Public Private Partnerships in the Social Sector
Posted on: October 30 2009 | Author: megha | Comments:0
PAC Director, Raghavan Suresh and Head of Participatory Governance Research Group, Meena Nair were invited to IIM-B on October 29th, 2009 to facilitate a workshop on Public-Private Partnerships in the Social Sector. In attendance were 36 Senior-level IAS officers from various states of India. The citizen-centred orientation of the discussion was met with surprise by some attendees, stimulating lively debate. However the PAC team's inputs were widely appreciated and were commended for their novel outlook and thought-provoking contributions. Below are brief minutes of the meeting and key discussion points.
Highlights of the discussion
A note of introduction was done by Prof. S. Raghunath on PAC and Suresh.
The programme was conducted in the form of major interactive sessions with discussions revolving around:
· The definition of social sector – with term social being equal to ‘security’ that should be provided to all citizens of a country and should be the responsibility of a government;
· The factors that contribute to Security – namely Income, Food, Health, Education, Social and Ecological;
· Current government policies/schemes/programmes that target towards providing security in the above areas;
· Identified government schemes and private sector contributions, if any, that have helped or hindered those schemes given as groupwork to six groups coming under Livelihood, Health, Education, Social Justice, Habitat and Environment.
· Reinventing the definition of ‘private’ in the term PPP – where if it is established that ‘Public’ means ‘State’ which has enough resources to take care of the security of its citizens through proper management (capping corruption, etc.), then the term ‘Private’ can be replaced by ‘People’.
· Need for a new form of partnership between the state and its people with the latter to be given platforms to share information, local knowledge and resources.
· Infusing enthusiasm for partnerships by using tools such as CRCs and CSCs to gather this information and using it effectively to implement programmes that improve the opportunities for security.
· Use of Citizen Report Cards (CRCs) as one of the tools to gather information from people that can be used by the community to demand better services and the state to implement better policy measures.
· Definition of a new PPP – Public People Partnership.