Patna, April 14: With the state set to enter the era of right to service from August 15 this year, the Bihar government has decided to monitor the implementation of the right to service act online.

Bihar Prashasnik Sudhar Mission (BPSM), a joint venture of the UK’s department for international development and the government of Bihar, would play the role of the watchdog. Under the proposed system, BPSM would set up a monitoring and analysis wing in Patna. It would receive reports from all the officers supposed to deliver services to people under the new act. The same would be the case with appellate authorities entertaining complaints if an officer fails to deliver a service, which falls under the purview of the act, in stipulated time. The frequency of report submission is yet to be decided.

Officials at both these levels would have to send reports having details like the number of applications received, the number of applications disposed of and the number of applications in which services could not be delivered.

In case of appellate authorities there would be additional information, which would deal with the action taken against a particular officer for not delivering a service. According to the provisions of the act, officials failing to deliver a service within a stipulated time without any valid reason would have to cough up a fine at the rate of Rs 250 per day for the delay period. The upper limit of the fine is Rs 5,000. The poor performance of officers on this front would be entered into their annual confidential report. The reviewing authorities, who would be at the highest level of the implementation of the act, would also have to submit detailed reports to the cell to be set up at BPSM through emails.

The cell would be manned by four programmers and an IT manager, whose task would be to generate reports on the basis of inputs provided by the government offices. Senior BPSM officials would analyse the reports for assessing the performance of the officers.

“The report generation and its analysis is going to be vital as the government would be in a position to keep regular tabs on the performance of the officers in implementing the new act,” a BPSM source, who refused to be named, told The Telegraph. He said the analysis of these reports would also give an insight on whether the government offices were facing any problem or not in delivering services to people.

Keeping a tab on delivery of services apart, BPSM has also been entrusted with the task of preparing format for application forms for obtaining different kinds of services.

“To begin with, about 40 services of 10 different departments would be brought under the purview of right to service act and 40 different formats would be developed for filing applications. The formats would be accompanied by instructions for filling application forms and the documents to be attached for availing different kinds of services,” he said.

Services like issuance of caste, income and residential certificates, issuance of driving licence, character verification by police for passport applications and various kinds of social security pensions given to people are some of the prominent services which are likely to be brought under the purview of the act.

A unique feature of the act is that not only the designated officers who are supposed to deliver services to people would be bound to act in time-bound manner, rather there would be a fixed timeframe for appellate as well as the reviewing authorities for disposing of the applications received at their level.