Answer: Public Service Delivery is the mechanism through which public services are delivered to the public by central, state and local governments. Public education, health services etc. are some of the examples of public services. This public service delivery, in order to be effective, demands a people centric approach due to following reasons:

• Public Satisfaction: When governments deliver services based on the needs of the people they serve, they can increase public satisfaction and reduce costs.
• Increases accountability: The continuous scrutiny inherent in people centric approach leads to increased accountability in service delivery as well as reduction in corruption.
• Brings inclusivity: People centricity ensures that the entire system functions in a manner, which is seen to be fair and inclusive; thus, ensuring an adequate flow of benefits to the disadvantaged sections of the society as well.
• Increases legitimacy: When public service delivery meets the local needs taking into consideration the local context and local demand, it enhances the legitimacy of the state and its role.
• Ease of Access: People centricity focuses on easing the access to service delivered by the government. For example, services such as getting birth or death certificates, permissions for building construction, licenses for events, etc., need to be easily available.

India being a welfare state, effective public service delivery is sine qua non. In order to establish effective people-centric approach, it needs to be built on coordination and leverage technology:

• Presence of coordination between people and government agencies as well intra- governmental departments is essential to improve transparency, accessibility of information, institutional capacity, and innovativeness of initiatives.
  • Moreover, it enables working in a dynamic environment, maintaining a constant flow of information, helps in specialization, promotes group efforts and high performance, and creates synergies.
  • Coordination enables identification of break points at which delays or service shortfalls cause customer satisfaction to drop significantly and thus, improve upon it.
• Leveraging technology helps in enhancing people centricity through improved monitoring on the part of people as well as other stakeholders.
  • It can improve the entire experience that a person has when seeking government service.
  • It enables speedy and efficient delivery of services, for example, electronic transfers of benefits to stakeholders’ accounts, end to end automation reducing chances of leakages and corruption, biometric identification at various stages that helps in reducing frauds etc.
  • The government of the State of Andhra Pradesh is utilizing blockchain technology to address issues of fraud and corruption in land ownership data records.

By taking a citizen-centric approach built upon improved coordination and use of technology, governments can better understand the needs of their citizens and translate those needs into targeted, effective service-delivery improvements.