Quality of service delivery
After over a decade of rapid economic growth in India, the biggest challenge facing policymakers at both central and state levels is to ensure ‘inclusive’ growth so that the gains from increased national income are shared by all sections of society. In particular, it is imperative that a high quality of basic services such as health and education be provided to all citizens, since these are not only ends in themselves, but also play a critical role in enhancing individual capabilities to participate fully in the growth of the economy. Central and state governments have recognized this as a priority area, but have shown a lack of imagination (like all their predecessors) in addressing the problem of service quality by focusing mostly on increasing spending and not enough on the question of how effectively the resources allocated are spent.
Concept of Service Delivery Capability
The common meaning of ‘capability’ is ‘the ability to do something’. ‘ Service Delivery Capability’ means the capability of an organization to deliver services as per standards promised in the Charter. Capability of an organization also means its ability and capacity expressed in terms of use of its Resources. Resources available with an organization include the following:
- Human resources: their number, quality, skills, and experience,
- Physical and material resources: equipment, machinery, building, furniture and fixtures,
- Financial resources: ready finance, access to sources for additional finance when needed,
- Information resources: pool of knowledge, databases, and
- Intangible assets: process designs, image and goodwill, patents, etc.
Organizations need to build new capabilities and upgrade existing ones, in order to ensure that they are able to fulfill the purpose for which they have been set up. In general, when organizations are created, they have limited resources at their disposal, and one of the activities that they must do is to find ways and means to access additional resources to improve their performance over time. With changes in the external environment of an organization, new methods to acquire new resources have to be tried out. Over a period of time, organizations that are not able to deliver high quality services, due to limitations on their current resources, must find out legitimate ways to augment their resources, so that they can deliver. This brings us to the issue of how to define ‘high quality service’ or ‘service quality’.
Service Quality and its measurement
The word ‘Quality’ is generally associated tangible products that can be measured in terms of quality of its physical attributes such as (i) dimensions,(ii) angles, (iii) weight (iv) power (v) hardness, (vi) tensile strength,(vii) color, and many other physical characteristics. Understanding the aspects of ‘Quality’ in the context of services is comparatively more difficult, as there are no measurable physical or tangible attributes. Even where they exist they may not be directly effecting the essential nature of service. Therefore, Quality in Service is about ‘what really matters to the service recipient’. Although this is the case with both goods and services, it acquires a special significance in the context of public service delivery in general, and service delivery under the Sevottam framework, in particular.
Parametres of quality of service delivery
In the implementation of Sevottam framework, three main areas have been found as the most common causes of inability to deliver services as per standards included in the Charter, and /or to meet expectations of service recipient citizens / clients. These are:-