CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu government’s commitment in the State Budget to introduce a Right to Services (RTS) Act is an important step towards more responsive administration. Citizens are entitled to public services that are prompt, transparent, and delivered with dignity.
And yet, for decades, people approaching frontline offices for a legal-heir certificate, revenue records, driving licence or building approval have faced tedious delays and arbitrary decisions. An RTS Act can turn timely service from an administrative favour into an enforceable public duty.
As Tamil Nadu prepares to draft an RTS law, it must recognise that neither legislation nor a digital portal alone can make public offices responsive.
More than 20 Indian states have enacted similar laws since 2010, but a substantial gap remains between their promise of time-bound service and its delivery on the ground. The CAG’s performance audits and other evaluations demonstrate why high ‘disposal rates’ cannot establish that citizens actually received the services they sought. In bureaucratic parlance, an application marked ‘disposed’ may have been rejected on technicalities, returned for correction, closed prematurely, or transferred between departments.
When deadlines are missed, many RTS laws provide for penalties against responsible officials and compensation for applicants, though provisions vary by State. Madhya Pradesh’s pioneering 2010 Act, for instance, permits a penalty of Rs 250 for each day of delay, up to Rs 5,000, and allows compensation to be paid to the applicant from the penalty recovered. But delay does not always result from an individual official’s neglect.
Acute staff shortages, delayed recruitments, dependence on clearances from other departments, belated fund releases, court stays, seasonal surges, and repetitive petitions can all impede service delivery. In such circumstances, even a conscientious official may struggle to meet deadlines. A fair RTS law must distinguish individual culpability from systemic failure without making citizens bear the cost of administrative shortcomings.
Strict personal penalties may also encourage officials to game the system. An application might be rejected for a minor reason just before the deadline, forcing the applicant to start again. Or it may be held back from formal registration until documents have been informally screened and a decision made. Both practices conceal the citizen’s actual waiting time and distort disposal figures. Monitoring should, therefore, track intake refusals, reasons for rejection, repeat applications and whether the service was ultimately delivered.
Pursuing appeals may be burdensome for citizens, and adjudicators may hesitate to penalise officials—whether from professional solidarity or because delays reflect wider administrative constraints. Penalties and compensation can thus remain on the statute book without providing meaningful accountability or redress.
The Right to Information Act, 2005, has a narrow task: it requires public authorities to disclose existing records, subject to statutory exemptions, and provides for penalties for non-compliance. Yet, barring the Union and a handful of States, its implementation remains poor.
An RTS law is more demanding. It may require eligibility checks, field inspections, funding processes, and coordinated action across several departments. Tamil Nadu must prepare for that operational complexity.
To turn the statutory commitment into a workable reality, Tamil Nadu should follow five design principles:
1. Categorise services by administrative complexity: Public services differ in the time and scrutiny they require.
Routine, standardised services such as birth, death, caste, income and residence certificates, driving licences, and revenue records such as chitta and adangal extracts are high-volume services with clear documentary requirements. They are well suited to firm statutory deadlines under an RTS law.
Welfare services, such as PDS ration cards, social security pensions, healthcare enrolment, and subsidised housing require eligibility checks. The RTS law should only guarantee timely processing and a reasoned decision, while making clear that it cannot guarantee benefits beyond available funding.
Complex or discretionary services, including commercial building approvals, environmental clearances, land-acquisition decisions and disputed patta transfers, may involve technical scrutiny, inter-agency consultation, inspections or public hearings. They need realistic, stage-wise timelines and reasoned decisions; firm deadlines for approval may be impractical.
Tamil Nadu should bring services under RTS Act in this order.
2. Set evidence-based, differentiated deadlines: The surest way to undermine an RTS law is to impose uniform deadlines — 30 days for all, or a few standard periods of 7, 15 and 30 days — for services of widely differing complexity.
A digitally available certificate may be issued promptly; a licence requiring inspection or a scholarship involving verification and fund release may take considerably longer.
Deadlines should be service-specific and evidence-based. Before setting them, the government should map each workflow, identify responsible officers and external dependencies, and conduct time-and-motion studies of actual processing times.
Only Karnataka’s Sakala has attempted something similar, other States largely codified legacy Citizens’ Charters. Benchmarks should reflect both median and 90th-percentile completion times, and be reviewed as systems improve. This preparation takes time, but skipping it risks undermining the law. Statutory deadlines must be grounded in evidence, not administrative guesswork.
3. Think big, start small, expand in phases: Tamil Nadu must resist the political temptation to notify hundreds of services on day one. Instead, it should begin with a disciplined pilot of 10-20 standardised, high-volume, low-discretion services such as revenue extracts, driving licence renewals, and utility connections across 2-3 diverse districts (such as Chennai, an industrial district like Coimbatore, and an agrarian district like Thanjavur). The pilot should track intake refusals, rejection grounds, appeal outcomes, staff capacity, and actual service delivery. Coverage should scale up across districts and departments only after back-end digital workflows and appeal arrangements are tested and stabilised.
4. Make the system digital by design: A central weakness of early RTS systems was treating digitisation as an add-on to paper-based workflows. A modern law should be digital by design: technology should shape service delivery from the outset, not merely move existing procedures online.
Applications filed online or through an e-Sevai centre should enter a common system, receive a unique tracking number and clear due date, and reach the responsible officer. Applicants should be able to track progress online, with assisted access available to those without internet connectivity. Repeat applications may be linked using the Aadhaar number.
Under the ‘once-only’ principle, departments should share information already held by government, sparing citizens from repeatedly submitting caste, income or residence documents. Where official records confirm eligibility, routine licence renewals and continuing welfare benefits could be processed automatically, subject to scheme rules and appropriate checks.
Digital systems cannot fix inefficient procedures. Before setting statutory deadlines, Tamil Nadu should redesign workflows, simplify back-end processes, and shorten approval chains. Automation, digital file tracking, and end-to-end e-services can reduce human intervention and make compliance easier to monitor.
5. From missed deadlines to meaningful redress: A statutory right is of little value if citizens must draft appeals, travel to offices and repeatedly pursue officials to enforce it. Tamil Nadu could adapt Haryana’s Auto Appeal System for notified services: send alerts to the responsible officer and supervisor as the deadline approaches, then automatically lodge an appeal with the first appellate authority if it is missed. The applicant should be notified and given a hearing, particularly where the facts are disputed.
For specified, low-risk and non-discretionary services with objective eligibility rules, the law could also provide for deemed approval when a complete application is not decided within the prescribed period. Madhya Pradesh’s 2021 amendment allows the portal to generate a digitally signed deemed approval automatically for services notified by the State.
What seems straightforward in principle can prove elusive in practice. Making the RTS Act work is as much a governance challenge as a technological one.
Tamil Nadu should adopt a ‘slow trigger, fast bullet’ approach: take time to design the law carefully and put the necessary systems in place, then implement it decisively. This requires streamlined workflows, evidence-based deadlines, adequate staffing, effective interdepartmental coordination, fair accountability that distinguishes individual fault from systemic failure, and rigorous oversight.
By learning from other States’ experience, including their mistakes, Tamil Nadu can avoid creating a paper tiger that produces misleading figures and adds procedural burdens while leaving actual service delivery unchanged.
The author is a retired IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, former Vice-Chancellor of Indian Maritime University, Chennai, and Member, High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations constituted by the Government of Tamil Nadu