A Life and Its Lessons
A Life and Its Lessons

Author: Samuel Paul

Publisher: Public Affairs Centre

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 8188816140

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Memoirs of an Indian educationist and social activist.

Inclusive Urbanization
Inclusive Urbanization

Author: Krishna Shrestha

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-25

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1135006474

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How do we include and represent all people in cities? As the world rapidly urbanizes, and climate change creates global winners and losers, understanding how to design cities that provide for all their citizens is of the utmost importance. Inclusive Urbanization attempts to not only provide meaningful, practical guidance to urban designers, managers, and local actors, but also create a definition of inclusion that incorporates strategies bigger than the welfare state, and tactics that bring local actors and the state into meaningful dialogue. Written by a team of experienced academics, designers, and NGO professionals, Inclusive Urbanization shows how urbanization policy and management can be used to make more inclusive, climate resilient cities, through a series of 18 case studies in South Asia. By creating a model of urban life and processes that takes into account social, spatial, cultural, regulatory and economic dimensions, the book finds a way to make both the processes and outcomes of urban design representative of all of the city’s inhabitants.

Making Voice Work
Making Voice Work

Author: Samuel Paul

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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A citizen's assessment of public services provided evidence of inefficiency and corruption and stimulated public service providers to be more responsive to customers. So, public feedback can change behavior.Paul reports how a report card on public services in the Indian city of Bangalore was used by citizen groups to create greater public awareness about the poor performance of public service providers and to challenge them to be more efficient and responsive to their customers.The report card was the result of a survey of a sample of users (both rich and poor) of the city`s services and rated public agencies in terms of public satisfaction with different dimensions of their services. Public feedback was used to quantify the extent of corruption and other indirect costs of the services. The result was a citizens' assessment of public services.The survey was completed in 1993, but the follow-up activities continued for three years, with the active involvement of several concerned citizen groups and nongovernment bodies. Paul discusses how the media disseminated the report card findings, how public agencies responded to it, and how agencies joined citizen groups in joint initiatives to improve services. Similar report cards have since been prepared on several other large cities in India.It is not easy to measure the impact of the report card on the quality and responsiveness of Bangalore`s service providers. Paul examines the problems involved and gives some intermediate indicators.There is some evidence that public awareness of the problems has increased as a result of the experiment. Civil society institutions seem to be more active and their interactions with public agencies have become better organized, more purposeful, and continuous. As a result, some public agencies in Bangalore have begun to take steps to improve their services.This paper is a product of the Development Research Group. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Effectiveness of Client Surveys in Improving Service Delivery (RPO 682-07). The author may be contacted at [email protected].

Public Affairs Index - 2016
Public Affairs Index - 2016

Author: C. K. Mathew, Sr.

Publisher:

Published: 2016-03-12

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 9788188816989

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The Public Affairs Index (PAI) is an attempt to bring together the states of the country which are culturally, economically and socially diverse, into a common data-driven framework, to facilitate an interstate comparison. A well-framed methodology backed by statistical data from government sources, have been included in the study to provide insights into the subject. While we acknowledge that this task is subjective and opinions may vary, PAI has adopted the best possible method which in our view maximises the opportunities to accommodate the variations among states and minimises any bias.