Challenges and Prospects of Implementing Citizen Charter: A Study of Union Parishad in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to identify complexities and drawback of citizen charter at Union Parishad in Bangladesh. Generally, A Citizen’s Charter composes of the 3 Cs: Customer-driven service standards, Communication and Control.  Citizen charter has become a traditional attempt of providing better service delivery, tools for empowerment of local people and implementing government policy at grassroots level.  In order to expand the quality of public service to the mass people, the government of the  People's Republic of Bangladesh introduced a "citizen's charter" at the grassroots level to empower the local populace and promoting them with meaningful participation, equitable and accountable delivery of public services. The study is based on review of the relevant literature, applying primary data with a small scale survey and discussions with service users in the localities.Collected Data obtained from the field survey show that the introduction of citizen's charter in Bangladesh had nominal impact due to poor publicity campaign that caused in low awareness among the citizens, a person-centered approach to service delivery in local committees and apathy and lack of interest among stakeholders. The key objective is to identify the challenges involved in applying the citizen's charter efficiently at local level and present insight for toward developing approaches for effective implementation of the charter at the local level in developing countries. The paper comes to an end with fragile implementation strategies and practices in developing countries encumbering empowerment of citizens and do not allow local authority to perform effectively.