An Effort to get the Cutting Edge to Deliver: Shivpuri Vikas Express

Shivpuri District in Madhya Pradesh is located as the third point of an equilateral triangle connecting Gwalior and Jhansi, and it’s a two-hour road journey from either railhead. The Gwalior-Guna section of Central Railway has connected Shivpuri by train to Delhi and Indore. There is also an airstrip where small aircraft can land. Shivpuri used to be the summer capital of the erstwhile Scindia princely state of Gwalior, and the private hunting grounds of the Maharaja have now been converted into the Madhav National Park, with a population of tigers, panthers, chital, sloth bear, wild boar, Nilgai and other avifauna. There is also a migratory bird paradise at Dihaila Lake near Karera. In addition, Shivpuri City has the famous ‘Chatris’ or cenotaphs of the erstwhile Scindia rulers, as well as Bhadaiya kund and Sailing Club on the Chand Patha Lake. Banganga, a series of small springs, has a mention in the Mahabharata as well. Shivpuri is one of the few selected tourist spots being promoted by Govt. of Madhya Pradesh, and a 42 – bed Tourist Village built around cottages near the National Park is itself a tourist attraction.

The district has an area of 10278 sq. km, with 1326 populated villages and seven urban areas. By Madhya Pradesh standards, Shivpuri is one of the larger districts in the Madhya Bharat belt in Northern Madhya Pradesh. There are eight development blocks and seven tahsils, with five sub-divisional officers (revenue). To illustrate the kind of personnel numbers involved, there are 388 patwari halkas, with one patwari apiece. There are 286 ration shops under the public distribution system, and there are 605 Gram Panchayats comprised in eight Janpad (Block) Panchayats.

Improving delivery of services at the cutting edge


The challenge before any district administration is primarily, how to improve the working of field functionaries at the cutting edge level. It is all very well to talk of administrative reforms at seminars in Delhi, Bhopal or even the district level, but no field functionary ever worked better due to some resolutions in some bureaucratic meeting.

Government is ultimately a service provider to the citizenry, and its services extend from provision of drinking water, primary health care, primary education to food availability through PDS shops. There is very little difference between the services provided by a bank and the service provided by Government, in the sense that the quality of service provided depends entirely on the person at the cutting edge providing the service – in the bank’s case, the teller at the cash counter, and in the government’s case, the patwari or the primary school teacher. Hence in order to improve quality of service, we must monitor the field functionary at the cutting edge level. However, with the decline of standards all around, this monitoring is almost extinct. In fact, the district and sub-district level officials should perceive their mandate to be that of enabling and helping the field functionaries to do their job better. In contrast, the entire structure becomes one of benign neglect, with the district and sub-district officers seldom taking any initiative to improve service quality and relying instead on not taking any action against erring employees in order to stay out of controversy, and specially, never rewarding any hardworking and efficient functionary.

The challenge, once again, is to ensure that the cutting edge level functionaries do their work efficiently, so that the quality of service delivered to the ultimate customer and client, in our case the average villager, improves significantly. Government systems, however, have a healthy fixation for hardware, and an even healthier disrespect, verging on callous neglect, towards software. To illustrate, everyone is interested in sanctioning a new school building and getting it constructed, to avail of the consequent ‘cuts’ all around, but very few people actually bother to see whether the school is teaching its pupils well after the building has been built. Similar instances abound in institutions of higher education, public health, and so on. Hence the need to focus on software rather than hardware – how to get the most out of existing resources in preference to putting in more resources to create more hardware, which in all probability will go into genteel decline, and not be utilized fully.

So – what is the plan??


We reckon that the battle has to be fought on two fronts – creating a demand and improving the supply, to put it mildly. We must have informed and empowered communities to demand their right for a satisfactory quality of service, as well as gear up our machinery to improve the quality of service. All very well to say so, and we have heard numerous speakers waxing eloquent on these issues, but how is it to be done?

A simple strategy to achieve this has been attempted in Shivpuri district over April-May 1998. The strategy was conceptualized in the following framework:
- create a citizen’s charter and circulate widely, to inform and empower communities
- prioritize works of public utility, and make a checklist to be monitored – items requiring no investment, only improvement in utilization of existing services.
- make a timetable of field inspections and circulate this along with the check-list, so that people know what is expected of them
- keep the field inspections a surprise as to the destination, not as to the date
- have block level meetings of the cutting edge functionaries sufficiently in advance, and reiterate the need to follow the check-list and be prepared for the field inspection
- on the appointed day, set off with all relevant district level officers to the designated block, and decide which village to visit en route in the vehicle, this being the most important random variable
- Preferably, seat all district officers in a single vehicle such as a mini-bus, avoiding multiple vehicles
- On reaching the village, gather the villagers as a gram sabha under a shady tree or similar structure, and interact with them on the check-list, evaluating the village’s position on it
- Evaluate the field functionaries of the village using the community to do the evaluation
- Perhaps most importantly, immediate rewards to good functionaries in the form of a commendation letter to be typed and handed over in front of the whole village. At the same time, an immediate punishment to functionaries who are insincere, and the punishment to be handed over in front of the entire village community
- Reinforce the attitude that the functionary is under the social control of the village community, and that the community must progress from a passive recipient of good or indifferent government services, to an active participant in the monitoring of village level services, using the gram panchayat

Following the above framework, we translated it into action thus:

On April 14 and April 16 1998, gram sabhas were organized in all the 605 gram panchayats in the district and a set of Citizen’s Charters comprising 13 departments were distributed among the public, and displayed on the walls of each primary school and each panchayat bhavan in the district. The departments were those felt to be closest to the general public, such as the Panchayat Raj system, drinking water, public health, primary education, women and child development, tribal development, revenue department, forest department, PDS shops, Electricity Board, improved agriculture, social security schemes and rural development schemes. These were prepared as thirteen separate handbills, and were written in everyday Hindi used in villages. The effort was to make these handbills user friendly, by including salient information on services provided, and details on whom to contact for more guidance. The repeated emphasis was that local problems can and must be solved locally using the decentralized structures provided by the Panchayati Raj system, and there was no need to expend time and money in approaching the District Collector for every little thing. These citizen charters were published in huge numbers, and nearly one lakh (100,000) copies of each charter was published at a very low cost – a set of thirteen citizen charters cost only Rs 2.50!

The response was amazing – supplicants coming to the Collector’s office dropped by 50%, and people started approaching the relevant offices and functionaries straightaway. There were instances of otherwise vulnerable sections of society waving the citizen’s charter in front of an erring field functionary and demanding that they be given the service mentioned therein. In fact there was a demand to create a similar citizen’s charter for urban areas as well, which was duly followed up.

The next step was prioritizing works of public utility. This involved consultation with a larger cross-section of political, social and administrative leadership. The checklist thus made was pre tested in a few villages to ensure relevance and decide weightage. Significantly, there weren’t any hardware issues here – a simple matter of whether the installed hand pumps in the village were working, whether drinking water wells were being disinfected, whether the patwari was kind towards the villagers, the health workers were attending to preventive and curative health issues, and so on. To have a visible symbol of change in each village, one of the points was cleaning and painting all government schools in a particular colour.

On March 31, 1988, letters were issued to all relevant district heads of departments that this check-list would be monitored in each village to be visited, and that the district level officer would be responsible for any lapses found in the working of her or his departmental field functionary at the village level. A timetable of inspections was made for each block. Similar letters were sent directly to sub-district and block level officials, ensuring that no official could plead ignorance due to postal delays and non-receipt of instructions from their departmental heads. Local elected representatives at the district and block levels were also invited to join the inspection team.

The proviso was that on the given day, all officers would go in the designated block and visit any village at random. The choice of the village would not be made in advance. The villages would be chosen on the given day, in the vehicle, using a map of the block. This generated tremendous uncertainty among the field functionaries, and this single element was perhaps primarily responsible for making the program a success. With no knowledge of the exact village to be visited, perforce all functionaries had to prepare as if their village was going to be inspected. Thus while we may have visited only 18 to 20 villages, all the 1326 villages of the district became vigilant and the cutting edge improved across the district. In addition, the informed and empowered communities also made use of the information in the citizen’s charter and demanded a better level of service from the cutting edge functionaries holding out the threat of the impending inspection.

Widespread publicity was given to the block-wise inspection program, and all possible mass media techniques were used to inform the lay public that on the given day, a team of district officers would visit that particular block. Posters were printed with the 25-point checklist and the designated day of inspection, and stuck to prominent walls across the district. To create some public interest and peg the program to a visible symbol, it was decided to call the mini-bus in which all officers would travel by the name of ‘Shivpuri Vikas Express’ – merely a name to evoke interest in the program and to ensure that village functionaries would have a single focus to do their work to.

To ensure face-to-face interaction with the cutting edge before the inspections, a series of meetings was organized in all block headquarters, which was attended by all the sarpanches and gram panchayat secretaries, among others. These meetings were organized back-to-back from April 24 right through April 31, and the Collector and CEO Zila Panchayat attended all meetings. We analyzed the position of drinking water sources in each village, as well as the teacher position in all primary schools. The occasion was used to issue an unequivocal statement on the Shivpuri Vikas Express program, and how no defaulter would be allowed to escape. This further reinforced our seriousness and commitment towards the program.

The first block inspection was on May 1 and the last on May 15, 1988. The response was amazing. The team of officers used to start at 7 AM from Shivpuri Collectorate on the special mini-bus, and go to the particular block. Almost the entire rural population of that block would know that Shivpuri Vikas Express was coming in their area. The villages to be inspected would be chosen in transit. Between 150 to 250 persons would assemble at the destination, and in this gram sabha, various departmental heads would review their points, until all 25 issues were discussed. At the end of the program, all village level functionaries would be rated by the entire community on a scale of very good to very bad and immediate rewards or punishments based on this evaluation were issued. The team never came back before 10 PM! It was the peak of summer, and all Express passengers were issued special head-scarves to prevent heat stroke. After the first day, all the officers got into the spirit of the Express and there was tremendous camaraderie, as well as appreciation of the good work being done by others by the end of the program. The whole process was publicized widely, to encourage later blocks to improve their act.

It was hard work, but there were rewards. We came across many village functionaries who were very respected figures in the village community for the good work they were doing. There were also some under-performers who gave the entire government a bad name. Invariably, complaints about the latter come up to district and sub-district headquarters, and no praise or mention is made of the former, thus leading to the sanctimonious belief that nothing works at the village level, and that the punishment mode is best suited for all functionaries. We were pleasantly surprised at the extent to which there were good functionaries in the system – unsung heroes all !

And what was the result??


All school buildings (1349) in the district were cleaned and painted– over a period of a fortnight
All pending mutations (12707) and sub-divisions of land completed
All pending demarcations of land (1813) completed
All non-tribals encroaching on tribals’ land (55) ejected and possession restored to tribals
All handpumps (3779) repaired in the peak of summer
All drinking water wells chlorinated and disinfected
All health workers (242) toured their area intensively and stocked medicines with depot-holders in villages
All ration shops (286) fully stocked under PDS, and distributed grains to the needy
All social security pensions to the destitute paid by the 605 gram panchayats
All scholarships, uniforms and textbooks distributed to SC ST students
All anganwadis (936) in district started operating in full swing

The entire exercise has been repeated from December 30 1998 to February 1999, and services have improved even more. In fact, in the second phase, it was clear that functionaries have accepted the social control of the village community, and thereby have become more responsive to local needs. We plan to repeat the Express monthly in one randomly chosen development block.

To conclude


It doesn’t take much to get government moving in a way that makes a real difference to the average citizen – all it takes is common sense and a carrot-and-stick approach towards village level functionaries, along with empowering the village to assume social control over the functionary. Most important is some appreciation for the silent majority of village functionaries who actually do their jobs rather well! If the cutting edge starts delivering, the average citizen benefits immensely.

The second major lesson is that we in government are overly obsessed with input - so many lakhs for this program, fully spent…. or so many school buildings/anganwadi buildings sanctioned and completed … and hardly any focus on output - so much good work due to so many lakhs spent, or so many schools have started running efficiently, or so many anganwadis have mopped up the eligible population of infants across all villages. To make a difference, we don’t need any additional investment, just improve the return on capital employed, or in other terms, get better results on the already existing infrastructure. And as Shivpuri has shown, it can be done in a short time, and at hardly any cost.

Lastly, if a district administration is prepared to tour intensively, and with a previously declared priority list, while keeping the destination a surprise, the above accomplishments can very easily be replicated in their area also. A classic example of a little effort going a long way!

Post Script:


In August 1999, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh wrote to all district Ministers to replicate this effort in their respective districts, while the Madhya Pradesh Government has instructed all Collectors to launch the same or similar initiatives in their district.