Sevottam

Sevottam comes from the Hindi words "Seva" and "Uttam" and means excellence in service delivery. It is a citizen- centric administrative measure to improve the quality of public services India and includes the following three main components. 1. Citizen Charter and Service Standards- Citizen Charter is the document where a public sector Organization declares its key services along with delivery timelines and requirements. Sevottam focuses on the forrmulation, monitoring and review of Citizen Charter to ensure the organization promises what it can deliver and delivers what it has promised. 2. Public Grievances - Here Sevottam focuses on receipt, redressal and prevention of grievances. 3. Service Delivery Enablers - This includes the key pillars which are required to give excellent service and includes Customer Feedback, Employee Motivation and infrastructure.

The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances has developed a model for benchmarking Excellence in Public Service Delivery through Sevottam. The model provides the frame work to organizations to assess and improve the quality of service delivery for the citizens. It involves the identification of the services delivered to the citizens, quality of service, its objective, improvement of quality, by using innovative methods for developing business process and more informative with the help of information technology.The CBDT and Central Board of Excise and Customs are the biggest departments where this is undertaken.It is the United Progressive Alliance's pet project.^{[1][2][3][4][5] [6] [7]}

Targets

Sevottam targets stated needs like

• Timeliness: time norms for specific services are enumerated in Citizens’ Charter.
• The services and norms are set as per active discussions with different stakeholders.
• Effectiveness: a single window system for service deliverables is targeted for delivery to cut down on assessees shuttling from one desk to another to get services.
• Responsiveness: a robust grievance redress system is needed to listen to assessees grievance as well as redress them timely.
• Courteous behaviour: norm for behaviour, specially in assessees facing positions, is described in the Citizens’ Charter and pro-active feedback on service delivery is gathered to judge this.
• Information: facilitation centers and help centers are targeted to meet assessees needs of information.
• Empathy: public grievance officers are needed to listen to assessees in their time of need

References

1. "PRIME MINISTER's 15 POINTS PROGRAMME |". Minorityaffairs.gov.in. Retrieved 2013-08-20.
3. "Quality India :: Vol. 1 No. 6, Jan-Feb 2008". Qcin.org. 1952-03-14. Retrieved 2013-08-20.
4. https://web.archive.org/web/20101211234248/http://aicc.org.in/new/achievements-of-upa-gov-2007-6.php. Archived from the original on December 11, 2010. Retrieved March 29, 2013. Missing or empty |title= (help)
5. "current affairs: What is Sevottam framework?". Currentaffairsindiaandworld.blogspot.in. 2010-09-23. Retrieved 2013-08-20.
6. "Service Delivery Excellence Model (SEVOTTAM) - Citizen Charter - reg". Taxmanagementindia.com. Retrieved 2013-08-20.
7. "Guidelines for Implementing Sevottam" (PDF). Darpg.nic.in. Retrieved 24 February 2015.