Assessing the Legislative Framework of Public Service Guarantee Laws in India's States.

This article aims to explore the importance and challenges of implementing a national public service delivery law in India. The Global South, particularly India, is highly dependent on public services, and this leads to significant opportunities for rentseeking by bureaucrats and delays and corruption in service delivery. Such a law could help curb this by guaranteeing service delivery as a right to citizens and introducing mechanisms for transparency, accountability, accessibility, efficiency, and public participation. As of 2024, twenty-three States in India have public service delivery laws. However, the current literature on these laws is limited. Only a few studies have assessed the legislative architecture, and they do not provide a comprehensive analysis. This article aims to fill this gap by providing an analysis of India's legal architecture for, and institutions of, public service delivery. This analysis is supplemented by qualitative interviews of stakeholders involved in the laws' implementation. The article seeks to furnish insights into the challenges and opportunities identified by policy-makers and bureaucrats in the implementation of these laws. It also provides a comparative analysis of other models and best practices in public service delivery and offers insights for future research and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]