Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has directed the Chief Secretary and Additional Chief Secretary Governance to examine the proposal of the Punjab Governance Reforms and Ethics Commission (PGREC) to repeal the existing Punjab Right to Service Act, 2011.
The direction came on a proposal by PGREC Chairman K.R. Lakhanpal, who has written to the Chief Minister seeking immediate repeal of the existing law on the ground that “the elaborate administrative machinery created under the same, topped by the Right to Service Commission comprising of a Chairperson and ten members, serves little purpose, except incurring some avoidable and wasteful expenditure.”
It may be recalled that the Council of Ministers, in its meeting held on March 18, 2017, had decided to recast the existing Punjab Right to Service Act and replace the same with a new one. The department of Governance Reforms had subsequently prepared the draft of the new law, which was discussed in a meeting chaired by the Chief Secretary.
However, the meeting felt that the new draft law does not address the major shortcomings in the existing law and needs improvements to be an effective tool for the timely, accountable and corruption-free delivery of public services to the citizen. The new proposed legislation is, therefore, still under discussion, an official spokesperson said here on Monday.
In his letter to the Chief Minister, Lakhanpal has listed out the major weaknesses in the existing law as: inclusion in its ambit of only peripheral public services to the exclusion of core public services, cumbersome redressal mechanisms in the form of two appeals and a revision, which a citizen may dread resorting to, and no real-time monitoring of delivery of public service, both by the government and the citizens.
Other lacunae cited by Lakhanpal include absence of a digital system to receive citizens’ requests for services and delivery thereof by the concerned departments/agencies, lack of a rating mechanism for judging the performance of delivering agencies, absence of a healthy system of incentives/disincentives for leaders and laggards, and absence of any mechanism for inducing public service ethos in the service providers.
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