Rights are not a solution to poor implementation, they amplify the need to build state?s implementation capability

Before the current Parliament session comes to a close, our Parliamentarians are likely to debate and pass two crucial pieces of social policy legislation?the Right to Food Security Bill and the Right of Citizens for Time Bound Service Delivery and Redressal of their Grievances Bill. With the passage of these two Bills, the citizens of India will have two new additions to the ever-expanding basket of ?rights??the right to information, the right to work (through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, MGNREGA), the right to education?delivered to us by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Taken together, these rights mark the beginning of an alternative social policy vision for India and are likely to go down in history as one of the most important legacies of the current government. Now that the UPA is preparing to go to the polls, it is worth taking stock of this legacy.

In their aspiration, these rights-based laws are both ambitious and powerful. Scripted largely by civil society movements, they aspire to re-imagine citizen-state relations away from patron-client relations to one defined by rights and responsibilities. By articulating responsibilities of the state in terms of citizens? entitlements, the attempt through these laws is to empower citizens to demand basic services?employment, education, food, grievance redressal?and hold the state accountable rather than depend upon its whimsical patronage. For a country as deeply stratified as India and where the power asymmetry between ordinary citizens and the state is skewed so heavily in favour of the state, the aspirational value of these laws holds great promise for changing the rules of the game.

But can mere legislation effect such a significant transformation? There is little argument that the real challenge for social policy in India today is not about legal frameworks and policy guidelines but about ensuring effective implementation. In fact, the push for rights-based approaches emerged precisely out of the state?s failure to implement social policies and a deep scepticism about its ability to correct this failure without additional checks and balances. For rights activists, legalising entitlements through rights-based legislation was a means to empower citizens? to place claims on the state and demand effective implementation. The twin pressures of greater citizen demand and legal intervention, in turn, could act as a check against an inefficient and incompetent state.

But experience suggests that the mere creation of a right is simply not enough. In fact, the effective enforcement of rights suffers precisely because of the states? inability to implement. Consequently, even when citizens? make claims and demand entitlements from the state, the state is unable to respond.

Take the instance of the Right to Education Act. In response to a public interest litigation based on the Act, the Supreme Court issued more than half a dozen orders between 2010 and 2012 directing state governments to meet infrastructure standards set by the Act by March 2013. However, despite regular court intervention, no state has been able to meet this deadline. This failure to meet the deadline is a consequence of weak administrative capability?delays in fund transfers, large vacancies in key staff positions, bureaucratic red tape and administrative turf wars?which has made effective implementation near-impossible. In this instance, court intervention has been useful in building pressure points to push state governments, but in the absence of any effort to address the underlying causes of poor implementation, states have been unable to respond.

State capability to respond to citizens? demand is further weakened by the organisational structure?the norms for reporting, internal management systems and hierarchies?of the bureaucracy. This is best illustrated through the experience of conducting social audits in the MGNREGA. For the uninitiated, social audit is a method through which citizens? quite literally audit government books to verify that what is recorded in government books represents realities on the ground. One of the most radical entitlements afforded to citizens in the MGNREGA is the right to conduct regular social audits of MGNREGA works.

Since 2006, the government of Andhra Pradesh has made a serious attempt to conduct regular social audits. The audits have successfully created platforms for citizens to raise complaints and demand entitlements from the state. To respond to these demands, the rural development department, created a formal grievance redressal cell and appointed vigilance officers at the state and district level. Despite this, grievance redressal has been slow because the organisational structure of the bureaucracy has made it difficult for the rural development department to impose sanctions on officers. To illustrate, two key officers against whom complaints are regularly made in social audits?the branch post master (responsible for making wage payments) and the mandal-level programme officer (responsible for day-to-day implementation)?report to authorities outside of the rural development line agency.

Government service rules are designed such that the rural development department does not have any sanctioning authority over these officers. All they can do is to recommend that action be taken without any powers to follow up on the recommendation.

So, in the final analysis, should we dismiss these rights approaches as fine political rhetoric that will never achieve their potential? There is little argument that the aspiration and vision embodied in the rights approach is powerful and critical to building a new India. But for this vision to be realised, there needs to be a complementary transformation of the state. This transformation requires that investments be made in building administrative capability?from improving staff capacity to better funding and training, streamlining management systems, improving interdepartmental coordination to dealing with structural problems related to hiring and firing government functionaries. Rights are not the solution to the problem of poor implementation, rather they serve to amplify the need to build the implementation capability of the state.

The author is director, Accountability Initiative, and senior research fellow, Centre for Policy Research