A citizen is not a petitioner. That sentence should be unnecessary in a functioning republic. Yet it captures the daily experience of millions: For small, ordinary things, people must plead, follow up, return, escalate, and wait. The system behaves like a favour economy. Outcomes arrive not through predictable process, but through persistence, connections, or exhaustion. Delay does not merely inconvenience. It slowly erodes dignity and momentum. And when routine services demand repeated requests, the republic quietly converts citizenship into supplication.
The deeper indignity is what governance failure forces the citizen to become. Not merely a petitioner, but a crusader for the routine. The individual ends up doing what the state should have done: Chasing files, manufacturing urgency, interpreting rules, extracting timelines, and escalating pressure. The system outsources its duty to the citizen. That is not governance. That is abdication. A serious republic is measured by how little a citizen must fight for what is ordinary.
Economics, not emotion
This is not a moral complaint. It is a growth problem. Every queue is time stolen from productivity. Every discretionary “come tomorrow” is a hidden cess on enterprise.
Every unreasoned delay kills momentum and adds risk. Entrepreneurs do not fear compliance. They fear unpredictability. Investors do not fear regulation. They fear discretion. Talent does not fear hard work. It fears wasted time. When administration runs on friction, the nation pays for it in slower growth, higher costs, and a culture of permanent workaround.
One of the least discussed drivers of litigation in India, including in the high courts, is not legal complexity but administrative failure. Matters that should be resolved through routine applications and time-bound departmental action are escalated into writ petitions because the file does not move, the decision is not taken, reasons are not recorded, and responsibility is diffused across desks. Citizens approach constitutional courts not to wage grand legal battles, but to compel basic governance. The writ jurisdiction becomes a rescue lane for what should have been ordinary service delivery.
The deeper disease is impunity. Delays and indifference often carry no personal cost. When inaction is consequence-free, inaction becomes rational. The citizen pays in time, money, and uncertainty. The judiciary pays in docket pressure. Judges are forced to spend scarce time issuing directions to do what should have been done in the ordinary course. The system then laments pendency while feeding it daily. Delay is not neutral. In law, delay changes outcomes: Rights wither, businesses stall, families bleed, and remedies arrive after relevance.
Dignity by default
India does not need more slogans. It needs a standard of service. Dignity by default is a system where the normal citizen does not beg the system to work. It rests on simple disciplines.
First, time-bound decisions. Every application must carry a declared timeline, and silence cannot be a governing method.
Second, written reasons. Every adverse decision must state reasons that can be read, appealed, and corrected.
Third, a single trackable trail. The file must be auditable, with clear ownership, timestamps, and responsibility.
Fourth, discretion with visibility. If power is exercised, accountability must be seen.
Fifth, swift grievance redressal. A citizen should not need a lawyer and a writ petition to obtain what the rule already promises.
None of this is radical. It is the basic architecture of a serious state. It reduces corruption by reducing discretion. It reduces litigation by reducing abdication. It reduces delay by making delay expensive to the system that causes it. And it restores something India desperately needs: The citizen’s confidence that the republic can deliver without being pressured into it.
Citizenship is not meant to be a repeated request for what is basic. Governance is not meant to be a maze that rewards persistence over legitimacy. The state exists to make ordinary life predictable, not exhausting. If we want faster growth, cleaner institutions, and less burden on the judiciary, the reform is not only legal or economic. It is behavioural. The republic must stop treating the citizen as a petitioner and start treating service delivery as its first duty. siddhartha@duaassociates.com
The writer is a Chandigarh-based freelance contributor. Views expressed are personal.
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