Kerala’s push for faster public services sounds good—but will it work?
Kerala’s draft law seeks to ensure time-bound public services, enable digital delivery, and impose penalties for delays. But past experience raises questions about whether it can truly reform the bureaucracy.
Kerala is set to become the first of India’s 22 states and Union territories with Right to Public Service legislation to bring the law into the digital era, and, more importantly, give it some real teeth.
The draft Kerala Right to Public Service Bill, 2024, approved by the state cabinet last month, marks another attempt at rights-based legislation. India already has a Right to Food and a Right to Education; now, Kerala citizens will additionally enjoy the right to time-bound delivery of public services, guaranteed by law.
The draft Bill, cleared for presentation in the legislature, replaces the 13-year-old Kerala State Right to Service Act, 2012. It differs from the existing law in two key ways. First, it brings citizen-government interactions into the digital era, giving legal sanction to electronic modes of service delivery as well as to online grievance submissions and redressal.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it strengthens accountability for timely service delivery by imposing financial penalties on public officials for delays beyond the mandated, publicly notified timelines.
Penalties for delays range from ₹1,000 to ₹10,000 for designated officers, recoverable from their salaries, and up to ₹15,000 for appellate delays. Interestingly, the Bill also establishes a direct link between citizens and the bureaucracy by providing for direct compensation to affected parties from the fines collected, instead of creating a separate budgetary provision.
The new Bill attempts to address several deficiencies in the old law. All departments are now required to notify every service they are mandated to deliver under the Act. Earlier, this was left to departmental discretion—resulting in only a few innocuous services being notified, while many significant ones (those with potential for rent-seeking or harassment) were left out and thus escaped legal scrutiny.
It also introduces a second-level appellate authority, chaired by the state’s law secretary, which should help overcome intra-departmental protection of “brother officers."
Rules aren’t enough
All this is well and good, but if we are to believe that legislation alone can fix intractable issues, we must ask why the 2012 law failed. In the nearly decade and a half that the earlier law has been in force, not a single penalty has been imposed on a public official. If one were to conclude from that that service delivery had been exemplary or that citizens had no grievances with the official machinery, there would have been no need to scrap the old law entirely and draft a new one. Provisions like recognising electronic communication could easily have been added through an amendment.
The very fact that a new law is being contemplated shows where the real problem lies—not in missing rules or penalties, but in a missing culture and mindset of service. What we call “public service" in India is anything but, with so-called public servants—elected and appointed alike—still operating with a colonial view of themselves as rulers rather than facilitators.
Making laws work
For that to change, there must be a fundamental shift in how the state appoints, evaluates, and rewards its employees. Without a culture of accountability—where reward is tied to efficiency, performance, and measurable outcomes rather than seniority—and unless the political stranglehold over the bureaucracy is loosened, the system is unlikely to change, no matter how many laws are passed.
Take the biggest problem confronting both citizens and businesses that deal with the state machinery: corruption. India ranked 96th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index. A December 2024 LocalCircles poll found that 66% of over 9,000 surveyed businesses admitted to paying a bribe at least once in the preceding year. More than half said they were forced to pay, while the rest described it as “speed money" to get their work done on time.
This is the state of affairs despite a multi-layered anti-corruption framework. We have vigilance commissions at the Centre and in the states, an anti-corruption ombudsman in the form of the Lok Ayukta, and regular audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, a constitutional body reporting to Parliament. Yet, between 2015 and 2023, the CBI secured convictions in only 35% of its cases.
Clearly, laws alone are not enough. The key lies in implementation, and that requires political will above all. Otherwise, such legislation will end up like elephants’ tusks: more for show than for any real use.
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