Core Public Services
India has been very successful on a number of fronts: the country has maintained electoral democracy, reduced absolute poverty by more than half, dramatically reduced illiteracy and vastly improved health conditions. Since the early 1990s, the country continues to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world. These achievements create new challenges:
While India’s economy is booming, its publicly provided core services such as healthcare, education, water, power and transport – appear to be deteriorating.
Figure 1: Public Health Services: Immunization against childhood diseases is a basic building block for public health, and India’s full immunization rates have fallen over the past five years.
Bangladesh has reduced infant mortality rates much faster than India, and with far less expenditure . While researching the quality of medical care in the Delhi’s public health services, the World Bank has found that a typical doctor at a Primary Health Center in Delhi is less competent than a counterpart in Tanzania, and substantially less so than one in Indonesia.
Source: For India, Reproductive and Child Health survey data, for other countries WDI 2006
Figure 2. Elementary Education: Even in areas where there has been a successful expansion in the public sector—such as elementary education—serious concerns about the quality of education and citizens’ satisfaction with the service remain: almost 2/3rd of children in government primary schools cannot read a simple story, and half of them cannot solve simple numerical problems.
Source:Â ASER 2005
Recommendation: Create effective systems of accountability to improve the delivery of core public services. This can be achieved in a variety of ways: internal reform of public sector agencies; providing citizens with regular, relevant and reliable information; strengthening local governments and decentralizing responsibilities; and expanding the role of non-state providers. Ultimately, however, implementation is everything.
RSS