In India, the Real Estate Regulatory
Authority (RERA) ensures that the real estate developers and sellers sell plots
and apartments after their registration with the real estate regulator. But the
real estate developers start launching their projects and even start booking
the sale of the units without registering the project with the RERA.
For example, in Gurugram Haryana,
sector 102A the developers found booking plots and apartments in the unregistered
projects. The developers took the money either in cash or cheque and also allot
the booking of the unit to the customer without registering the project and it
is totally illegal because the project is not registered and permission is also
not sought from the RERA. The RERA is empowered to impose huge penalties on the
developers for such wrong practices i.e. up to Rs. 12 Crores against the
promotor.
The RERA Act states that no real estate
agent can participate in the project's advertisement, marketing, or sale without getting registered with the RERA.
The Government is responsible and
entrusted to deliver public services for providing basic amenities i.e.
Transportation, Education, Health, Water Supply, Roads, Electricity, Legal
Services, etc. In case, the services are being provided without discrimination
as per the rules of the Government; it is considered Good Governance but in
case, the services are not being provided on time as per the needs of the
citizens and the system is affected by corruption; then there is lack of Good
Governance. Every nation and every state faces various challenges in ensuring Good Governance in public services. The systems to address the grievances are
framed to sort out the disputes among citizens and government offices with
regard to general issues. Even the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and
Privatization of the public services are used to reduce the quantum of
resources in the hands of the Government. The challenge to streamline the system of
delivering public services is very complicated sometimes.
(i) Establishing
Public Institutions for Delivering Public Services:
The basic solution to ensure good
governance in delivering public services is to formulate public institutions
with mandates to deliver public services. The government set up various types of
organizations to deliver the public services such as Departments for
Electricity, Water, Roads, Irrigation, Sanitation, Railways, Bus Services, etc.
in the countries function to deliver the public services.
The Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs)
are formulated for delivering the public services in each organization. The SoP
is basically a set of step-by-step processes to carry out the organizational
functions by the officers or executives. The SoP fixes the duties and
responsibilities of each executive and also provides the mechanism to fix the
inefficiencies at the executives’ level for delivering their best contribution. In
this way, each organization works as per SoP and achieves the aims and
objectives with efficiency, quality of service delivery, and best enforcement
of rules and regulations.
In the pandemic times, the District Education Officer fixed the responsibility of School Principals for finding Covid or Corona positive students in the schools.
The Government ensures the reward to good
performing executives and punishment to bad non-performing executives by
framing policies, and rules, and giving instructions. The rule of ‘higher
incentives’ and ‘cut in salaries’ work for reward and punishment to the
executives.
The Educational Schools, Hospitals,
Electricity Generation and Distribution, and Public Works Departments are
established for ensuring delivering of each public service.
However, the management of the
organizations become a major challenge in such case, and corruption is
required to be fixed at all levels of the organizations.
(ii)
Privatization of Public Sector Organizations:
In most of cases, it becomes difficult
to provide good public services due to corruption and non-fixation of
responsibility in public institutions. In such a case, the Government decides to
privatize the public sector organizations.
When the Government is not much empowered
to collect the taxes for funding the organizations delivering public services;
the decision is taken to privatize the organizations i.e. to transfer the
ownership and management of the public sector organizations into the hands of
private players i.e. corporate sector’s companies with a particular procedure.
However, the Government regulates and
controls the private sector organizations to ensure the availability of the best
services to the citizens.
(iii)
Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Projects:
When Government requires to utilize the
capacities of private sector organizations but to a small extent, only in areas
where it is unable to deliver the public services; then the mode of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is preferred.
The PPP model is particularly used to
procure goods and services of the private sector organizations through a
transparent procedure. The Governance to deliver public services to the
end-users is monitored without differentiating the public sector organizations
with or without PPPs. The role of regulatory bodies becomes more important to
ensure good governance.
Before adopting PPPs in public services; a
tool of public sector comparator is used to estimate the cost of delivering
public services in the hands of the Government and thereafter, the feasibility
studies are carried out to decide whether to use PPP or not. Only when it seems
feasible and economical to deliver public services through PPP mode; the PPPs
are formulated and governance is ensured.
(iv)
Communitization of Public Services:
The Government decides to transfer the
ownership and management of public institutions to the communities for better
delivery of public services. It happens when the Government wants to get the participation of communities, in the utilization of public resources. It is well
known that the Non-Government Organizations and Communities at the large level,
show interest to come ahead for delivering public services.
Through communitization, the governance is
improved up to the grass root levels by sharing the government assets with the
communities. The reforms for more efficient delivery of public services; are
implemented with the support of communities working at the ground level among the
users i.e. citizens including beneficiaries of various schemes of the
Government.
Recently, the communization of public
services is used in Nagaland and it is found that it brought major improvements
in the Governance system and reduced the inefficiencies to a great extent. Even
the communities responsible for delivering education services applied the ‘no work no
pay’ slogan to stop the unauthorized absence of teachers from the schools. Similarly,
in health services, the Nagaland constituted Health Committees to strengthen
the governance system and ensure the presence of doctors, and the availability of
medicines in a better way. The communization of electricity services sorted out
the practical problems of high Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C)
Losses including distribution losses by the public without the involvement of the
police administration.
*Copyright © 2019
Dr. Lalit Kumar. All rights reserved.
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