Citizen Charter

Citizen Charter is a response to the quest of for solving problems which a citizen encounter while interacting with the organizations providing public services.Citizen charter has emerged as a mechanism to channelize the citizen administration relationship.The concept of citizen charter enshrines the trust between the service provider and its user. The concept of citizen charter was formulated first time by the British Prime Minister John Major in 1994 with a simple aim to continuously improve the quality of public services for the people of the country so that these services respond to the needs of the user as their aspirations and needs keeps on changing. The basic philosophy behind citizen charter is that for every public services citizens are paying heavily,therefore they are entitled to expect highest quality services which is of highest standards responding to their needs and provides services at reasonable cost.

Citizen charter are the voluntarily commitments prepared by the bureaucracy in consultation with the citizens. They provide information about the work to be performed by the bureaucracy and even the finances i.e the amount of money to be spent by the bureaucracy. It provides the time frame taken to complete particular service along with the standard of services, range of services and quality of services.The need for it because the administration across the world faces two challenges i.e how to ensure accountability of bureaucracy and how to ensure the participation of citizens in democracy.   

Citizen charter was formally implemented in India in 1997, at the CM conference in New Delhi to discuss the measures to tackle corruption and they identified two major factors of it which included high level of secrecy in administration and lack of accountability. For these reasons, it was introduced in those areas which has large public interface for example railways,telecom,PDS(Public Distribution System),etc. These has been implemented but the attitude and behavior of bureaucracy is still rooted in colonial area and they have completely failed to understand the significance of citizen charter in achieving its objective. Since, it is mostly formulated in english language which is still a major hurdle in rural areas.So, there is a need for wider consultation before formulating citizen charter and a wider publicity.