Meena: Hello there Jamuna Ben! You look quite weather beaten! We bet, you have just returned from Kutch. How is your work shaping up on social audits?

 

Jamuna Ben: Good to see both of you again! Don’t ask about work. Nothing seems to move forward. We have had many community meetings and discussions. To tell you the truth, I am lost in all the shouting and noise. My ears are still ringing! Community participation could be a real pain sometimes.

 

Meena: Well, Jamuna Ben, we have something that will cheer you up. Why don’t we all sit down? Okay, listen, in fact we have a nice story to share with you; not of those stories where you have to search for answers. We have a real story of a change that happened when we interacted with the village community with the simple intention of disseminating Citizen Report Card findings and opening a platform for dialogue between the community and the service providers? By the way, do you still remember our work on Citizen Report Cards that we shared with you couple of years back?

 

Jamuna Ben: Well I have always been interested in your organization’s work! Aren’t the Citizen Report Cards[1] (CRCs) a powerful tool to gather citizen’s feedback on delivery of public services? I know that this feedback can be utilized both for service providers like the Gram Panchayats to reform their services as well as local people to demand better services and plan future action. So now why don’t you tell me what happened?

 

Meena: Well as you know, our CRCs have been more used in urban centres where you find strong supporters for advocacy and change like the media and civil society groups. But this CRC that we carried out in four talukas in Tumkur district in Karnataka was rural in nature, and also for services that are provided by the lowest tier of the government – the Gram Panchayat (GP). We covered four services, drinking water, sanitation, streetlights and roads in 24 GPs and through a ranking exercise based on satisfaction ratings we selected the best ranked and worst ranked GP and carried out a community participatory exercise to carry out our advocacy work. Our story is related to what happened in the worst ranked one!

 

Jamuna Ben: That’s lot of work….can you please tell me how did you go about doing this. What made it happen and who were involved?

Meena: Well, we started off by taking feedback on specific aspects of the services from both the providers of the services and the local community. To make this quite simple and straightforward, we asked both the groups separately, to give a score to each of the indicator or aspect of the public services that we covered in the CRC in terms of accessibility, service quality, problem incidence and resolution, staff responsiveness and satisfaction. It was an on-the-spot exercise, you know something like the Community Score Card approach and it was fun watching them discuss, argue and finally agree upon a score!

 

Jamuna Ben: Sorry to interrupt you. Can you quickly tell me what is community score card approach?

 

Meena: It is a local adaptation of the citizen report card. But here, the scoring, analysis, discussions and reform plans are all done in the same day. And, instead of household interviews, we have focus groups giving scores. Well, to continue what we were discussing…we brought both the sides together and showed them the ratings given by each other and offered them an opportunity to understand the viewpoints of each other. This helped not only the community to express their satisfaction and disappointments with the providers but also understand the limitations that the providers face in terms of resources – financial, human, procedural while implementing these services. Jamuna Ben, to tell you the truth, we were very scared in the beginning as to how the discussions will proceed, will they fight? But to our pleasant surprise, they discussed and listened to each other…agreed, argued, questioned and appreciated, all done in the right spirit. All we did was to provide a platform where a dialogue could be initiated between the user and the provider and people took that opportunity to open up and exchange their views with each other…

 

Jamuna Ben: This is interesting! What was the scenario like? I mean, how did you see the change?

 

Meena: The most important change we noticed was that the discussions were focused on numbers and scores and not on individuals. The debate was on services and not personalities. This brought in more objectivity to the whole process. People were coming forward, taking up issues and confronting the service providers for not providing minimum basic services for the villagers to live comfortably, the chastisement of the providers for never having provided such a platform for them to be aware of the situation in their village…

 

Jamuna Ben: But isn’t this what a Gram Panchayat is supposed to do? What was so special in this particular case is it because of the environment in which this happened?

 

Meena: Yes Jamuna Ben, the magic here was that people were aware of their entitlements and were being provided an opportunity to express their experiences in a very objective and structured manner. Imagine a Gram Panchayat where the villagers had been enduring the services provided by the government thinking that this was their fate, not aware that there are ways and means of conveying their frustrations and dissatisfaction with the government through platforms such as Gram Sabhas. Since the community had never witnessed a Gram Sabha in their Gram Panchayat, this news itself came as big shock to them. The fact that we helped them make aware that such platforms existed and should be made use of makes this occasion special!

 

Jamuna Ben: This is has been one of the most stimulating experiences that I have heard! It gives me now lot of ideas on how to improve my social audits. I would love to replicate this whole exercise – a CRC and follow up measures in the some of the rural areas that I work in! Would you partner with us?

 

Meena: I would love to!