The Hindu Business Line : Great expectations from public services

Post-offices often carry more than the mail. Their wide reach into the length and breadth of the country makes them susceptible to well-meaning policy makers who wish to do good to society. For example, given the limited reach of the banking system in India for many years, post-offices became a good way to provide a savings facility for the rural folk through their savings accounts. Though it was a far cry from their main services, their extensive network was leveraged.

The US postal system

But as times change, post-offices also need to change and they can be a good barometer of how public facilities and services adapt to new times. As the financial performance of the US postal system swings from red to black to red on a regular basis, and with constant lobbying from private courier services to dilute the monopoly of the postal service, law-makers, as American legislators are called, frown at having to subsidise postal facilities and grumble each time they pass the postal budget.

The US post-office seems to have been learning the right lessons. The office now sells a variety of stationery and packing items (logical, come to think of it), and provides consulting services to small businesses on how they can utilise postal facilities to distribute their advertising materials to their potential customers.

When you attempt to mail a parcel at the lowest rate available, the postal clerk will quickly check and inform you that by paying a few cents more, parcel will reach days earlier.

During Christmas time, he will warn his customers that the package may not reach in time for the festivities so that they can choose a faster alternative. All designed to increase revenue for the post-office and ensure the customer a pleasant experience.

Inefficient service

Public services are where the rubber hits the road in our daily life. We deal with public agencies that provide law and order, water and electric supply, and so on, all the time.

When they work well, we do not even notice them. Unfortunately, government departments and their agencies that provide public services are also sinecures, offering the occupier power to provide solutions .

Busi, my colleague from Zimbabwe, who now lives and works in the US, complains that her friends who pursued careers at home are doing much better than she is. They live in large houses, drive the latest cars, and run successful businesses, she says.

They are all employees of various state agencies and have used their influence in the government to get licences and other valuable slips of paper that allow them to import restricted items that can then be sold at high prices locally. Throw in a few rules and regulations in a society, and you can always create a new wealthy class.

Changing times

Privatisation has been posing a challenge to public services. For one, the threat of privatising various services, such as garbage collection, electricity distribution, and so on, is challenging the traditional way in which public services are viewed — now the public expects the services. Either the employees of the municipality do their job, or they risk losing their jobs.

The Chennai Corporation privatised garbage collection in various parts of the city, thereby improving the lives of residents. Bangalore has allowed its garbage to pile up all over the city; the trucks dump their loads along the sides of major roads on the outskirts of the city.

Another by-product of the increasing availability of private services is the contrast that arises in the quality between public and private services. Getting used to better services at the hands of private vendors makes us less willing to accept the shoddy level of services when we face the public sector, even if it has remained the same. In contrast, it seems worse.

When there is a choice, consumers vote with their purses. And the public sector, like the US postal service, has to rush to catch-up if it wishes to survive. In India, we have seen that among the airlines and telecommunication services. As Indian Airlines (now Indian) found its erstwhile captive customers opting for other airlines, it had to work harder.

Poor service

It is most frustrating when there is no alternative. There are still so many services that we receive from the state, either because they are public services (like law and order) or because at one time, the public let the government provide them. Having got used to inefficiency, those agencies kick and scream at the possibility of reform, believing it their civil duty to be uncivil.

Because a large number of public servants do not have to face other public servants, they often do not know what the experience is like.

When Indian ministers or senior civil servants return from an overseas sojourn, they do not have to put up with the staff at the immigration or Customs counters as their network arranges separate exits for them. The rest of the public has to struggle with incomprehensible instructions on the forms, and venal inspectors.

I am convinced that civil servants, generally fairly reasonable and well-meaning folks, do not know what it feels like to stand in line to either obtain a ration card or a driving licence for they always have it arranged for them. If like the kings of yore they went incognito, they would know how it feels and would do something about it.

When systems are stifling and civil servants believe it their duty to be unhelpful, an options market develops to use influence as a lubricant.

Getting things done becomes a game of knowing the influential rather than the more powerful. You need to know the person whose influence will work . The poor pay heavily for these games.

Corruption, apart from causing serious misallocation of resources, steps in as a substitute for influence when you do not have the time or the right connections.

Those who can afford to flash a few notes are able to get to the front of the line, while the poor struggle to reach the door of the office, finding it difficult to even get a copy of the application form.

The joke is on the poor, of course, for when election time comes and they believe that they can get free housing, clothing, and per chance, a TV set too, they do not stop to ask who is paying for it all.

(The author is professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. His Internet address is cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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