A water-billing PPP in Jaipur: contract design, accountability and the citizen charter

Diagnose before choosing a remedy. NPM assumes that outputs can be specified, measured and contracted, with risk transferred to the party best able to manage it. This contract transfers a risk to the operator that the operator does not control: collection is a function of the accuracy of the corporation's legacy customer database and of the field staff's cooperation. A 90 per cent target sitting on top of an undigitised base is a specification written backwards.

The design faults are contract-level, not merely operational.

1. No termination-for-convenience clause and no step-in rights leave the corporation locked in for seven years; the sole remedy is arbitration, which is slow and confidential.
2. The absence of a service-credit regime with automatic deductions in place of the crude withholding of Rs 3 crore invites dispute without correcting performance.
3. The duplicate in-house app is a governance failure: two systems, one customer base, and a signal to the operator that the corporation is hedging.
4. No joint governance or data-sharing arrangement, hence no single source of truth for 'collection'.

Options and recommendation. Scrapping the contract unilaterally is likely to be both costly and vulnerable to challenge. The disciplined option is a renegotiated variation, within the contract, in the next sixty days: fix a verified customer baseline, split risk between database quality (corporation) and collection effort (operator), add a graduated service-credit schedule, add step-in and exit rights by variation, and merge or shut the duplicate app with a single citizen interface. If renegotiation fails, obtain a legal opinion on termination for fundamental breach and prepare an in-house transition plan with costs and a staffing estimate. The board should approve a negotiation mandate rather than a slogan.

Map accountability honestly instead of naming a single culprit.

• The elected wing owns the policy choice to outsource and must answer in the board and to the voters.
• The Municipal Commissioner owns contract design and contract management, and cannot deflect responsibility to the operator.
• The operator owes the service levels and must answer to the corporation, and through the corporation to citizens.
• Neither the corporation nor the operator, however, owes any enforceable duty personally to a resident who waits sixty hours for a complaint to be closed.

The promise of 48-hour complaint resolution is therefore presently a statement of intent without a remedy, and a charter that is not measured is worse than no charter because it teaches citizens that commitments are decorative.

Rebuilding it in practice.

1. Publish a service-level dashboard, updated monthly, showing complaint volumes, median resolution time, repeat complaints and collection by ward. This is the cheapest form of accountability.
2. Fix responsibility in the charter by name and office for each service, with an escalation ladder to the Commissioner and then the board.
3. Link the operator's fee to measured service credits, so that the charter becomes an instrument of the contract rather than a separate promise.
4. Use the state's public service delivery guarantee law where the service falls within its schedule, and publicise the remedy and the appellate forum.
5. Hold a quarterly public hearing, and put the performance report before the board and the ward committee.

The larger lesson for good governance is that participation and transparency are not add-ons to a PPP; in the absence of a citizen-facing measurement system, the contract's output targets will serve the parties' convenience rather than the public's interest.