government service.
This Public Feedback Model is an initiative of the Chief Minister Punjab Mohammad Shahbaz Sharif to eliminate corruption at the grassroots and to provide prompt relief to the people.
This was stated by a spokesman of the Punjab Model of Proactive Governance here on Sunday. While elaborating on the project, the spokesman said that the project, first piloted in six select districts, has now been fully working in Bahawalnagar, Bahawalpur, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Hafizabad, Jhang, Khanewal, Mandi Bahauddin, Nankana Sahib, Narowal, Rahim Yar Khan, Sahiwal, Sheikhupura and Sialkot.
In the next phase, this Model will be implemented in all the 36 districts in Punjab. Initially, important public-dealing departments like police, health, revenue and education have been chosen to seek feedback of the people, he pointed.
The spokesman said that the provincial government, with the active interest of the Mohammad Shahbaz Sharif started implementing the Public Feedback Model in April 2010 in six districts. After significant positive feedback, it has set up a special Cell in the Chief Minister's Secretariat, developed a pilot-project and contracted a Call-Centre to scale-up and institutionalise the idea so that people could be fully facilitated.
While explaining the modus operandi, he explained that when a citizen goes to a government office to avail services like driving licence, character certificate and property registration etc, the concerned office records his or her mobile number along with the transaction details. This data is then passed on to local officers and to a Call-Centre through an online data entry form or through SMS. The local officers call selected citizens, while Call-Centre sends SMS messages to citizens and also calls them to inquire about the quality of services received. Thus, the state, instead of passively waiting for the citizens to file a complaint, if there is indeed cause of such a grievance, proactively engages the citizens and gets their feedback to improve service-delivery, and especially to weed out corrupt government officials. In order to capture data from government offices, a novel method of using SMS-to-Web technology has been introduced. Staff at these offices, type transaction details on their mobile phones and send through SMS to a central server that processed the data and puts it in online database. DCOs and other managers can access this data in real-time using the online dashboard, explained the spokesman.
The spokesman of proactive governance said that unlike most such efforts in developing countries, this initiative has been taken by the Punjab government itself. This Model of Proactive Governance aims at building sustained mutual trust with citizens, increasing citizens' participation, reducing corruption and improving service-delivery by enabling effective monitoring. The powerful deterrence created by this easy communication of the government with the citizens, availing a service in any corner and backed by a credible threat of punitive action, was helping to put strong curbs on corruption and realising the citizens that the state is answerable to them, summed up the spokesman.
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