by Mudasir Rasool Najar
Delays, weak accountability, and poor public service undermine citizens’ dignity. Reform requires ethical governance, empathy, institutional accountability, and officials who treat every citizen with respect.
A government office should be a space of dignity, where people find solutions—not where their patience and self-worth are tested. Every file represents a person, and every delay carries a human cost that goes beyond paperwork: a student’s admission, a patient’s surgery, or a family’s livelihood.
Yet, for many service users, especially those already navigating hardship, a task that should take a day can stretch into months. These cases are marked by repeated visits, long queues, and files that sit untouched without explanation. A delayed certificate can cost a scholarship. A stalled file can postpone treatment. Each unnecessary delay communicates a quiet but damaging message: that institutional convenience matters more than human need.
This is not a call to blame every official. Many work within genuine structural constraints. There are understaffed offices, outdated systems, and procedures that have never been simplified. Still, these offices continue to serve with integrity despite these barriers. Naming a system’s failures is not the same as blaming the people within it. But acknowledging structural strain should not become an excuse for indifference. There is a meaningful difference between a system that is slow and one that no one takes responsibility for repairing.
What is more troubling is how little formal grounding officials receive in the values their role demands: honesty, ethics, empathy, and respect for human dignity. Administrative training tends to emphasize procedure and compliance, rarely addressing the psychosocial reality of the person seeking help.
A student who steps from the classroom into a school, hospital, revenue office, or police station often struggles to reconcile the two worlds: the curriculum speaks of rights, duty, and person-centred service; the lived experience on the ground tells a different story. That gap between value-based training and everyday practice is where public trust quietly erodes, and where reform, and perhaps social work’s own contribution to public administration, must begin.
The evidence makes this concrete. In Jammu and Kashmir, applications under the Right to Information Act rose by 25 per cent in 2024–25, reflecting a population increasingly asserting its right to transparency. Yet the backlog of unresolved cases grew even faster, by over 60 per cent, according to an independent analysis of Central Information Commission data.
Separately, authorities uncovered Rs 11.8 crore in fraud by private hospitals under the Golden Card health scheme, serious enough that the government had to restrict four common surgical procedures to public hospitals alone to curb further exploitation. A scheme designed to protect the most economically vulnerable became, for a few, an opportunity for profit. This is what happens when accountability is treated as optional: the burden falls disproportionately on those with the least power to demand better—a person waiting on a file or a patient trusting a card meant to protect their life.
Governments must simplify procedures, expand equitable digital access, set clear service timelines, and build accountability mechanisms, while also recognizing and supporting officials who serve with genuine commitment. But policy reform alone cannot repair this. Change begins at the front desk, in the daily choice each official makes to treat a person’s need as legitimate and worthy of attention. Access to a service that is already a legal right should never depend on a citizen’s willingness to plead, wait, or return again and again.
The measure of a public servant, much like the measure of any helping profession, is not the title on the door, it is the dignity, empathy, and genuine difference they bring to the lives of the people who depend on them.
(The author is is a postgraduate student of Social Work (MASW) at the University of Kashmir and holds an MA in History from IGNOU. Ideas are personal.)
