The Punjab Model for Proactive Governance aims to fight petty corruption, improve service delivery, and facilitate citizen engagement by proactively seeking, through SMS and calls, feedback of citizens who receive day-to-day government services.

The model is as follows: when a citizen goes to a government office to avail a service (eg. driving license, character certificate, property registration), the office records his or her mobile number along with the transaction details. This data is passed on to local officers and to a call center through an online data entry form or through SMS. The local officers call some of the citizens. The call center sends SMS messages to citizens and also calls a much greater percentage to inquire about quality of service received.

Thus, the state, instead of passively waiting for the citizen to file a complaint, if there is indeed cause of such a grievance, proactively engages the citizen and gets his feedback to improve service delivery and, especially, weed out corrupt government officials.

The Punjab Government, in partnership with the World Bank Country Office, submitted this innovative idea in the prestigious Innovation Fund Challenge of the World Bank Group conducted between their country offices. This proposal is one of the 13 innovative proposals from among 170 received from all the country offices and networks that got selected for funding. The World Bank wrote that it looks forward to “partnering with the Punjab Government — and learning from its experience — to develop, scale and institutionalize this proactive outreach to citizens for improved governance.” The results of the qualitative evaluation led by Michael Callen from UCSD can be found here.

The project was first piloted in six districts. Over the last few months, more districts have been added. It is currenty running in all districts of Gujranwala and Bahawalpur divisions, in addition to six other districts. For the complete list, click here.