Enabling Citizen’s Participation

While no single strategy can be advocated for increasing public participation in governance, the following steps must be taken:

1. Each agency should carry a review of existing mechanisms of citizen’s participation.
2. Changing administrative procedures as needed.
3. Each agency should assign this duty to a senior-level officer. Senior officers’ performance management assessments should include their role in increasing citizen participation in governance.

Enabling Participation of Women: 

• Women are the focus of many of our socioeconomic programmes.
• However, women find it challenging to approach and access government offices/ services because of socio-cultural mores and seclusion norms.
• Recommendation: Government should take extraordinary measures to obtain their feedback so that policies affecting them are based on their ground realities.

Enabling Participation of Disabled: 

• A huge percentage of physically challenged people are unaware of their rights. It is found in one survey that only about 22% of these own the prescribed disabilities certificate.
• Recommendations: 

⇒ 100% registration of disabled: All persons with disabilities must be registered 100 percent of the time in order to ensure early detection and proper corrective action to alleviate the problems they encounter.

⇒ Be proactive (camp approach): This would necessitate the government taking a proactive approach to detecting and registering those who are physically handicapped. Camps organised at the PHC/village level, as done in some forest districts of Orissa at the initiative of a District Collector, will go a long way toward ensuring this (refer window of hope).

⇒ Database: A database of all Disabilities Certificate holders should be created, and the database should be integrated at the district, state, and national levels.

Window of Hope:

From the perspective of Differently Abled Persons, the Mayurbhanj District Administration (Orissa) realised that service delivery is exceedingly difficult, costly, and time-consuming (DAPs). The District Administration introduced the ‘Window of Hope’ programme, which included the following innovations:

• A single-window system with blocklevel decentralisation of service delivery. At a ‘camp’ location, all facilities are given free of charge.
• Fund mobilisation through convergence and Public-Private Partnerships to achieve 100% follow-up action. 

A fundamental aspect of citizenship is citizen engagement in governmental choices that impact their individual and group interests. Public institutions, however, may purposefully or unintentionally inhibit citizen participation, and citizens’ levels of trust in their ability to participate on a political and intellectual level vary widely.